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Notes -
Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
I guess I’ll bite on the last point.
I think killing a person is relatively but not absolutely wrong. We deprived this man of his liberty and eventually life because it was the only way to protect the rights of (would-be) victims. Since we can’t predict recidivism, we’re stuck with this approximation.
I am giving equal weight to life and liberty, here, but I’m not feeling confident in that. Outside of pragmatic concerns like cost and false positives, do you think life imprisonment is categorically more moral than killing?
I think there are cases where it's justified to kill someone. I'd refer to aquinas' just war theory as being illustrative. Every death is a tragedy, but there are times where causing a lesser tragedy serves to prevent a greater. But note that I specified "helpless" person. Which-- relative to the carceral system-- inmates are. In older, meaner times, when society had fewer surplus resources, the relatively higher difficulty for the state to efficiently contain criminals made the death penalty more justifiable. But in the modern context, that's simply not the case.
So yes, I believe life imprisonment (where technically feasible) is more moral than killing. I wouldn't try to life-imprison an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight, but I would absolutely prefer to imprison rather than execute them after their capture.
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