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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 reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
The enslaved soldiers definitely would have still been out-group after being enslaved, and if anything more prone to massive violence. You're correct that executions were also common, but I don't think either of us have the data to talk about "standard practice" in this case. And yet, an argument that says, "hard labor cannot be more efficient than execution" required a preponderance of the evidence, while my position (that hard labor can be made to be more efficient) requires only a collection of positive examples, regardless of how representative they are of average behavior.
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