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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 find that position even worse for a different reason. The “if there’s any doubt at all, we can’t execute” standard also guarantees that by the time we actually execute someone, it’s extremely expensive and decades after the fact. The delay removes any deterrent from the act of execution as by the time you actually execute him, most people have no idea what crime he committed or the details of the crime. At least in the bad old days of either the Old West, or Dark Age Europe you didn’t generally have to remind the public of the crime that happened twenty years ago. You knew he’d murdered someone because you had just recently heard about the crime. Public executions would seem a reasonable thing if the goal is to deter crime.
This what I'm always saying. The death penalty is expensive because we let it be so. It would be really cheap if we just hanged them 20 minutes after conviction right outside the courthouse.
Justice only has deterrent value when it creates credible fear in potential criminal's minds. The most important way is certainty -- most criminals think they won't be caught. But inflicting the image of hanging corpses on public streets on the public would certainly keep the thought in their minds.
I mean yes certainty, but also temporal nearness. Having a situation where a guy sentenced in 2000 doesn’t have the sentence executed until 20 years later absolutely kills the deterrent effect of the execution because the time frame is longer than humans are biologically able to process. Even 5 years for most people is a vague “long time from now’ thing. And most criminals have shorter timeframes than the average person. And again, if you’re talking about a crime that happened two decades ago, most people have long since forgotten the crime.
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