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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   30509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:

rest in power Emmanuel Littlejohn

may your memory drive us to continue fighting for the abolition of the death penalty

To be clear on who Littlejohn was:

On the night of June 19, 1992, a robbery occurred at a convenience store in Oklahoma City, resulting in the death of the store owner, who was gunned down by two robbers.[2]

On that night, at around 10:15 p.m., 31-year-old Kenneth Meers, the owner of the convenience store, was working with two employees, Tony Hulsey and Hulsey's brother, Danny Waldrup. While they were still doing their work, 20-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn[a] and 25-year-old Glenn Roy Bethany entered the store and held Meers at gunpoint, with the intention of robbing him.[3]

…

In a separate case, together with William Arnold Penny, Littlejohn was also charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, two counts of first-degree rape and kidnapping.[9]

To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:

I was a witness for Alabama's execution of Alan Miller by nitrogen gas tonight. Again, it did not go as state officials promised. Miller visibly struggled for roughly two minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints. He then spent the next 5-6 min intermittently gasping for air

Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.

How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.

I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.

To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be.

To interrogate this a little: do you think that attempted murder should have the same punishment as accomplished murder?

Historically attempted murder has often drawn a lower penalty than completed murder, with there being an underlying assumption that failure to complete the act indicates some lack of mens rea to do so, or that cosmically it is wrong to execute a man without another body on the other side of the scale. After all, for Hammurabi "An eye for an eye" represented a gentler moderation rather than a harsher extreme, by that logic one cannot execute one's enemies unless they have taken a life.

One can, of course, focus on the mens rea and say that it's the evil intent that is most important.

I'm just curious where you come down on that argument.

My take on it is that punishment should more be based on what is best for the rest of us. Do we want to live next to this person? Is this person a massive risk for the rest of us and a drag on society? My main argument for the death penalty is that we are far better off without these people. They high risk.

To commit such extreme crimes they most likely have an outlier awful personality with high levels of psychopathy, poor impulse control and low IQ. They are pretty much the extreme left tail of the bell curve. We are simply better off without them. Also getting rid of these people is a eugenic measure that is highly effective as we would be removing the people with the worst possible traits.

Yes, but not unlike the problem of schools (nobody cared when dumb kids were dumb when everyone was white, but thanks to Multiculturalism if too many dumb kids are non-white you need to stop teaching algebra or calculus to anyone, and abolish standardized testing, and remove all discipline) we now have a problem with the death penalty, or even imprisoning anyone. When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death. I'm not sure anyone cared if a bunch of poor whites from the same zipcode were always getting thrown in jail. Add a dash of Multiculturalism however, and suddenly we aren't allowed to have a functional civilization anymore. To many non-whites end up in jail or get the death penalty? Time to start depolicing and just letting people go. Sure they might murder someone you love a week later, but at least we won't be racist.

What are you talking about?

Multicultural America is the only majority white country left that has the death penalty.

When England permanently put a moratorium on executions, it was 90% white British.

The US movement to abolish the death penalty goes back to the 18th century, when multicultural considerations weren't a thing. I will leave this link to Perplexity's quick summary that has further links.

You are correct that currently people are concerned with the death penalty in part because it affects black men more than white men. (And that nobody cares that it affects white men more then Asian men or black women, etc.)

Uh, do you understand the history of the death penalty in the USA? Until the very late 20th century, the death penalty was quite strongly associated with, and mostly used on, large black populations.

That’s not an argument against, but the death penalty being in heavy use against blacks has been going on for a long time, and recent shifts in demographic composition are not the reason many opponents tie it to civil rights.

When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death.

The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.

Does China count as a first world country?

No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.

They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.

The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

Japan and Taiwan both execute people often enough to qualify, no?

It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing

Looking through states that everyone agrees maintain the death penalty, there's lots of low-single digit numbers of annual executions and lots of 'carry out one execution every other year' type states. Like yes, they're much smaller than Taiwan or especially Japan, but Taiwan and Japan have much lower murder rates- and Japan in practice seems to use the death penalty for much the same things as retentionist US states. When you take that into account, a multiple murderer is possibly more likely to get the death penalty in Japan than in the US south.

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