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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.

I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations. Basically everyone involved in allowing that to happen should be removed from government office or employment, permanently, and strictly speaking at least some of the police, lawyers, and judges involved seem to have earned the death penalty themselves as a result. And wrongful execution does seem to happen, sometimes, and the consequences for it happening are basically nil; redistributing a bunch of tax money to the family of the innocent deceased is no solution at all.

But by the same token, when a murderer ends someone's life, there's just literally nothing anyone can do to "make it right." We sometimes allocate money to the bereaved, but their loss is inescapably paltry by comparison to the permanent, irrecoverable loss imposed on the deceased. The death penalty is society's way of saying, "the impossibility of restorative justice in these cases means that Hammurabi is all we have left."

Discourse on this topic is frustrating because a rather labyrinthine motte-and-bailey complex has arisen in connection with the retribution/deterrence/rehabilitation theories of criminal justice. In the United States, at least, we refuse to really commit to any particular theory of criminal justice (probably as a result of the democratic process). Instead, we engage in laundered mob justice, demanding our lawyers dress it up in whatever theory has the best fit, or happens to be in fashion. This strikes me as... inadequate.

So I end up being kind of weakly opposed to the death penalty, more because I tend to despise government than because I have any philosophical objections to executing known murderers. This is all in much the way that I vehemently reject the idea that "all cops are bastards," while comfortably believing that, say, "all traffic cops are bastards" is basically correct.

I disagree that the death sentence is a qualitatively different punishment from the usual.

We do not have a 100% accurate legal system, or even one that approaches it. It is still, speaking broadly, an acceptable one. I and most people present here have negligible chances of ending up behind bars if we go on leading relatively normal lives.

If I were someone wrongly convicted of a crime, and only released at the hoary age of 80 with a few million dollars as an apology, it isn't much better than being dead. Better, yes, but assuming I was in there for most of my natural life, I would have lived a very substandard existence, I would have lost the opportunities that I cared about.

Life is fungible with time, and time with money.

Look, I get where you're coming from about the irrecoverable nature of death, but I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. Sure, death is final - but so is losing decades of your life to imprisonment. Many seem to consider that there's there's this huge, qualitative difference between execution and long-term incarceration, but I'm not convinced it's as big as we make it out to be.

Think about it - if you're wrongfully convicted at 25 and spend the next 40 years in prison, only to be exonerated at 65, what exactly have you recovered? You've lost the prime of your life, missed out on career opportunities, relationships, family, and pretty much everything that makes life worth living.

Most of us need to donate a decade or two of our lives laboring to make ends meet. And (for the moment), death has been an inevitability for 97 billion anatomically modern humans. You steal my life savings, and I can draw up a figure for the years of my life you've stolen for me.

Keeping someone alive in custody for decades is expensive. Yet, the damage done, if done wrongly, cannot be trivially reversed.

Executing someone, in the USA, even those guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, is somehow more expensive, but that speaks more to political opposition and organizational failure than the price of a bullet or a noose. It is not intrinsically difficult or expensive to end a human life, quite the opposite.

You mentioned the idea of Hammurabi being all we have left when restorative justice is impossible. I'd argue that this applies just as much to life sentences as it does to the death penalty. In both cases, we're essentially saying, "We can't undo the harm done, so we're going to remove this person from society permanently."

And that may as well be cheaply. Because the rest of us are paying for it with our finite time and money. Not without due process, extra care even, but the kind of people who end up on Death Row aren't particularly sympathetic characters if the recent discussion about the questionable candidates that the Innocence Project were forced to advocate for are any indication.

I'm an unabashed transhumanist. I think there is a very significant probability that human lifespans could be made nearly unbounded in the span of our current life expectancies. I think it's a tragedy that anyone dies, especially today, when the end is potentially in sight. That only changed the values of the calculus, not the core of it. Still, beyond wishful optimism, I know no reason to assume that humans can live literally forever, not while thermodynamics and Feynmann's quip about it stands. But as the world exists, reformative and restorative justice seem farcical to me. The closest we can get those congenitally inclined towards to criminality to desist within the tender caress of a prison is to age them out of their proclivities. While still outside, with the fear of swift and likely punishment (hence why the perceived odds of being brought to justice outweigh the kind of justice involved, the death penalty isn't a detterent over life in prison). Thus, without access to better ways of removing the crime from the criminal, we keep them away from those they might hurt. Maybe one day we'll be able to edit minds or genes to turn even the most murderous maniac into someone who sobs at the idea of hurting a fly, but that day isn't today. If the possibility of killing someone before that eventuality seems too much, oh well, cryopreserving their brains in a vat preserves some possibility of reform even after death, and is more than their victims received. It's a rounding error compared to the costs of trial, prison, or execution at the end.

Almost all societies recognize the necessity of governments making hard decisions, often unpleasant decisions, about who goes behind bars and who dies. We simply have to choose how to calibrate that curve, decide how many innocent men die and how many guilty men go free. For a functional society, the optimal number of either is not zero. When you bite that bullet, I genuinely don't see any reason to be squeamish about the most villainous biting theirs.

Nominating for a late-in-the-game AAQC purely on the strength of that marvelous closing sentence.

Heh. I can't resist to throw in some alliteration, a pinch of prpsody, and I'm glad someone appreciates it!