So, what's the deal with Richard Glossip?

[Malthus]

Malthus, it absolutely does not.

Then I'm not sure what the counter-argument is. Those against the DP are, in effect, saying (or at least those making the argument you disagree with are saying), in effect, "the DP is permanent and those in [group (2)] could never be compensated if they were executed". Why is this not a good argument from a logical position? Noting that those in [group (1)] wouldn't be compensated, either, whether they were imprisioned or executed, while 100% true, doesn't strike me as a persuasive rebuttal.   

Because if the argument is that "Penalty X should not be used because we know that it results in people never being exonerated who should be" is the argument, then it logically applies equally as well to penalties that are not the death penalty.

You either tolerate the fact that there will in fact be cases where innocent people are punished as a unfortunate result of an imperfect judicial system, or you do not tolerate it - in which case the character of the punishment is not longer the issue, as they are all equally "bad" in the sense that they are all going to be applied unjustly at times.

"the DP is permanent and those in [group (2)] could never be compensated if they were executed"

And neither can those in group 1. So the claim that the DP is somehow "different' in the overall evaluation of "Punishments that result in unjust outcomes" is false. It isn't different. With the DP or without, you have the same problem. Get rid of the DP, and you still have a system that results in people being unjustly convicted who will never be exonerated.

LIP is permanent for those who are in group 1, and since we know there are people in group 1, then the objection on the basis of the existence of group 2 is not a consistent argument.

The idea, I assume, is that there is *more* injustice with the DP. Not that there is *no* injustice with imprisonment.

Any system of justoce is going to have injustice - the system ain't perfect. That's true with imprisionment and with the DP - admittedly. Your argument is sound as far as that goes. An argument that claimed that imprisonment would result in no injustice is incorrect.

Thing is, with imprisionment there is a chance for injustices to be corrected. With the DP, there is not, at least after the date of execution. So assuming that there are injustices, and assuming again that those injustices are discovered during the natural lifespan of the accused, then in those particular cases with imprisionment those injustices can be corrected but with the DP they cannot, after the sentence has been carried out. 

Now, it is pefectly reasonable to argue that the numbers who will benefit from this are small, and if you are willing to accept imperfection in the case of imprisionment, why not accept imperfection in the case of executions as well? The counter to that is that the above imperfections aren't the inevitable result of the court's process, but rather the result of choosing execution as the punishment - and so, avoidable. You can eliminate this possibility simply by not choosing execution as a punishment, without affecting the fairness of the court process in the slightest. 

It is also perfectly reasonable to argue, as you have, that the extra attention and process paid to those who are to be executed makes it *more* likely that unjustly accused will be discovered. But that's a counter-argument, not really an attack on the logic of the original argument.

[Martinus]

I guess the best solution would be to (1) abolish death penalty and (2) ensure that the type of resources currently dedicated to analyse DP convictions are dedicated to life (or long term) imprisonment convictions.

[Berkut]

Marty, I don't disagree with your conclusions, although obviously reached in a different manner.

For me, the DP is simply not worth it. There is no evidence that it is an effective deterrent, and no evidence that the cost associated with it has anything near a countering benefit to society, or even the families of victims.

I think we have a inherently problematic justice system in a wide variety of ways that desperately need to be addressed, and getting hung up over the DP is a waste of valuable resources,.

[Martinus]

Marty, I don't disagree with your conclusions, although obviously reached in a different manner.

For me, the DP is simply not worth it. There is no evidence that it is an effective deterrent, and no evidence that the cost associated with it has anything near a countering benefit to society, or even the families of victims.

I think we have a inherently problematic justice system in a wide variety of ways that desperately need to be addressed, and getting hung up over the DP is a waste of valuable resources,.

I guess DP is more emotionally significant, as our visceral reaction killing people is stronger than to just locking them up.

Speaking of which, saw "Capote" this week - an excellent movie.

[Berkut]

Listen to that Serial podcast I recommended. I bet you will find it interesting.

I can't help but think that the guy would have been better off getting the DP.

[LaCroix]

I think we have a inherently problematic justice system in a wide variety of ways that desperately need to be addressed

i think the biggest problem comes from the bottom rather than the top. U.S. society wants to punish people. most people equate justice with large prison sentences or, with the most egregious crimes, execution. i've seen people criticize the prison system one day and complain a month later that a rapist didn't get jail time. people have to first change the way they view criminals.

[The Brain]

i think the biggest problem comes from the bottom rather than the top.

Yeah, very often.

[Martinus]

i think the biggest problem comes from the bottom rather than the top.

Yeah, very often.

[LaCroix]

Yeah, very often.

[DGuller]

i think the biggest problem comes from the bottom rather than the top.

Yeah, very often.

[Eddie Teach]

If that is your biggest problem, your life is either very good, or very bad.

[jimmy olsen]

Looking at this case in particular, it seems kind of interesting.

I think it is rather likely that Glossip contributed or even instigated the murder. At the VERY least he was involved in trying to cover it up, which looks rather suspicious.

However, I don't think one should ever be able to secure a conviction based primarily on the testimony of someone else who was directly culpable for the crime, and has something very much to gain by implicating someone else. I can't say that I can see anything that ought to result in the verdict being overturned, but on the other hand (assuming the facts as presented to the jury are substantially as I understand them) I would never vote to convict on 1st degree murder had I been on that jury.

Agree completely with that

[OttoVonBismarck]

I agree with the first post by BB, I'm dubious on the value of evidence against Glossip but I don't think the new evidence is of meaningful evidential value. The evidence against him was the sole word of a man known to have physically murdered the victim, given to spare himself from the death penalty when he had been essentially caught red-handed and had no hope of escaping serious punishment. That to me "shouldn't be enough" to convict someone of a crime, which to me is the first major problem with what happened here--the sentence either way is just a consequence of a really shitty conviction.

I know that typically in our system it is the role of juries to evaluate situations where you have one person testifying one way, and the defendant basically rejecting said testimony in their defense. But I just don't understand convicting someone on a he said she said. Isn't that why rapes are so damn hard to get convictions on? I'm not sure why we're getting murder convictions on the same kind of evidence that often isn't enough for a prosecutor to even go to trial on a rape case.

I think we just need a fundamental rework of the criminal justice system in terms of avoiding wrongful convictions. Our system is geared toward speed and "conclusions" far too much right now. Didn't Canada have a similar problem and they revamped theirs to specifically try and eliminate wrongful convictions back in the 90s or something? What did they do there? And is there a way we could apply it here in the United States? I do know that in Virginia at least the commonwealth did seriously beef up the death penalty process to make sure that the defendants have extremely good counsel. That alone I think had so many prosecutors in the State basically get scared off of even pursuing death penalty cases, when faced with having to litigate against attorneys that don't fall asleep in court a lot of prosecutors here would rather not bother. Which is kinda scary to me, that the same guys who were routinely taking cases capital dramatically reduced that when faced with competent opposing counsel.

Philosophically I've never had a problem with the concept of the state killing someone for a crime. I don't actually know or care about the deterrent effect (well, I know the data suggests it probably has no deterrent effect), or the "vengeance for the victim" aspect. To me it's more of a justice concept, the whole justice system is built around it but it seems to never get brought up in these discussions. Instead we talk about either rehabilitation or deterrence. I think how you handle inmates should focus on both of those (and vastly more on rehabilitation than we do now in the United States), but the actual sentences, that should be based on the ancient concepts of justice that underpin the entire system. For many crimes I believe the most just punishment is death.

That's the high-level, legal philosophy opinion. From an applied perspective I think even a much more robust criminal justice system is far too flawed to allow the death penalty as a regular punishment. I'd be okay with keeping it for extreme edge cases, like treason, serial killers, terrorists (basically all of whom cannot really be convicted without nigh-certainty of their guilt.) But it should largely be off the table as a punishment. Ordinary murder with aggravating factors just isn't enough to warrant the practical clusterfuck that is the death penalty.

I reject the concept that you can "fix" years taken away in prison. Time is a resource that you can't buy back, once gone it's lost for ever. The quality of life in your typical American prison, especially for someone convicted of a serious crime and likely to be imprisoned in a maximum security prison where they spend significant time in a cell every day, is so low that it's aptly viewed as "lost time." Money doesn't fix that when it's been done to you unjustly. Your punishment may not "permanent" in the sense that after death you're gone, but it is permanent in that you lose years you never get back.

That being said, within reason I agree with Marti if I was innocent I'd rather be given a life sentence than a death sentence. Life sentence gives mo a longer time window to prove my innocence, and if it ever got to be too much it's not like you can't kill yourself in prison. That being said I do think the damage of incarceration is probably pretty easy to understand, it's been studied and written about by psychologists for ages. Humans are social animals. In prison you either lose access to socialization (if you're the worst of the worst criminal, the kind that can't behave  and has to be locked down forever) which is known to basically cause insanity in social mammals, or you have normal society replaced by one in which you are in constant fear of being attacked or killed by the antisocial people you have to live with. Constant stress like that has to wear on your psyche no different than the constant physiological stresses of combat contribute to wearing down the psychological health of soldiers. Prison is deeply psychologically damaging and to me someone who spends 50 years in prison, then dies of natural causes, for a crime they didn't commit, probably had a worse outcome than someone who was in prison for 7-15 years and then executed for a crime they didn't commit.

[Barrister]

I think we just need a fundamental rework of the criminal justice system in terms of avoiding wrongful convictions. Our system is geared toward speed and "conclusions" far too much right now. Didn't Canada have a similar problem and they revamped theirs to specifically try and eliminate wrongful convictions back in the 90s or something? What did they do there? And is there a way we could apply it here in the United States? I do know that in Virginia at least the commonwealth did seriously beef up the death penalty process to make sure that the defendants have extremely good counsel. That alone I think had so many prosecutors in the State basically get scared off of even pursuing death penalty cases, when faced with having to litigate against attorneys that don't fall asleep in court a lot of prosecutors here would rather not bother. Which is kinda scary to me, that the same guys who were routinely taking cases capital dramatically reduced that when faced with competent opposing counsel.

Perhaps ironically, one of the biggest things changes was that using "jailhouse informants" is now extremely rare.

[Razgovory]

I think we have a inherently problematic justice system in a wide variety of ways that desperately need to be addressed

i think the biggest problem comes from the bottom rather than the top. U.S. society wants to punish people. most people equate justice with large prison sentences or, with the most egregious crimes, execution. i've seen people criticize the prison system one day and complain a month later that a rapist didn't get jail time. people have to first change the way they view criminals.

I think this is the crux of the problem.  Before we can really make changes to the system we need to alter the way people view the criminal justice system.  We need to convince people that rehabilitative programs are not only viable alternative to merciless imprisonment but a superior one.  We also need to remove the stigma of former criminals in the mind of the public.  It doesn't do us much good to damn a person to menial jobs for the rest of his life because he did one year in the pen.