In the United States, innocence has never been grounds for an appeal, a stay, overturning, or clemency. Here in Florida, I could write an accurate algorithm for calculating the application of the Death Penalty. Skin darkness (literally, not race), IQ, wealth, sex are the relevant factors. The elements of the case are not.
I'm not against the Death Penalty on general principle grounds; I'm against it because we clearly aren't to be trusted with it.
In the USA, innocence isn't grounds for an appeal. Actual, post-conviction DNA tests aren't a basis. Errors at trial are. So good lawyers find one. Jury instructions, evidentiary errors, procedural, etc., which is why money buys justice.
"Innocence" is an unknowable state of fact. Insufficiency of evidence to prove guilt is a basis for direct appeal. And new evidence showing actual innocence is a basis for federal habeas review after appeal. See McQuiggin v. Perkins. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
Clarification: McQuiggin continues to leave open the question of whether "actual innocence" can be the basis for habeas review standing alone. In practice, there is something else that can be alleged to "bootstrap" the "actual innocence" claim.
Indeed he may be, but the case of Herrera v. Collins is pretty clear - laws are about procedures, not facts. If someone has been found guilty in a trial, and there were no flaws in the prodecures followed, then it is not unconstitutional to follow through with the punishment, even if later evidence shows the person is innocent.
More importantly, it would be procedurally problematic if convicted criminals could appeal on the basis of a claim of innocence, even if it's due to new evidence. Following procedures is more important than getting at the truth. (I conjecture it's because getting at the truth is unreasonably difficult. For example, there's no guarantee that a subsequent trial will be more reliable than the original.)
Hererra v. Collins must be considered in the (unfortunately complicated) context of post-conviction review law. There are state and federal post-conviction review procedures for dealing with new evidence. In addition, while Herrera and later cases reserve the question of whether "actual innocence" is by itself a basis for habeas relief, in practice there is a "bootstrap" Constitutional violation (usually ineffective assistance of counsel) that in conjunction with the actual innocence claim will provide a basis for habeas review. And in McQuiggin v. Perkins, the Supreme Court cleared pretty much any procedural hurdle to such claims when "actual innocence" is shown.
Many (and, I hope, all) jurisdictions will reopen a trial when significant new evidence appears, but not just for any new evidence. For example, "I suddenly remember that, the morning of the crime, I woke up five minutes earlier than usual" or "it turns out there are not 20, but 21 HD videos of the crime" may be new, but is very unlikely to be deemed reason to reopen a trial.
Problem is to determine what is both significant and new.
Even somebody else confessing or new evidence showing up that the convicted has an alibi to the crime may not be deemed significant, as somebody must judge whether the new information is true.
For example, blindly trusting confessors to speak the truth would open the door for groups of people to keep each other unconvicted (A gets indicted and, a few months later, convicted, B suddenly shows up claiming he was with A, giving A an alibi, a year later A gets convicted again because that alibi didn't turn out to be watertight, C (who may already be in jail for something else) confesses, C gets convicted, D, who's dying, confesses, etc.)
So, some judge must determine whether new evidence warrants reopening a case. If that judge is (consciously or unconsciously) biased, this easily can lead to injustice. From what I read, that seems to have been the case quite a few times in the US.
Speaking of pretty clear, later evidence is pretty clear grounds for a new trial according to U.S. law, at least up to 3 years after they're found guilty. Beyond that I'd leave it to the lawyers to figure out.
But that challenges the whole foundations of a civilized society, does it not? I suspect if prominent people are being caught on the wrong side of such procedural issues, ways would be found to tweak the law in a hurry.
Still, that alternate confession must be credible. For high-profile crimes, there often seem to be dozens of alternate confessions, and they are usually obviously untrue so they should not be grounds for appeal of the convicted.
The hard part is how to establish that alternate confessions or new evidence are really significant (as they indeed sometimes are).
Ok then, what happens if new evidence comes up. For example, lets say you were accused of murder, and later on a video is found on some security camera that wasn't noticed before of someone else killing the person in question, so that you are 100% proven to NOT be the murderer?
Would that be grounds for an appeal? I'm pretty sure it would be...
What are you smoking? I'd ask for sources but this is an absurd idea. You don't even need innocence in the US. You need to show there is reasonable doubt that the individual is guilty. At least that's how it works during trial. I'm not going to claim this works flawlessly, nor that it justifies a death penalty, but let's be real here.
You are completely misinformed. Reasonable doubt applies at trial, not on appeals. Also, the ad hominem adds nothing to your point.
Edit: look at Herrera v. Collins (SCOTUS): "Petitioner's claim of actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence is not ground for federal habeas relief. United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed."
Two questions were presented for the Supreme Court's review:
Do the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments permit a state to execute an individual who is innocent of the crime for which he or she was convicted and sentenced to death?
What post-conviction procedures are necessary to protect against the execution of an innocent person?
Is the critical distinction in "federal habeas relief"? Does that mean that state appellate courts can/do consider evidence of innocence in order to vacate a conviction?
No it doesn't. It just means that this particular case doesn't speak to states doing that or not. It has no applicability outside of federal habeas relief.
That is for the first trial, and the first trial only
After that you are guilty, the only thing that matters to the legal system then is their arbitrary rules. The other commenter is 100% correct that actual innocents is irreverent for any appeal.
The US Legal System is completely off the rails of any common sense, justice, or rational thought at this point.
"The law perverted! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!" -- Frédéric Bastiat
The intention behind debating guilt only at the first trial is to prevent endless retrials for the same thing. Imagine if you were cleared of a charge but someone kept re-accusing you over and over, dragging you back to trial again and again. Or similarly, if someone was found guilty of the murder of someone you loved, but kept being re-tried again and again, and you had to keep giving testimony as a witness each time.
What is "perverted" about the system is that people have found ways around it to essentially get retrials for the same crime. Because there are so many laws, and so confusingly worded, the prosecutor can often just keep throwing things at you until something sticks (especially for white-collar crimes.) And appeals, which ought to be rare, somehow have become routine for many cases.
>> Imagine if you were cleared of a charge but someone kept re-accusing you over and over, dragging you back to trial again and again.
Well that is turning the double jeopardy rule on its head, using that to defend not considering innocence on appeal is something only a lawyer wishing to pervert the law would consider...
The purpose of double jeopardy is to limit state power to put people in a cage, not to increase state power to keep them there...
>And appeals, which ought to be rare, somehow have become routine for many cases.
I dont think so, I think any sentence over 5 years should come with an automatic appeal to a 3 judge panel and any sentence of Life or more, should come with a automatic retrial with a whole new jury.
I have zero faith in the Jury system and police state, and I think the wrongful conviction rate is vastly under reported. That is with out even getting started in the immoral extortion racket called "plea bargain"
“There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.”
One could argue that the 10th Amendment counts here. Of course it's such a "catch all" that it's basically always ignored...
OTOH, the govt. chooses to acknowledge the vague and fuzzy parts of the Constitution (eg, the "necessary and reasonable clause") when it's convenient for the State. But if a vague and fuzzy part of the Constitution could be seen as establishing more of a check on the power of the State, well...
> It was against this muddled constitutional backdrop that the Texas Supreme Court significantly changed the “actual innocence” debate this past May in In Re Billy Fredrick Allen. Allen was arrested for two murders in 1983 by Dallas County authorities. He was subsequently convicted and was sentenced to two concurrent 99-year terms. His convictions were upheld on direct appeal. Over the next quarter century Allen filed several writs of habeas corpus in state courts alleging constitutional violations and claims of actual innocence—the latter claim having been recognized as cognizable in post-conviction habeas corpus proceedings in 1996 in Ex parte Elizondo. In 2009 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) found that Allen’s “newly discovered evidence” demonstrated a sufficient showing of “actual innocence” under Schlup v. Delo to warrant the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus and a release from custody.
Wow, thanks for that. Perhaps progress is possible on this front.
I've never completely understood the tendency towards severity in Texas, other than the long period in which it was simply very violent, but that would depend on a questionable reading of the effects of institutional memory.
>>>I'm not against the Death Penalty on general principle grounds
You should be...
When you kill someone outside the conditions of self defense that is murder and is immoral. I do not care if the government doing it as some kind of "punishment" or a person doing it for another reason, murder is murder, "capital punishment" is murder.
If we want a peaceful, just and free society, it can not include capital punishment. A free and civilized society does not have Capital Punishment.
History will not judge us by how we treat the acceptable people, the people that follow the rules, the nice people... No history will judge our society by how it treats the worst of us, the evil people that given the opportunity would slice your throat open and laugh as you bleed out...
It is likely that in 100 years, this time will be viewed by people living then like we view the barbarism of Early American history. People will be asking "how could anyone support that kind of treatment of others". This of course is not just about capital punishment but the entire prison system.
It's very easy for me to have a preferred moral code that is almost like yours except that I do not axiomatically declare that capital punishment is equivalent to murder.
Governments are made by people out of people. The whole system is just people, telling one another what to do, with the carrot of reward and the rod of violence, as necessary. An organization isn't a shield against personal morality. Capital punishment is a bunch of people telling another person to kill yet another person. That's all it is.
I agree with most of that, except for the "is" in "war is murder".
What do you mean by "is"? At the end of the day we have decided as a society that "Killing people is called murder and it's Very Bad", and we can also decide that "killing people who don't deserve it is murder and it's Very Bad" if we prefer.
Personally, I vacillate between thinking that capital punishment and life-imprisonment is quite immoral (and that we should fine something like 'exile' as an alternative), and a more utilitarian stance that, well, we have to find something to do with dangerous people and it doesn't really bother me if getting rid of them entirely is it.
[n.b. these stances are all in a vacuum and do not reflect my policy beliefs, which are specifically attuned to our society's pisspoor implementation of life-imprisonment and capital punishment.]
Sincere question. Why are you allowed to murder someone in self-defense, but not as a punishment for crimes? What moral code do you rely on that draws the line there? Why is that moral code more correct than one that draws the line between punishment and capricious violence?
FWIW, I'm somewhere between you and OP in my thoughts. Definitely against the death penalty in practice, and somewhat ambivalent in theory. But it's interesting to really think about the axioms we construct our morals and ethics from, and why they're the way they are.
It would not be murder to protect your own life from the aggression of others. However any use of violence must be in proportion to the threat to your life. I.e I do not believe you have the right to kill someone for trespassing, but only in those circumstance where there is a reasonable believe your life to be direct and immediate danger.
Self-ownership... Then you could theoretically "cede" that ownership of your own body to someone else like a family-member / spouse (perhaps a will, or have it done prior-to-death). And thus, in that frame of reference murder becomes an extreme form of theft.
Why don't you rephrase that with the appropriate level of detail and not leaving out important facts: Is not wanting to pay for something that you were given and didn't explicitly request theft? And yes, I'm an anarcho-capitalist and jumping in here.
There are a slew of assumptions that are being made when arguing for a pro-state stance. Eventually, you'll stumble on this thing called the "social contract", and then magically all questions of validity are somehow answered. It's a convenient answer devoid of any first-principles, that many are content with using as a basis to defend the status-quo of the existence of a state.
If your window is broken and I replace your window but take your TV as payment, did I steal your TV?
Maybe you had a different window you wanted, or maybe you did not want to replace it at all.
"Paying for services" implies some kind of voluntary exchange. Government is not voluntary, government is violence, and any "service" provided by government is done so at gun point under the threat of violence and paid for in the same manner.
Frankly, I don't even understand what's the purpose of capital punishment?
It is not to punish someone -- they are already dead, so they can't feel the punishment
It is not to set an example -- its been proven over and over again - when people are ready or commit crime, the last thing they think of is that they will get caught or get punished.
That's why death penalty does not stop people from committing heinous crimes.
It is not to give relief to the family of a victim. Countless examples of (mostly Christians) that publicly said they forgive the murderer and are against death penalty for him/her are always being ignored by justice.
Its very scary to think a civilized country have something as horrible as death penalty, which imho means we gave up on someone. Sure I've seen animals in human skin but what stops us from putting them in jail for the rest of their lives (not money I can tell you that).
If you used a time machine to bring some people from a 1600s English colony here in America to the present time, they would think our punishments are cruel and unusual. To them, prison itself was cruel and unusual punishment, so they didn't have them: they just executed people or did other harsh, but quick punishments, depending on the crime. To them, it was far more merciful to execute someone than to stick them in a prison cell for years and years. (They did have jails, though, but only for people awaiting trial.)
So any time I see someone criticizing the death penalty as "uncivilized", I think it's a bit silly because there have been whole cultures that completely disagreed.
okay so taking your logic forward, I dont get it why we need houses, forks and cars? We used to be just fine living in caves, using stones to chase and crash each other skulls for food, and we been fine riding horses too!
So you think prison really isn't all that awful then? And that everyone who tries to simply commit suicide instead of spending their life in prison must have "mental problems"?
That is so true. Very dark skin, on the border of intellectual disability, poor and male means... no matter what you are accused of or whether you actually did it or not... guaranteed death penalty if possible by law.
Oh no, he'd published two novels before that, both significant, but for different reasons. Poor Folk was a maudlin debut but it made him the hottest new writer in Russia, briefly. Belinsky, the biggest critic of the day, famously kissed him when they were introduced.
Now that he was a celebrity he thought he'd show them what he really could do, and came up with The Double, which is genius. But it bombed, and Dostoevsky became a has-been in his mid-twenties. It's still one of the best things he ever wrote, equal parts comic, tragic, and weird. It's also short, so one of the best first things to read by him.
All that happened before he went to Siberia, which of course was transformative. His memoir of the prison camp, Notes From the House of the Dead, is another masterpiece and a sort of decryption key for all his later work. It was Tolstoy's favorite.
Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime And Punishment) was sentenced to be executed by the Tsarist government in 1849. He was actually in front of the firing squad, waiting for his turn to die, when he learned that his sentence had been commuted to a measly 10 years hard labor in Siberia.
One could argue that this was the defining moment of his life, and most of his greatest works were motivated in some way by the intensity of that experience. So yeah, for lots more on this, read Dostoevsky.
Has the first hand account of Joshua Ryen, who also experienced what it was like to almost get executed.
I'm personally not a fan of the death penalty - I generally don't think it's worth the risk in effort, except perhaps in the case for people (eg. terrorist leaders) such that keeping them alive could result in a hostage situation.
But I do think it's a little unfair to have a case like this presented in a completely one-sided way.
The Ryen account is a little far down that page. Since we heard one story in anatomical detail, how about another?
"The first time I met Kevin Cooper I was 8 years old and he slit my throat. He hit me with a hatchet and put a hole in my skull. He stabbed me twice, which broke my ribs and collapsed one lung. I lived only because I stuck four fingers in my neck to slow the bleeding, but I was too weak to move. I laid there 11 hours looking at my mother who was right beside me.
I know now he came through the sliding glass door and attacked my dad first. He was lying on the bed and was struck in the dark without warning with the hatchet and knife. He was hit many times because there is a lot of blood on the wall on his side of the bed.
My mother screamed and Cooper came around the bed and started hitting her. Somehow my dad was able to struggle between the bed and the closet but Cooper bludgeoned my father to death with the knife and hatchet, stabbing him 26 times and axing him 11. One of the blows severed his finger and it landed in the closet. My mother tried to get away but he caught her at the bottom of the bed and he stabbed her 25 times and axed her 7.
All of us kids were drawn to the room by mom's screams. Jessica was killed in the doorway with 5 ax blows and 46 stabs. I won't say how many times my best friend Chris was stabbed and axed, not because it isn't important, but because I don't want to hurt his family in any way, and they are here.
After Cooper killed everyone, and thought he had killed me, he went over to my sister and lifted her shirt and drew things on her stomach with the knife. Then he walked down the hallway, opened the refrigerator, and had a beer. I guess killing so many people can make a man thirsty."
The sole survivor, Josh Ryen, had told a social worker in the emergency room that the murders were committed by 3 or 4 white men. Josh spelled his message by pointing at letters on a clipboard as he was unable to speak, but the social worker and medical staff observed that he was lucid and could spell his name and address correctly. Judge Fletcher wrote, "Deputies misrepresented his recollections and gradually shaped his testimony so that it was consistent with the prosecution's theory that there was only one killer." Jurors, however, said they disregarded Ryen's testimony because they believed he was confused and traumatized.
On June 9, a woman named Diana Roper called the Sheriff’s Department to tell them that her boyfriend, Lee Furrow, had come home in the early hours on the night of June 4. He arrived in an unfamiliar station wagon with some people who stayed in the car. He changed out of his overalls, which he left on the floor of a closet. He was not wearing a t-shirt that he had been wearing earlier in the day. He left the house after about five minutes and did not return. [Roper and her father] both concluded that the overalls were spattered with blood. Roper turned the overalls over to the Sheriff’s Department and told the deputy that she thought Furrow was involved in the murders. Roper later provided an affidavit stating that a bloody t-shirt found beside the road leading from the murder house had been Furrow’s. It was a Fruit-of-the-Loom t-shirt with a breast pocket. Roper stated that she recognized it because she had bought it for him. She also stated that a bloody hatchet found beside the road matched a hatchet that was now missing from her garage. [...] The Sheriff’s Department never tested the overalls for blood, never turned them over to Cooper or his lawyers, and threw them away in a dumpster on the day of Cooper’s arraignment."
Furrow had been released from state prison a year earlier. He had been part of a murderous gang, but had been given a short sentence in return for turning state’s evidence against the leader of the gang. The leader was sentenced to death. Furrow told friends that while he was part of the gang he killed a girl, cut up her body, and thrown her body parts into the Kern River."
We know you can implant false memories, especially in kids. If the cops decided Cooper was guilty it would have been easy to coach him into giving the testimony above.
I'm not saying he is innocent or guilty, just that there appears to be some doubt, much of it due to police sloppiness and misconduct.
This is why it's a great idea to try these cases on Hacker News. (I'm only half kidding.) Always and everywhere, if you sit on a jury and listen only to the prosecutor or defense attorney, you will come to the conclusion they want. This is for the same reason you can't tell what a magician is doing with his hands: he's an pro, you're an amateur.
3. Josh Ryen told the police he thought three men committed the attack. He later changed his story.
"When Josh was rescued the day after the murders, he could not talk because his throat had been slashed. He could only squeeze the police officer's hand in response to questions. The story that Josh was finally able to tell police was that he was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother's screams. When he and his friend Chris went to investigate, he saw the bodies of his parents and Jessica and the backside of one unfamiliar person, so he ran and hid. Then he heard Chris screaming, so Josh ran back towards his friend. At that point, something struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious. He awoke later in a pool of blood.
When later queried by investigators, Josh spoke of three Mexicans who had come to the house earlier and thought they could have done it because they had been there once before. However, Josh never said he saw three people commit the murders. He consistently told different investigators that he saw only one attacker. The triple murderer theory is merely speculation based on the visit of the three Mexicans and twisting of a little boy's words.
Additionally, Josh was an eight-year-old boy who was startled awake by a horrific murder and was brutally attacked. It is unsurprising that probing questions by adults and the power of suggestion later tried to confuse his story. Most important however, Cooper was not convicted on the limited testimony of an eight-year-old. He was convicted by the mountain of other evidence incriminating him."
1. The girlfriend of a former inmate friend of Cooper's, thought her boyfriend might have been involved in the murder. She turned his bloody coveralls over to the local Yucaipa sheriff's substation, but they threw out the coveralls without testing them.
"This girlfriend, Diane Roper, was dismissed by law enforcement as completely lacking credibility. She was a professed witch who claimed she had a vision during a trance that the murder had been committed after she heard about the Ryen case. However, she had no substantive reason to believe her boyfriend was involved with Cooper the night of the murder. In fact, she told sheriff's investigators that she did not even know to whom the coveralls belonged. She said she "just knew" from the vision that the coveralls were connected to the case. By the time the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department heard about her fantastic story, they had Cooper in custody with mountains of evidence (see above) against him. Based on their limited resources and already having the likely killer in custody, the San Bernardino County police chose not to expend precious time and money chasing Roper's crazy story."
As for the other evidence:
"The victims died from numerous chopping wounds later determined to have been inflicted by a hatchet or axe and stabbing wounds inflicted by both a knife and an ice pick. Later that day, bloodstained items were found in the vacant house where Cooper had stayed, including a button from a prison jacket identical to the one he was wearing when he escaped. A police criminologist also found evidence of blood on the carpet, in the bathroom sink and in the shower along with Cooper's footprint. Hairs from the shower drain and the bathroom sink were consistent with those from two of the victims.
A bloodstained hatchet from the vacant house was later found near the Ryen home. The sheath from the hatchet was found on the floor of the bedroom where Cooper had slept. Some hunting knives and at least one ice pick were also missing from the vacant house. A strap fitting one of the missing knives was found in the same bedroom. Shoe prints were found in the Ryen home and the vacant house next door matching the unique pattern of shoes issued exclusively to prison inmates. The prints indicated shoes of Cooper's size and brand that he had recently received in prison.
While most of the blood samples taken at the murder scene were determined to have come from the victims, one sample was conclusively determined to have come from a black person with the same blood group as Cooper. The sample was too small to determine if it was Cooper's rare blood type.
The Ryen station wagon was found several days after the killings in a church parking lot in Long Beach. Hairs found in the car matched those of Cooper. Tobacco issued exclusively to prison inmates, which Cooper smoked, was found in the vacant house and in the Ryen's station wagon.
Two days after the murders, Cooper befriended a couple in Mexico and joined them on a boat trip up the California Coast. Weeks later, Cooper was arrested on a boat off of Santa Barbara after the woman reported that he had raped her at knife point, threatening to kill her if she woke her husband. Following his arrest, several items taken from the vacant house in Chino were discovered on the boat.
At his trial, Cooper admitted staying in the Chino house but denied any involvement in the Ryen murders. Josh Ryen, who miraculously survived his injuries, testified that he awoke on the night of the murders after hearing his mother's screams. He remembered being hit from behind when trying to investigate but was unable to identify his attacker.
For the 19 years following his 1985 conviction, Cooper's claims of trial and sentencing errors have been reviewed by California and federal courts. In 2000 he won a delay of his execution so that new DNA testing could be performed on various blood and saliva samples found at the murder scene, in the stolen station wagon, and on a bloody t-shirt found near the Ryen home. The DNA from all of these samples was found to have come from the same person. This DNA was then compared to DNA from Cooper's blood. It matched. The odds of the match being by chance were 1 in 310 billion."
When you hear one side of the story, always look for the other -- whether or not it's a criminal trial. Adversarial justice works.
Maybe Joshua Ryen remembered a different guy who looked like Cooper. Also, from the discussion of DNA evidence, I suspect that samples were mishandled, and crude tests were used. There's evidence that commonly used DNA markers don't distinguish non-white people very well.
Some might say that the practice of allowing brutal murderers and rapists to live out their lives and die in peace is totally abhorrent and has no place in any liberal society.
It's almost as though different rational people of good will disagree about moral matters.
> the practice of allowing brutal murderers and rapists to live out their lives and die in peace
Unless I'm misreading you, that's a huge misrepresentation of what death penalty abolitionists advocate. I don't want violent criminals to have zero repercussions for their actions, and no present-day society I've ever heard of allows them to.
But I agree with (what I perceive to be your greater) point about differences in personal moral code. I was merely speaking contextually about the general trend Western society has followed for the past few centuries -- like fewer, more lenient punishments and more respect for civil rights, among others.
Call it what you want. IMO, any society that recognizes the problems with capital punishment and accordingly outlaws it has at least some liberal tendencies.
There are cases in which blanket statements are valid.
I'm hesitant to do so in the case of moral arguments, though I find the case in favour of the death penalty, particularly given the many, many abuses, and utter and final nature, phenomenally weak.
That said, I disagree with the HN hive-mind's obliterating your comment.
Agree to disagree about the blanket statements, and I actually do agree that for what most people are picturing here, the death penalty should be abhorred. But, seriously, it's rough out there. Almost nobody actually lives in San Francisco, when you think about it. (Or similar.)
This kind of emotional experience is beyond understanding for most of us (and hopefully remains so). The masterpiece of a film Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville has a scene in it, of an execution that .. (I won't continue with spoilers). It was one of the most powerful things I've ever watched that made me feel maybe just a tiny bit, what that might be like.
If the only reason for banning capital punishment in the USA was to prevent DA's from personally benefiting from "being tough on crime" in the next election for DA or governor, that would be enough.
The entire American criminal system is beyond corrupt at this point.
It seems crazy -- there are so many independently-sufficient reasons to abolish the death penalty, argued from virtually any grounds, many of which otherwise are completely opposed.
Denmark doesn't exactly have the cultural baggage the US has.
There isn't a gun culture* (just picking one aspect) at all in Denmark, there is a rich culture in the US to the point that people think you are changing the identity of the country if you reform gun law. Stating that a progressive state that never had such problems can solve them has no meaning.
* guns would be the leading cause of homicide in the US.
The cause (IMO) is a human who lacks self-control, anger-management, moral compass, or is otherwise broken in a way that causes/allows them to intentionally take the life of a fellow human.
The gun/trigger/bullet/gunpowder/whatever is a mechanism of the murder, not the cause. (I'm not a rabid "gun nut" [nor even a gun owner], but blaming guns as the cause is just as fundamentally misplaced as blaming a baseball bat, knife, or rope, IMO.)
I simply don't think it wise to entrust the State, with a completely fallible justice system, with the power to end a citizen's life. Haven't quite worked out the philosophical grounding of that argument, but I think that's where I'll start.
I find the factual, mechanical description more emotionally moving, because I can more easily put myself in the position of the writer. My emotions matter a lot more to me than what a (convicted) murderer says he's feeling -- I'm against the death penalty even in cases where the person is clearly guilty and a horrible person.
Because a stay of execution is literally a (temporary) last recourse. Up until that time, you are pursuing the years of appeals or otherwise trying to get the conviction overturned.
There are victims and families of victims who do not support the death penalty. A documentary aired in the UK a few years ago that spoke with the family of a prison officer (Daniel Nagle) who was murdered, the perpetrator (Robert Pruett) had been sentenced to the death penalty and the Nagle family were against the sentence -- even though they believe him to be guilty of the murder.
They are the last ones who should have an opinion on the matter, as pain clouds their judgement towards revenge.
Besides, they'd be saying the same things for anybody, if they were convinced or led to believe that he/she was the culprit, even if he/she were innocent.
Only if they were against the death penalty should they be heard, because that would be a sign that they speak putting revenge and petty sentiments aside.
The justice system shouldn't be a mechanism for revenge but for the protection of society.
The family almost always vents their anger at whoever the police tell them "did it", even if the police are wrong. Often they persist in that belief after DNA evidence or video evidence proves conclusively that the police were wrong.
I don't get it. Cooper's stay of execution was granted in 2004, most probably due to facts that became known at the time. This article was published in 2016, and he is still in prison - for the same crime? Twelve years have passed and no progress has been made in determining whether Cooper was responsible or not?
I understand that US justice system is completely biased against minorities (Mainly blacks) but i can't completely come to terms with total abolition of death penalty as expressed by many here on HN. Here are few incidents where i think death penalty can be justified (examples are from Norway which has abolished death penalty & India where it is very rarely carried out - only 5 from 1995)
A reformed Breivik, once released, would be able to do some good by working against his former cause, speaking to prevent others from following down the path that he took.
It's interesting that you give the example of Breivik. Don't you think that a far-right nutcase like him would relish the reinstatement of the death penalty?
I'm not against the Death Penalty on general principle grounds; I'm against it because we clearly aren't to be trusted with it.