Executing the Innocent
The grim business of executing criminals has long been haunted by the specter of killing someone innocent. Common sense and the fact that a number of people on death row have been exonerated suggests that it’s happened, but no specific case has ever been widely acknowledged. Now it looks like David Grann, writing for The New Yorker, has our man Cameron Todd Willingham accused by Texas of setting a fire that led to the deaths of three children. The case, as Grann argues, is a mess. It’s founded on forensic evidence that’s not backed up by any real science, a mentally unstable semi-repentant jailhouse snitch, and some badly flawed eyewitness testimony.
You should read the story for yourself. The tragedy inherent in executing an innocent man is pretty clear. But it’s sobering to note that these death penalty cases are more heavily litigated than other kinds of charges that might lead to “only” ten or fifteen years behind bars. Given the staggeringly high number of people in prison in the United States, it stands to reason that we have thousands of innocent people behind bars. Part of the problem is simply that no system is foolproof. But part of the problem is a mentality among law enforcement and prosecutors that convicting the innocent is a workable second-best alternative to convicting the guilty. This leads to enormous and irrational resistance to ever rethinking “successful” prosecutions.
57 Responses to “Executing the Innocent”
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August 31st, 2009 at 10:07 am
Given the staggeringly high number of people in prison in the United States, it stands to reason that we have thousands of innocent people behind bars. Part of the problem is simply that no system is foolproof.
It is worse than that. Our system is all about making examples of people. So when the police decide that they have the suspect they can never, never, never afford to back down. They feel that this would cause people to question their judgement and authority and we cannot have that. Even when a person is determined to be innocent, a state prosecutor will still claim that the jury let a guilty person go.
I know a former district attorney who switched sides and became a defense attorney because he felt that the system was so broken. You should hear the tales.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:20 am
Unless it get’s Health Care?
August 31st, 2009 at 10:24 am
The US has more prisoners than any other country, even China (in total number, not only in share of population). I think it is also the only country in the world that privatized so much of what can now be called: Big Prison. Probably not a coincidence.
But part of the problem is a mentality among law enforcement and prosecutors that convicting the innocent is a workable second-best alternative to convicting the guilty.
And part of the problem is the Law itself, with for example the three-strike rule and the infamous case of the man initially sentenced for life because he stole a slice of pizza.
http://wikibin.org/articles/jerry-dewayne-williams.html
August 31st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Maybe the criminal system reserves all of its empathy for white-collar criminals and conservative politicians.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:35 am
Well, as always, let’s look at the incentives.
The best way for a county prosecutor to make it to AG (or for an assistant prosecutor to make it to prosecutor or judge) is to be tough on crime, so they have every incentive to rack up the maximum number of convictions, whether justified or not.
One factor in judging cops is how many cases they’ve closed, so they have every incentive to cut corners to get someone convicted, whether guilty or not.
Add to that victims’ families, who generally oppose every effort to reopen a case, regardless of the evidence (”we’ve achieved closure, let’s not reopen old wounds”), and you’ve got a system virtually guaranteed to result in unjust convictions and executions.
Unfortunately, to the extent the public is aware of these factors, they’re mostly fine with it. At a bare minimum, the defense, particularly in capital cases, ought to have access to the kind of forensic resources the prosecution has, and there ought to be real (criminal) penalties for hiding exculpatory evidence, but I have no doubt any effort to make even these modest reforms would be caricatured as “letting the thugs go free”, so they have absolutely no chance of enactment.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:39 am
Zealous people are going to end up investigators and prosecutors of crimes (in some sense you want that, and in any event it is unavoidable), and we have long ago reached the point of diminishing marginal returns in terms of procedural protections, so the only real solution is to make our system less punitive overall. Now developing the political will for that solution is a whole different matter.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:15 am
Obviously the solution is to crush the police union and fire 3 to 5% of the “bad” police officers and DAs every year.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:21 am
The problem with the whole “tough on crime” approach was once unknowingly summed up by one of its supporters, a guy I heard talking at a counter: “Hey, they can’t put enough of those people in jail to satisfy me.” Exactly.
Back in the day they used to dunk people in water to determine guilt or innocence depending on whether or not they floated. We may think we’ve progressed from that, but between the inconsistency of juries (one jury will convict while another won’t, based on the same set of facts) and the evident irrationality of the prosecutors, I’m not sure that we have. If the system produces arbitrary results, we may as well go back to dunking and save a lot of effort.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:29 am
Obviously the solution is to crush the police union and fire 3 to 5% of the “bad” police officers and DAs every year.
Snark aside, that would probably be a very, very good start.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:45 am
It’s possible, you know, to restrict the death penalty to cases where guilt is a near surety. No one seriously questioned whether the late and unlamented Saddam Hussein was guilty of the crimes with which he was charged.
For some reason, though, the Yglesian peanut gallery seemed to object to the Hussein execution as well.
Personally, I’d be fine with a compromise that took the death penalty off the table except when guilt is essentially certain (perhaps in exchange for extending the scope of the penalty to cover crimes beyond first degree murder, such as child rape).
August 31st, 2009 at 11:45 am
What’s the big deal? The CIA kills innocent people (i.e. not tried and found guilty of a capital offense) from time to time. Not much of a serious ruckus is raised over that. Hundreds of current elected officeholders take the position they shouldn’t even be impartially investigated for their killings, let alone punished if wrongdoing is proved.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:46 am
An elected judiciary has very little incentive to act as a brake on any of this.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:48 am
That’s an understatement and a half. When judges say they’re tough on crime, what they’re really saying is that they’re tough on defendents. But that’s cool, because anyone who is in front of a judge probably did something wrong, and anyway it won’t happen to me.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
You know Hector, the fact that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy who deserved to die is not in question. The problem is that it wasn’t worth doing. Even if one accepts the improbable lower bounds set at tens of thousands of innocent people slaughtered, that’s far too high a price to pay in order to put one bad actor to death.
Using Hector’s standard, George W. Bush deserved Saddam’s fate.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Personally, I’d be fine with a compromise that took the death penalty off the table except when guilt is essentially certain
The existing standard for all criminal convictions is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” How does “essentially certain” trump “beyond a reasonable doubt?” Are juries supposed to have a “we think (s)he’s probably guilty” option vs. a “we’re double-dog certain (s)he’s guilty” option?
And what are you going to do once we start finding innocent people have been convicted of the double-dog certain guilty standard (which WOULD happen.)
August 31st, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Re: Even if one accepts the improbable lower bounds set at tens of thousands of innocent people slaughtered, that’s far too high a price to pay in order to put one bad actor to death.
Huh? Are you referring to the Iraq War? In that case I agree with you, but that’s not what I’m arguing for.
I agree we should not have invaded Iraq, but once that was a fait accompli and Saddam Hussein was in the hands of the Iraqi puppet government, I think that his execution was fully in order. Would you have opposed his execution if he had been overthrown by a domestic coup instead of a foreign invasion?
And if George W. Bush is found guilty, in a fair and impartial jury trial, of war crimes, then I would have no problem with him being executed either.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:13 pm
RE: How does “essentially certain” trump “beyond a reasonable doubt?” Are juries supposed to have a “we think (s)he’s probably guilty” option vs. a “we’re double-dog certain (s)he’s guilty” option?
That’s for lawmakers to determine, but one might, conceivably, apply the death penalty only in cases where there was conclusive DNA evidence, or where the facts of the case were not seriously in question (like with Mr. Hussein).
There is always going to be _some_ risk of exeucting innocent people, and that’s a tragedy. However, as long as we make an extreme effort to avoid it, and as long as the incidence of mistakes is very low, I don’t think it is a dispositive reason not to use the death penalty (under the principle of double effect). I think we can and should make the standard for applying the death penalty more stringent, but not do away with it entirely.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:22 pm
one jury will convict while another won’t, based on the same set of facts
The fact is, juries almost always convict.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
as long as we make an extreme effort to avoid it, and as long as the incidence of mistakes is very low
Spoken like someone without a clue as to how things actually work in the criminal justice system. Supposedly we already make extreme efforts to avoid wrongful convictions (that “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard), yet we regularly find people on death row who couldn’t possibly be guilty.
“It’s OK, kids, we may have executed your Dad despite his innocence, but we only have this happen a few times a year, so it’s all good.”
August 31st, 2009 at 12:32 pm
What gets me is that a lot of the same people who claim government can’t do anything right seem to think that it functions flawlessly when applying the death penalty.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Arguing that a certain volume of wrongful convictions is an acceptable consequence of an effective criminal justice system is not the same as arguing that, in a pinch, conviction of the innocent will substitute for conviction of the guilty.
Are there any functioning criminal justice systems in which the tolerance for false conviction is zero? I doubt it.
I suspect that, in any such system, increasing the percentage of correct convictions will always come at a cost of increasing the number of wrongful convictions. One can debate the costs and benefits of any position in the design spectrum between catching 0% of the bad guys and catching 100% of the bad guys, but I don’t think that arguing for a higher sensitivity (in the statistical sense) is morally equivalent to asserting that wrongful convictions are irrelevant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
August 31st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Hector, you haven’t read the article. Based on what the jury heard, this guy was certainly guilty. Forensic evidence, eyewitness testimony, and even a jailhouse confession all pointed toward certain guilt. Turns out that the forensic specialists were completely inept, the eyewitness accounts prejudiced, and the jailhouse confession completely unreliable.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Just to be clear Hector, I was merely using your logic as a starting point. It was not meant as a personal attack or even as a suggestion that you were on the wrong side of the unprovoked assault on the Iraqi people.
As for the question of whether Bush committed war crimes, his war of aggression speaks for itself.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Not as Stupid,
Well, thanks for clearing that up.
Regarding the Iraqi people, while I’m sure most of them dislike the US invasion and subsequent occupation, most of them were also glad to have the opportunity to mete out justice to Mr. Hussein.
JimBob,
Look, it sounds callous but it’s true. Lots of things we do carries the risk of killing innocent people. Fighting the Civil War among them.
Now you’ll probably argue that ending slavery was a good thing, and that as long as we did not wilfully kill innocent people during that war, accepting some risk of innocent civilian casualties was a necessary price to pay in order for the good of ending slavery. And you’d be correct. (Unless you’re a concistent pacifist, in which case have at it). I claim the same for the death penalty. The good that is to be served by executing the guilty (i.e. retribution and expiation) is important enough that we need to weigh it against, not the _wilful_ and _deliberate_ killing of innocent people, but rather a certain inevitable risk that a few innocent people will be executed. Again, if the risk is small enough, if we take all possible steps to minimize the risk, and if the good served by executing the guilty is large enough, then I think under the principle of double effect it is legitimate to use the death penalty.
Now if you don’t agree with the retributive or expiatory purposes of criminal justice then of course you’re unlikely to find this argument convincing.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I friend of mine got into a little trouble in Williamson County, Texas. He asked his attorney if he had a chance. She replied: “No. In Williamson County, you’re guilty until proven guilty. And it doesn’t take much proof.”
I’m generally sympathetic to Hector’s concept of limiting the death penalty to only the really clear cut cases, but that might not work out so well. The clear cut cases are often ones where the prosecutors don’t want to pursue the death penalty. Here in Boulder, we just had a case where a woman killed her husband. She called 911 to say she’d stabbed him. When the police came, she admitted it again. And she was holding a knife with his blood and her bloody fingerprints on it. But there are questions of past abuse and evidence of a recent struggle. There is no question she killed him, but they’re going with second degree murder because she’s going to argue self defense and will get a sympathetic jury in Boulder. Also, the DA doesn’t want to be seen as someone going tough on a victim of spousal abuse. He probably wishes the case never goes to trial and will plead down further.
August 31st, 2009 at 1:16 pm
It’s possible, you know, to restrict the death penalty to cases where guilt is a near surety.
For a practicing Christian, Hector, you do seem to like the idea of playing God.
And in practice, the death penalty is used most frequently in those places where concern for guilt is secondary to the desire to demonstrate the retributive capacity of the state. The elected judiciary in places like Texas goes together with all that — vote for Judge Lynch and he’ll “do what’s right”.
August 31st, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Generally, those who work on prosecutorial side of the criminal justice system are the scum of the earth. I worked a lot of years in h.s. and college as a summer court attendant and caught a good whiff of the apparatus. It’s not just that they’re weasels and poltroons – there’s something wrong with these people. And, maybe 75-80% of all cops are really stupid, lazy, and vile. The good ones really stand out. Then, if you have the misfortune to wind up in prison – you have to deal with the guards. They’re a lovely bunch. It’s quite a system.
August 31st, 2009 at 1:51 pm
The Iraqi people may love the outcome, but surely you aren’t a “ends justify the means” kind of guy. I know for certain you aren’t because if you were then your arguments against torture would have been nonsense.
As for me, I am not a consistent pacifist (no matter how many times the blundering poptarts gets confused by this). I’m not really one at all. There are people who deserve to die and there are wars that need to be fought. But wars must always be fought strictly on a need to</em basis. The moment one undertakes war for glory, revenge, or for reasons so convoluted that no one can figure out what the fuck you were trying to accomplish, then every one who dies in it is the victim of willful murder.
As to the death penalty, I’m in favor. In theory. But it would require a much fairer justice system than we have to implement it in an acceptable manner.
August 31st, 2009 at 1:51 pm
arg…so much for formatting…
August 31st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable, even if is assumed that the witness is making a good faith effort to give an honest account. People’s memeories just are not nearly as reliable as they suppose. A lot of forensic testimony is about as empirically sound as astrology. The fact of the matter is that the criminal justice system suffers from the same problems that any bureaucracy does when it is not under threat of being dissolved; it become populated with a lot people who take the path that entails the least effort, and that means that unreliable evidence works just fine, as long as the defense is overmatched.
For the flip side of the results produced by a lazy bureaucracy, take a look at the horrible story out of California last week, involving the 11 year old girl kidnapped 18 years ago, and enslaved until last week. The stepfather, who has spent years in the hell of being a suspect in the girl’s disappearance, gave an extremely accurate description of the vehicle driven by the kidnapper. The kidnapper was a paroled rapist, and has kept the vehicle, which was registered in his name, all of these intervening years, where it was discovered, along with the now-29 year old woman, on the rapist’s property. Putting in the drudgery of matching California sex offenders to vehicles matching the stepfather’s description would have saved these victims from years in hell. It was easier, however, to just take a hard look at the stepfather.
I don’t know if there is a solution to this, but greatly increasing the funding for public defenders would be a start.
August 31st, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Re: The Iraqi people may love the outcome, but surely you aren’t a “ends justify the means” kind of guy.
Didn’t I say that I opposed the war? The execution of Hussein didn’t retroactively justify the war, no. But on the other hand, I do believe in trying to make the best of the situation. Given that the war had already been going on for several years, I believe that it was the right decision, in 2006, to sentence Hussein to death rather than to life imprisonment.
Not that it really matters my opinion- ultimately it’s the Iraqis’ opinion that counts.
Re: As to the death penalty, I’m in favor. In theory. But it would require a much fairer justice system than we have to implement it in an acceptable manner.
Not that I support this, but some Latin American governments have the death penalty on the books only for genocide and war crimes- it is meant for people like Mr. Hussein and (arguably) Mr. Bush, rather than garden variety murderers whose guilt may not be certain.
Of course this may be the reason that the current Peruvian and Bolivian governments are so fond of throwing the ‘genocide’ charge at their political enemies….
August 31st, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Will Allen,
The internet never forgets that you’re an idiot.
August 31st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
My point wasn’t that you supported the war, or that Hussein’s death wasn’t a good thing. My point was that, in talking about executing the innocent, we have a political system that is perfectly happy to sign off on the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents without so much as a mock trial.
Take our idiot friend Will Allen, for example. He will rant and rave about how anyone who doesn’t support the brutal slaughter of the Iraqis is pro-Saddam. It’s because is too stupid to understand that a cost-benefit analysis requires admitting that there are costs.
August 31st, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Yeah, DMonteith, the person who wrote….
“Last time I checked, I’m sitting here with both a progressive tax code and carbon legislation coming down the pike.”
…is surely an idiot.
August 31st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Actually, Stupid, you are the only person sbout whom I have said that he supported the enslavement of Iraqis.
August 31st, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Hector Wrote: It’s possible, you know, to restrict the death penalty to cases where guilt is a near surety.
Its not, actually. You have to write rules for decision making. Those rules have to be carried out by people. Right now we have 12 people unanimously agreeing that there is no reasonable doubt at all of guilt. What else are we going to do? Have 24 people? 120 people? Tell them that they not only have to have no reasonable doubt, but they also have to have no reasonable doubt, really, for reals, no takesie backsies?
The best you could do would be to institute some kind of mandatory minimum for forensic evidence, but even that carries with it some risks. Maybe you could require confession?
I just don’t see any actual methods for reducing the error rate in death penalty cases other than screaming “BE LESS STUPID!” at the decision makers involved.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I’m with Hector at #10. The debate about the death penalty has a lot of freeloading by the absolutely guilty on the unfortunate coattails of the maybe-not-guilty. It wouldn’t be hard to design a system of post-conviction review that addressed only one question: are we absolutely, unconditionally certain of guilt? Put that way, a “no” wouldn’t undermine the disposition of the case, i.e. it wouldn’t be grounds for an appeal, but it would take execution off the table. All of this without prejudice to the continued ability of people who oppose the death penalty for other reasons to keep on fighting against it, but at least we wouldn’t be letting a few cases decide the many.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Will Allen,
Your failure to answer the questions in the post I linked to speaks for itself. The fact that you think I’m stupid for refusing your “offer” is just proof that you are someone that anyone would love to see on the other side of a negotiating table.
Running from that sort of reputation is rational, but futile because, like I said, the internet never forgets.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
The good that is to be served by executing the guilty (i.e. retribution and expiation) is important enough that we need to weigh it against, not the _wilful_ and _deliberate_ killing of innocent people, but rather a certain inevitable risk that a few innocent people will be executed.
IOW getting our collective rocks off about sticking it to the evildoers by offing them is so important that we shouldn’t worry about murdering a few innocent folk here and there.
Yeah, call me unconvinced.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
“…but no specific case has ever been widely acknowledged. Now it looks like David Grann, writing for The New Yorker, has our man”
I’m not so hopeful. Maybe the New Yorker article will change things, but I first read about this case almost five years ago when the testimony of the arson investigator was discredited, and I have yet to see this it make into mainstream discourse about the death penalty.
I’m afraid it will take a case where an execution proceeds despite widely reported credible evidence of innocence at the time of the execution before the concern becomes widespread.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Hector: “It’s possible, you know, to restrict the death penalty to cases where guilt is a near surety.”
Rich in PA: “It wouldn’t be hard to design a system of post-conviction review that addressed only one question: are we absolutely, unconditionally certain of guilt?”
It’s interesting that both Hector and Rich wave their hands in the direction of possibility (”it’s possible” “it wouldn’t be hard”), without mentioning an actual proposal on the table. This is because the “no, really, this time we’re 100% sure” standard is a pure fantasy, and they know it.
Rich’s idea—another level of judicial review to, I guess, proofread the finding of the jury—is particularly hilarious. Any tribunal that said, in effect, that the defendant is not definitely guilty—but our decision only applies to the question of punishment and is completely non-appealable!—would be completely unconstitutional, and in any event would run into exactly the same problems of inequality that put innocent people on death row in the first place. How would the innocent get the fair hearing that they didn’t get in trial? Would their (in many cases) incompetent court-appointed attorneys get to speak for them there, too, or would we hire really good lawyers to give them the adequate defense that they didn’t get when they were on trial for their lives? After all, right now death row inmates are entitled to unlimited appeals, and somehow the innocent still get executed. But sure, all we need is one more judge; that’ll finally work out the kinks of our legal system!
But this is just picking nits; the practical impossibility of the “we’ll make really really sure” plan is nothing compared to the pure immorality of it. Hector, at least, provides a sense of why all of this effort would be worth it: capital punishment is, for him, a spiritual good. Rich doesn’t give any sense of this, which makes me wonder why he feels like killing people is so worth it that we need an entirely new court system to make us feel less guilty about it.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:38 pm
A further point on Rich’s comment:
“The debate about the death penalty has a lot of freeloading by the absolutely guilty on the unfortunate coattails of the maybe-not-guilty.”
These are not legal categories in our system. There’s no such thing as “maybe-not-guilty”; there’s only “guilty” and “not guilty.” And since once you execute someone, you can no longer set them free and offer them an apology, a lot of us think that the fact that the “maybe-not-guilty” will always be there is a good reason not to execute people.
By the same token, we don’t have “absolutely guilty”; the guilty are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Once your Infallible Tribunal establishes that someone is “absolutely guilty,” there’s no reason for an appeal, is there? At that point, being slated for execution is the same as being infallibly guilty. You could just put the person against the wall and shoot them as soon as the hearing was over, which would save taxpayers a lot of money.
Finally, the way you frame the discussion is appalling. “Freeloading” off their “coattails”? Where do you think those coattails are going? The not guilty on death row are getting killed just like the guilty are. I’m sure that a guilty man strapped in the death chamber feels like he got a pretty sweet deal, tricking the courts into considering whether he was fairly tried before they kill him by putting poison into his blood.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Re: The best you could do would be to institute some kind of mandatory minimum for forensic evidence, but even that carries with it some risks.
A requirement for forensic evidence seems pretty reasonable to me, as a way to raise the bar for when we apply the death penalty for ordinary crimes. And yes, I’m aware that no system is foolproof.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:28 pm
are we absolutely, unconditionally certain of guilt?
The only honest way to answer that question is always no (witnesses can lie, forensic analysis can be falsified or screwed up, etc.). But that wouldn’t make the system answer that way – look at how badly “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” is undermined in practice and how many innocent people are convicted under it.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
After all, right now death row inmates are entitled to unlimited appeals, and somehow the innocent still get executed.
right now death row inmates are entitled to unlimited appeals
You sure about that?
August 31st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
[...] America, Crime, Liberty Leave a Comment Discussing capital punishment, Matthew Yglesias makes a good point… The tragedy inherent in executing an innocent man is pretty clear. But it’s sobering to note that [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Kiril: Why, no! I had a feeling someone might ding me for that, which is probably something I heard and misunderstood some time ago. My bad.
My larger point stands: innocent people on death row already have access to further judicial review, and there are still innocent people on death row regardless.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:42 pm
DMonteith, you are hallucinating about what is “coming down the pike”, so it is little wonder that you have other mental disorders as well. Like obsessive/compulsive. Do you attend Group with Stupid?
August 31st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
“coming down the pike”
Will Allen’s hypothetical.
I also try to kill mosquitoes when I see them. I guess I’m just obsessive/compulsive that way. Blood sucking parasites, idiot trolls; tomayto, tomahto.
August 31st, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Golly, D, you now appear to be hallucinating as to what comprises enacted legislation in the United States, or alternatively, what is needed to reduce carbon emissions in a significant way. C’mon; give us more soothsaying analysis regarding what is “coming down the pike!”
Seriously, though, you perhaps should try a different SRI to help with your problem, or perhaps just a dosage adjustment. Know hope!
August 31st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I’m sorry. I must have missed where you showed that your “offer” was both necessary and remotely plausible. Waxman-Markey, warts and all, is actual pending legislation whereas your “offer” consists of Will Allen’s desire that I accept regressive tax policies in exchange for fairy tales.
Again, contact me whenever you are about enter negotiations on anything. There’s money to be made on side bets there. TIA.
August 31st, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I’d like to see some stats on the rates of arrests and convictions during election years. The “tough on crime” platform is ubiquitous, and until we find better measures of being tough on crime, this is going to continue. Arresting the wrong guy is worse than not arresting anyone, not only for the innocent guy being arrested; but for the community, because the criminal is still at large while the case appears to have been solved.
September 1st, 2009 at 1:53 am
A requirement for forensic evidence seems pretty reasonable to me, as a way to raise the bar for when we apply the death penalty for ordinary crimes.
Despite what CSI: Des Moines might suggest, forensic evidence is
And that “when” is, I hope, sometime after the US becomes an absolute monarchy ruled by a white-horse-riding cavalier squirrel.
Speaking of absolutes: the absolute punishment requires absolute proof, and that doesn’t exist as far as human guilt and innocence are concerned. One might think a religious person were more inclined to find that argument compelling — unless that religious person believed that individuals might be imbued with the judgement of God Almighty over life and death.
I’ll say it again: the death penalty is used most frequently in those places where concern for guilt is secondary to the desire to demonstrate the retributive capacity of the state. If you’re comfortable with that demonstration, then your profession of concern for evidentiary standards is a crock of shit: you basically (and I mean, “base”) just feel a need to have someone killed for “retribution and expiation”, and as long as that person can be deemed sufficiently guilty of something, somewhere, then you won’t lose sleep about it. So go ahead and round up the usual suspects.
It’s all perversely Calvinistic, really.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:00 am
Let’s try that again: Despite what CSI: Des Moines might suggest, forensic evidence is subject to human error, or human manipulation, or human fraud.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:16 am
And let’s also make the point that during most of the 1990s, the Texas Supreme Court included John Cornyn, a regular competitor with Jeff Sessions for Dumbest Cracker Asshole in the Senate. Between his time as elected supremo and elected dumbass, Cornyn was Texas Attorney General, and sealed the death penalty memos that went to the desk of George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
So even if Cameron Willingham’s case had made it to a higher court, he would have been dealing with Cornyn either on the bench or as AG, and Cornyn loves him some state-sponsored killing.
September 1st, 2009 at 7:44 am
Re: absolute proof, and that doesn’t exist as far as human guilt and innocence are concerned.
No kidding, but it’s possible to have higher or lower standards for evidence, and we can certainly make the standards higher then they are today.
We have the obligation to make mistaken executions of innocent people as rare as possible, but I don’t think that the existence of a very low error rate means that we should never execute- anymore than the inevitable death of civilians in war means we should never go to war. And falsifying evidence in a capital case should be prosecuted with extreme severity.
What about that, Pseudonymous? Do _you_ think that the inevitable death of women, babies, and children in war- any war- means that we should never go to war? If you don’t, then presumably that’s because you thinnk preserving the safety of the nation (at least in some cases) is a positive good, while retributive and expiatory justice are not.
Which is a fair premise, but one I don’t accept, so of course I’m not going to accept your conclusion.
We certainly need to tighten up the standards in death penalty cases, but it’s not a reason for abolishing the penalty entirely.
And yes, I would love it if our leaders rode around on white horses….:)
September 1st, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Well, thanks for putting a lot of words in my mouth. Since this is a dead thread, I won’t say any more than reiterate that the best argument against capital punishment is the societies (on a state- or national level) that are most enthusiastic about it. There’s a reason why “Texas justice” is a shorthand for something that has little to do with justice, and a lot to do with Texas.