AFF's Doublethink

Mikeybackwards — November 10, 2009 at 2:50 am

Sonny,

I understand the visceral and emotional satisfaction of vengeance that the death penalty provides. I don’t think we have a justice system. I think we have a legal system that strives towards justice. As to the provision of justice – I like what Henry David Thoreau wrote in the opening of his treatise Civil Disobedience:

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

We cannot, of course restore life to those who have been murdered, or the murdered victim to his or her surviving family and friends. So, in those cases, justice not being possible, I think punishment, segregation from society, and preventing them from committing the crime again should be the optimal goals of a legal system. However, we also have, as a society, a duty not to compound the effects of the crime. Which is why I oppose the death penalty. Executing an innocent person is itself a heinous act, but unlike the case of the person improperly convicted and imprisoned, there is no ability to free the innocent from the unjust and improper sentence.

I agree with you that the majority of those sentenced to death who have been exonerated and freed prior to the carrying out of their sentence have had this come about as part of the near open-ended appeals process we associate with the death penalty. However, The Innocence Project has not limited its work to capital cases. Many individuals have been freed by their efforts and the efforts of others. So, I don’t think repealing the death penalty removes the opportunity for the improperly convicted to appeal and be freed from prison as you suggest. Further, while I don’t agree with those who suggest life imprisonment without the opportunity for release is as cruel or harsh a penalty as the death penalty, I believe it serves the purposes of our legal system as an adequate alternative at a much lower cost, both economically as well as morally.

I think that regardless of the outcome of any debate about the death penalty, we can do many things in the interim, and going forward to help reduce the number of wrongly convicted individuals for all crimes. In the book Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer close by prescribing several reforms that could help prevent improper convictions in the first place. I would also suggest that making it possible for an inmate to appeal on the basis of actual innocence to exist without a deadline, i.e. at any time after conviction, an inmate can file an appeal where he can present new evidence of innocence that might not have been available at the time of trial and/or have access to scientific testing of evidence as new forensic tools and processes are discovered, or where improved knowledge casts doubt on the validity of methods or science relied upon to support the initial conviction.

Chris — November 11, 2009 at 10:02 am

“What does justice mean for the husband and father whose wife was raped, one of his two daughters was raped, and all three were burned alive by a sadistic pair of monsters?”

Not to be crass, but who cares what it means to a specific husband? I am absolutely sure most husbands/fathers would have the desire to inflict great harm on the individual he believed responsible for such an act. In the legal system, “justice” is blind for a reason.

At issue is not whether or not we might wish evil for someone who did a despicable act, it’s whether or not a state legal system (which has proven fallible time and again) should be in the business of ending life.

Killing just one innocent person is too much…and it’s avoidable.

James N. Markels — November 11, 2009 at 10:26 am

Sonny: “But if life imprisonment is just as awful — nay, worse — than execution, why should we be happy that supposedly innocent people have been stuck in prison with no hope of parole for the rest of their lives? And how many of these innocents will manage to prove their innocence without the neverending legal process that has freed the innocent from death row?”

At least the supposedly innocent people have a chance during LWOP to prove themselves innocent and be pardoned or released from jail. Once you kill them, that option is no longer possible, and now you’re faced with the knowledge that the state killed an innocent person.

cervantes — November 11, 2009 at 10:37 am

rehab the few criminals who can be rehabilitated . . .

This is mindless bigotry. The vast majority of prisoners are non-violent drug offenders. They are in jail because they have little education or marketable skills, and they are black or Latino. White, middle class non-violent drug offenders generally don’t go to jail. Imprisoning these people just makes their chances even worse.

Most of them are 100% rehabilitatable, they need job skills, jobs, addiction treatment, and a chance. Instead, they get kicked back out on the street with absolutely no alternative but to return to crime, and they have been brutalized by their experiences in prison and turned from small time offenders into potentially more dangerous criminals.

We have more of our population in prison than almost any country on earth, including some of the most oppressive dictatorships. And it is absolutely counterproductive.

Get educated.

Drew — November 11, 2009 at 10:42 am

“This is a fair enough point, I guess, except for the fact that I’m not entirely sure I understand the difference between revenge and justice, especially in a case as personal as this one.”

I think this is a basic moral misunderstanding we have when it comes to thinking about punishment.

Because I’m honestly not sure what the purpose of revenge IS when it comes to punishment. I certainly don’t see justice and revenge as similar: and sometimes they are diametrically opposed.

Revenge is a very human desire, but that doesn’t mean that it’s one it benefits society to aid and abet. In fact, in many cases the whole purpose of a penal system is to prevent it: keep criminals away from society not simply for the good of society, but for the protection of the criminals.

The fact is, exacting direct harm on someone who committed a crime, or threatening their life is often an utterly pointless brutality: it rarely makes them more likely to regret (it’s more likely to make them resent) and whether or not it even helps the families of the victims seems to be a coin toss, not a sure thing.

And it’s especially bizarre if that person is years away from the act they committed: they’re practically a different person by then. It’s bizarre almost sacrificial thing to continue to punish someone because you think they _deserve_ it, and this desert somehow maintains over the years. Indeed, I’m not even sure what it MEANS to deserve lasting punishment/death/etc.

Imprisonment serves a clear social purpose. Exacting pain on someone just because they did something horrible… I’m really not sure what purpose that serves other than to find a legally sanctioned way to indulge in the very sort of violence we’re supposed to be standing against.

Plenty of killers kill because they have a sudden emotional conviction that their victim DESERVES to die.

That’s just not an attitude I think anyone should support or endorse in any context. People just don’t “deserve what’s coming to them.” Or rather, I don’t see a sensible moral case for arguing that they do.

Justice makes sense as a means to mitigate harm, prevent further harm, and provide whatever equitable recompense is possible. But nothing you simply DO to a criminal is recompense in anything but the most bizarre, magical-thinking way.

Steve Branda — November 11, 2009 at 12:21 pm

I think it’s a waste of time trying to make the case that executing a wrongly convicted person is a superior or equivalent option to keeping them in prison for life. To somehow imply that unjustly depriving a person of their life somehow lessens the wrong done to them by unjustly depriving them of their liberty is just nonsense.

That said, I find the Hayes/Komisarjevsky case absolutely appalling, and if anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s those two. However, killing those monsters will not make Petit whole. Their death won’t bring his family back, or erase the memory of the terrible manner in which they were killed.

The saddest part about this is that the stupid death penalty debate in the country will completely overshadow the real issue with our justice system that is at the forefront of this case. The bottom line is that neither of these repeat offenders should have been out of jail with the opportunity to commit the crime. This is the real failure of the justice system in this case, and something both sides of the death penalty debate could agree on.

Without going into too much detail on why the justice system fails in this way. I do think it’s pretty clear that when people commit certain crimes (assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, sexual assault, etc.) they are more of a danger to the personal safety of others. Figuring out how to keep these people locked up for DRASTICALLY longer periods of time should take precedent over the death penalty debate bs that never goes anywhere.

If you asked the surviving victim in this case if he would rather see these two jerks killed, or have the justice system get its act together to prevent this from happening to another family, I hope he would choose the latter. I think most decent people would. That should be the focus here, not the death penalty.