Re: Moussaoui gets life

Richard Bollard <richardb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Wed, 17 May 2006 08:07:07 -0700, Evan Kirshenbaum
<kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Robert Bannister <robban@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:


And, just to be fair, in locales that don't have the death
penalty, whenever someone sentenced to life in prison dies in
jail, a legislator who voted against the death penalty for the
crime in question is chosen randomly to assist in the autopsy.
Just so nobody forgets that people are still being sentenced to
die, just slowly.

Er, don't people who are not imprisoned also die?

Sure. And people who aren't imprisoned also get ten years older.
What I don't like is people patting themselves on the back for not
killing someone who might be innocent when in reality they're
sentencing someone who might be innocent to spend decades in prison
until they die, with no chance of getting paroled.

That is a misrepresentation. I don't think people who sentence
somebody to a long prison sentence congratulate themselves at all.

They may not, but I do believe that some anti-death-penalty advocates
do. That is, after a death sentence, they move into a mode of "let's
work to find a reason why they shouldn't be executed", while after a
penalty phase in which the convicted person might well have been
sentenced to death but wasn't, they consider it a victory and move
on.

But actually, I suspect that juries often congratulate themselves for
"removing a dangerous person from society" whichever way the penalty
phase comes out.

The other problem, as I alluded to before, is that since people don't
consider it so bad to sentence someone who might be innocent to spend
the rest of their life in jail, the legal system and volunteer
advocates don't bend over backward to give them every opportunity to
prove that they were innocent.

Arguing that the death sentence is irrevocable is not to deny that
other injustices cannot be made. It is just as, or almost just as,
bad (YMMV) to get a long sentence

50 years is a "long sentence". "Life imprisonment" is a long
sentence. Both of these mean "ineligible for parole for a reasonably
small number of years". "Life imprisonment without the possibility of
parole" (the only other choice in a capital case) is not merely a
"long sentence".

wrong as it is to get a death sentence wrong. So, it may not be "so
bad", by which I guess you mean "as bad", but it is still very bad.

You and I may believe that, but looking at the rules that have been
set up--and listening to the rhetoric--it's manifestly considered far,
far worse to execute an innocent person than to have them die in
jail. Or so it appears to me.

But all that presumes that they might be innocent. In some cases,
guilt is well-established. Consider the Columbine school shootings
but change two attributes: (1) make the shooters teachers or janitors
rather than students and (2) have them caught rather than committing
suicide. Now you've got a situation in which two men bring bombs into
a school and walk around the school shooting kids, killing a dozen or
so, wounding another couple of dozen. The shooters are well-known to
the victims and the survivors and are recognized by them, and they're
caught at the scene. Upon investigation, it turns up that their homes
are full of plans for doing exactly what they did, except that the
bombs (which failed to detonate) were supposed to blow up the school
and kill hundreds. I put it to you that no amount of scientific
advance short of evidence of a mind-control ray is ever going to prove
them innocent.

Since we're playing hypotheticals,

It's not really that much of a hypothetical other than the "what if
they didn't commit suicide". Murderers around the world do absolutist
death penalty opponents a service by imposing the sentence on
themselves in many of the cases in which there would be widespread
agreement even among those who are largely against it.

what if society's values change and the whole story of their lives
gets examined and they are judged to be guilty, sure, but insane,
and curable?

Then they'd be in the same situation that they'd be in if they had
died in jail a week before the new laws passed.

But that's a way bigger hypothetical than any I've come up with. Or,
to the extent it isn't, it's one of the things that you're trying to
guard against with either a death sentence or life without parole.
You're essentially saying "With the evidence we've seen, we don't want
someone who wasn't there deciding in thirty years that they should be
freed." Because way more likely than them actually being curable
would be someone asserting that they were curable, by some new fad.
Or deciding that because they were black or white or had parents who
were poor or rich by definition they couldn't have gotten a fair
trial.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |He seems to be perceptive and
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |effective because he states the
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |obvious to people that don't seem
|to see the obvious.
kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx |
(650)857-7572 | Tony Cooper

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/


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