The definitions of cruel and unusual are independent of crime severity.

I don’t think that’s true in the USA - the idea that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can make it cruel and unusual is the essence of the famous Furman v Georgia decision of the US Supreme Court in 1971 which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty until the late 1970s. What’s more eg in Coker v Georgia in 1977 the US Supreme Court ruled that rape of an adult woman was insufficient to qualify for the death penalty.

Well like I said below I maybe hoping for something that doesn't exist. I assume enough legal action has taken place to figure this out but I wouldn't really know. However, I agree that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can be cruel and usual (depending on how the punishment is defined). I fail to see how the second case example relates if the first is true. What is cruel or unusual seems unrelated to the crime severity because cruel and unusual is a separate concept like the first example seems to show or so I thought. Crime severity and severity of the punishment should be related though. This is why, in my opinion, solitary confinement can be called might be cruel and unusual. It's categorically different from prison. I hope any of that makes sense.

I sure hope not. That would allow execution for first-time-offender jaywalking.

Severity is part of what is meant by unusual. Life imprisonment for a minor crime would be considered unusual punishment.

Maybe I'm hoping for a more thoughtful legal system than is actually in place. While your example would be unusual it's only unusual now. Meaning you're basing what what is usual on the length of the prison sentence can gradually increased over time as long as it never appears to be usual compare to the "current mean". Much of this is legislated which implies to me that unusual would fall outside of what has been legislated.

Forcing someone to eat a box of baking soda would be unusual to me because it's in a totally different category of punishment. Like fining, community service, or death instead of prison.

> Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable

That's a blatant lie. If an innocent man ends up in jail at the age of 20 and it "is undone" when he's 40, his life is destroyed anyway: No career, no savings, no family, no prospects for ever amounting to anything. How do you undo that?

Get off your moral high horse. Life imprisonment is more cruel than death.

A weird example to use. Are you really saying it's better to kill innocent people than lock them up for 20 years?

That's a good question, and worth pondering outside the context of the state's monopoly on violence. Would the average person prefer Ted Bundy kill them immediately or lock them in his basement for 20 years?

This entire comment chain seems to be conflating two common arguments:

1) If it's wrong to kill an innocent man, it's also wrong to imprison that same man; you can call one more unjust than the other, but (as the argument goes) you can't say that one is justified while the other is not.

2) Our society has gotten too used to locking people up in metal cages for several decades; there are many arguments in favor of moving back to flogging[1][2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Flogging-Peter-Moskos/dp/0465...

[2] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/justice

Yes, definitely it would be far less cruel than subjecting them to the penal system for the best years of their life. Especially if it is a quick, painless method of execution.

It's sort of too bad that there aren't many mostly empty wastes that we can exile people to any longer. Remove them from society, but give them the chance to make what life they can under the sky.

Were the years Nelson Mandela spent imprisoned ones that would have been the "best years of his life" had he not been imprisoned, considering what occurred in the years after he was released? How do we determine value of time spent alive? Was it worth it and valuable to him to suffer through years of imprisonment in order to reach the later years? Was is worth it and valuable to society? Would he and/or society have answered differently during the years of his imprisonment than now? Whose answer (now-Mandela's or younger-Mandela's, now-society's or younger-society's) matters most?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. The difference is small, though.

But context matters. I'm really objecting to the weird notion that miscarriages of justice are sort-of okay, as long as they don't result in capital punishment. It makes little difference whether a man's life is unjustly destroyed or unjustly extinguished!

You are honestly arguing that killing innocent people is better than wrongful imprisonment?

Besides the fact that execution (last I checked) is permanent, there are no methods used in the US (or most places in the world) that guarantee a quick, painless death.

Practically, the most likely methods (lethal injection) end up torturing people to death.

That’s really the kind of world you want to live in?

Yes I am. Seriously, how is this even hard to understand?

Imagine yourself in the situation: you are 20, you go to jail. You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.

The point isn't so much whether a messed up life is still better than no life, the point is that someone upthread glibly asserted that wrongful imprisonment can be reversed. That is a convenient lie. Those years are lost. Forever. Irreversibly.

Still not getting through? Fine, imagine a women spending her third and fourth decade in jail. That means no children. Ever. Is that enough to get the point across that imprisonment causes permanent, irrevocable damage and that it isn't markedly different from capital punishment in this regard?

Well, I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I think your reasoning is... flawed, to say the least. We're not going to see eye to eye on this, so let's call it a day.

> how is this even hard to understand?

I think you need more practical life experience to understand why you are wrong.

> You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.

That was me at 40. I didn't go to prison. I got sick. Lost everything and had to start over. And 15 years later life is okay.

Friend mentioned his college professor. He fled the Nazi's and went to Argentina. And then had to flee again to the US. Each time he started over with _nothing_.

It makes a rather massive difference.

In one case, you can potentially reunite a person with their family. In the other, the state has killed an innocent man and permanently destroyed a family.

I'm really having a hard time understanding how locking someone up and potentially freeing them later after a miscarriage of justice is discovered is the same as murdering that person.

I'm not saying it makes it okay, but wrongful imprisonment, at least in the USA, results in fairly hefty lawsuits and financial settlements, usually in the millions of dollars depending on the length of incarceration.

I don't see the problem. You can easily undo all of those things. No savings? Just give him homey. No career? Hire him for a government job. No prospectors for ever amounting to anything? Get off your high horse, he'd still have 40 years left to do that. Especially for men 40 years is a perfectly fine age to start a family nowadays.

Really the worst case would be to convict someone who is 60 years or older who then dies in prison because of a lack of medical attention.

> No career? Hire him for a government job.

Are you being satirical here? The rest of your comment, other than this line, seems like you are trying to be serious, but this is so clearly over the line into absurdity I can't tell.

> No prospectors for ever amounting to anything? Get off your high horse, he'd still have 40 years left to do that. Especially for men 40 years is a perfectly fine age to start a family nowadays.

Assuming you are being serious for the moment (and if you arne't, good on you, I honestly wasn't sure): it seems like you are not accounting for any of the realities of the scenario you are describing. What about the trauma and PTSD from living through decades of psychological torture? What about the destroyed social networks? What about the consequences of decades of poor diet and exercise?

No friends.

In terms of human history, life imprisonment is very unusual. It's new enough to still be regarded as in an experimental phase, and everything we know about this experiment suggests that prison (especially life) is failing to have any of the positive effects that it is supposed to have.