People want the bar to be raised to a point where there is a 0% error rate. This effectively means abolishing the death penalty.

I disagree. There’s a difference between basically never used and not actually possible.

Exactly. If you kill someone in front of two surviving witnesses and it is caught on a well-lit good definition video, sure, that's beyond any reasonable doubt, execute away.

Short of that? Nah, let's err on the side of caution and not go around executing potentially innocent people, please.

What if the two witnesses were lying? What if the video was deepfaked? Plenty of executions and imprisonments from a few decades ago that were judged "beyond any reasonable doubt" at the time were found to be wrong as soon as DNA testing became a thing, and the racial and other kinds of bias in the justice system became immediately clear. What is the guarantee that the same thing won't happen for any executions done today?

You are adding layers of doubt. If there is doubt, then you’re not above the bar. It’s as simple as that.

Yes I recognize the post above me used the term “reasonable doubt”.

Raise that bar however high you want; you cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a mistake.

The defendant has been recognized by no less than 15 people. His DNA was found all over the crime scene . The victim's blood was found at his clothes. A video recording made by a surveillance camera depicts the whole murder. He himself confessed.

The murder has been staged. Organized crime found a doppelganger, made him wear the victims clothes and kill the other guy on cctv. They contacted the victim and told him to either confess or they will kill his children and parents.

I think society is ok assuming that won’t happen

Yep. That’s what I’m saying. Starting with a required confession is a good start. You could make it as hard as requiring the jury to fail to come up with any other believable narrative.

It’s ok if a criminal can avoid the death penalty by blatantly refusing to confess in light of obviously incriminating evidence.

Confessions are fake all the time, including in many existing "they were executed despite being innocent" cases!

Since we're on completely unrealistic scenarios anyway: that could still be a set up with a false confession.

The real murderer was his long-lost twin, who had previously kidnapped him in a cell, performed the murders and the confession, then snuck out and swapped them!

That’s not a problem with the sentencing

It is. The point is that there can always be more information later. And you can't go back on the death penalty.

I responded to this saying yes, but I think it left too much room for nitpicking. Although I do think this is above the bar, it’s also worth noting that in this scenario, the criminal did in fact seem to leave the crime scene. The much more obvious case is the one where they are caught mid act with many crowd sourced perspectives of the crime, like random shooters.

I actually don't believe that the videos people will use will live up to the standard even if they claim they do. Observing average people, they model probability as a binary 0/1.

They'll look at the video and be like "Yeah he's wearing Carhartt. It's him. He wears it" or whatever. And some other equally clueless nitwit will convince himself it wasn't me because I have 3 blue items and the killer had a red keychain.

Essentially, it is crucial to me to prevent the state from exercising power over me because the agents of the state are frequently morons. And there's nothing worse than morons with power over you since you cannot reason them out of idiocy.

I’m not convinced that you can meaningfully raise the bar beyond “beyond a reasonable doubt” (or even that you can get juries to consistently apply “beyond a reasonable doubt”.)

Regardless of jury instructions, I think what you normally get in practice is “beyond the point at which you are convinced the accused should be treated as guilty”.

That won't be sufficient for a few reasons. First, in a significant number of cases where people have been exonerated for crimes, they were convicted based on the police coercing testimony, hiding evidence of innocence, and even fabricating evidence. Based soley on the evidence presented, the jury should have convicted, even with a higher standard.

Secondly, the more serious a crime is, the less likely that jurors are willing to let the accused off on a "technicality". Even if they are told they need to judge to a higher standard, their inclination is to judge to a lesser one and this will subconsciously influence their weighing of the evidence.

> Based soley on the evidence presented, the jury should have convicted, even with a higher standard.

That’s an arbitrary assertion you can’t possibly defend.

I’m not arguing the defendant is not found guilty. I’m arguing the defendant is not sentenced to death specifically.

Now here is the thing. And this is the reason the death penalty was already illegal in Washington state, even before Inslee signed this bill earlier today.

However high we put this reasonable doubt, it is bound to be pretty arbitrary, and when you have an arbitrary marker, biases are quick to step in. The supreme court of WA found this arbitrariness to cause racial bias in who gets sentenced to death in the state. And this racial bias was deemed unconstitutional in the state, so the death penalty was abolished in 2018.

Interestingly the bias was actually found and published in a regression analysis study which the justices used when backing their ruling.

The bill Inslee signed was merely a removing of this punishment (as other unconstitutional laws) from the legal code.

So, no, this cannot simply be addressed by simply raising the bar, that is unless you find a way to remove biases from jurors, or otherwise find an objective framework in a messy world, or else you risk having a punishment which discriminates against racial lines, which is unconstitutional.