“ Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent.”

https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty....

We will never know how many innocent people have been executed, but even one is more than I am comfortable with.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I'm wondering if you know if "exonerated" in this case means "found clear evidence that they were not guilty" or just(?) "the conviction was overturned." To me, those are two different things.

To be clear, I don't want anyone in prison (or on death row) that didn't get a fair trial -- even if they're guilty. But I do think there is a difference.

The murderer/rapist was initially convicted and sentenced to death. Effective defense was able to get his conviction thrown out. Normally this would mean you walk free, due to double jeopardy protections. But in this case the murderer was a military officer. Once DNA testing was refined, it was proven conclusively that he was indeed the murderer/rapist. So he was tried in the military court system, which is independent of the double jeopardy protections provided in the civilian court system, and convicted to death - again.

The point I make here is that many of those 190 probably are guilty, and I think this is generally not a bad thing. My main concern with the death penalty is an innocent man being put to death. But if the standard of conviction is sufficiently high that even a guilty man can walk free, at least on occasion, then that gives one some degree of assurance in the ability of an innocent man to prove his innocence.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastburn_family_murders

And yet evidence of actual innocence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrera_v._Collins) isn't enough to stop an execution.

One is that being an irreversible punishment, it precludes any possibility of remediating injustices. There have been many cases where it seems highly likely or even proven that executed prisoners were innocent.

The second is that particularly in the US it has become highly politicised. The possibility that condemned inmates might be found innocent, and the damage that does to the credibility of the system, has lead to the system doing whatever it can to obstruct and prevent investigations that might exonerate condemned prisoners, regardless of the strength of any evidence.

So for me it's not so much that the punishment is bad, it's that it seems to be extremely hard to set up a process around it that is fair, and the US in particular has failed to do so.

And it wasn't circumstantial. Ford was a local who was immediately identified by the family during the act. The surviving family members all identified him, and their story also matched perfectly with that of the accomplice - until he later started creating overtly fabricated tales. Ford was also offered a plea deal that would have spared his life. He instead decided to try his luck with this whole 'I was just in the car, honest' story.

That he felt people would just believe him is what you get from sociopathy + narcissism. He was convicted after less than 7 hours of deliberation. Notably Texas isn't as fast and loose with the death penalty as its reputation either - in those 7 hours they had to determine if he would likely be a continuing threat to society and whether there were any possible mitigating factors that might otherwise yield preference to life imprisonment.

[1] - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy a wrong inside the person committing the crime, via rehabilitation, capital punishment serves no purpose. If prison exists as a holding cell (ha) until individuals within the system are rehabilitated and provided with supports to reintegrate into society, killing them serves zero purpose.

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy wrongs by punishing the person who committed the crime and allowing victims legal means of retribution/revenge, then capital punishment is absolutely necessary for some crimes.

I'm not honestly sure where I fall on that scale. I believe we (the US) is failing in our duty to individuals who are in prison, via piss-poor rehabilitation services. But I also believe some crimes deserve the death penalty.

Not sure what to do with that.

allowing victims legal means of retribution/revenge, then capital punishment is absolutely necessary for some crimes

How can you be so sure? Dennis Shepard famously didn't want the death penalty for his son's murderer. You also hear of stories of the families of victims not getting any closure after a convict is put to death. The victims themselves are often dead and can't obtains things like retribution or revenge. It's not as "absolutely necessary" as you're painting it here.

If you believe in deserved individual punishment then wouldn't incarceration for life be a harsher punishment than execution? The imprisoned person experiences the personal consequnces day after day after day until the eventually die. Whereas the executed person experiences literally nothing at all. They may have lost the experience of living the rest of their life, but they're not even aware of that.

(fwiw I'm anti death penalty for ethical as well as peactical reasons, but i live in a country that is unlikely to ever reinstate it.)

For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted.

I could perhaps support capital punishment if we had a higher level of guilt we could establish in our legal system reserved only where the evidence is entirely(!) unequivocal for particularly heinous crimes. I don't know exactly what that means, and is probably just another bad idea.

I am very much in favor of executing the worst criminals but I find myself generally against the death penalty due to the risk of executing an innocent person. I am conflicted and find myself moving back and forth on this topic.

Ah, this meme again.

I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.

Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible. There is nothing you can do to reverse the fact that you unjustly stole 40 years from someone's life. Are you then also against prison terms of 40 years, given that they're irreversible? What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.

Now you can say that it's a matter of degree. Sure it is, but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?

You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.

The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.

If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.

One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”

That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word. Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?

> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?

And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.

Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.

When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to. That person can never receive any sort of restitution. That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane). That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering. They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.

“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””

To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.

> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.

Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.

Ugh. This comment starts out in bad faith and delivers the full way through using linguistic tricks as some sort of "gotcha". I actually find your comment kind of disturbing, even. The word "irreversible" seems to be sticking for you, so instead let me be more precise: the death penalty precludes the state from acting on new evidence which may change the course of action the state takes against the convicted person.

> Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible

Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time. Of course time lost cannot be recovered, this is not some great revelation you've stumbled upon. But until death there is an opportunity for the state to make a better decision - not undo them, not "make them right". A wrongfully-convicted person isn't dead, they still have a life to live.

> Are you also against life in prison?

I am against life sentences without the possibility for parole, and I am against any system of justice that does not allow for new evidence to be reviewed in favor of the convicted.

So you ARE aware that nothing is reversible? Bad faith.

>The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing...

There is extensive evidence that the severity of punishment has very little to no effect on crime rates. It's simply not something criminals generally consider when actually committing crimes.

Privatizing prison builds an economic model that incentivizes creating repeat offenders. Withholding or making rehabilitation unattainable for the majority benefits the prison, but offers zero benefit for America as a society.

On your second argument - if death penalty had the very least effect of turning people away from crime, USA would have much better crime stats than "rest of the western world". Most criminals operating at that level (murder, rape etc.) operate on the assumption that they will never be caught.

LMAO

See Christopher Havens https://www.christopherhavensmath.com/