A beautiful statement by Newsom. Prisoners rotting away in a supermax prison is a much better punishment than the 15 minutes of fame they get from their execution.

Even knowing the crimes that would lead one to be given a death sentence? What about the victims and their families?

The crimes are horrific and the victims families want revenge, that’s what life prison sentences are for. Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death.

> Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death

In the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.

In a state where we struggle to house people, home prices are exploding through the roof, who bears the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need increasingly more care?

The taxpayers. Same as they ever did, because sentencing someone to death doesn't mean they just die - they appeal, and appeal, and appeal again, and they should be able to do so because their own death is on the line, sometimes on shaky ground.

> The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

I'm for keeping capital punishment as an option, but it's clear to me that adjudicating it does cost more than life w/o parole.

Virtually all cases involving death penalty have a jury trial, higher stakes == higher priced lawyers, there are built-in automatic appeals, there are actually two separate trials for guilt and application of death penalty vs. one trial with a sentencing phase, etc.

"it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer." – Benjamin Franklin

That's a founding father of the USA, talking about imprisonment. When you extend that to state-sanctioned execution... capital punishment makes no sense as it cannot be undone.

Didn't Benjamin Franklin bang chickens? I'm not going to take advice from that kite flyer.

> In the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.

In at least some US states, the jury decides guilt/innocence but the judge determines the sentences for guilty verdicts. So in those cases the jury of peers is certainly not being the arbiter of life and death.

When I served on a jury (minor drug charge), the judge explicitly told us not to think of sentencing and only to determine innocent or guilty.

Judges in the US have gone completely off the rails.

The constitution puts no limits on the power of a jury to acquit someone and it's absolutely despicable that judges have tried to usurp that authority under that pretext of following the rule of law.

If we want to make it harder for juries to acquit someone, then that should be written in the law; not invented by judges.

> A beautiful statement by Newsom. Prisoners rotting away in a supermax prison is a much better punishment than the 15 minutes of fame they get from their execution.

and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

No sure, but since we are comparing the costs, I am also curious about the costs of maintaining infra required for and performing the executions.

The typical HN reader is more educated, logical and informed than an average random person.

If I may make that assumption, what's your uneducated guess on how those costs compare?

What's the possibility that the costs of maintaining infra required for and performing the executions are just noise compared to those to fully house, keep healthy as inmates shiv and injure each other and maintain the life of an adult who will never repay it?

> after reading the article seems like a no-brainer, CA is not executing anyone anyway

voters vote on emotion than logic and math

Cost of lifetime imprisonment is less than capital punishment.

I suspect that about 100,000,000 Americans could fix that problem.

This argument only really makes sense for summary executions. For real US executions, there are significant costs to carry out a death sentence. Drugs, reviews, appeals, protests, etc are all expensive.

Housing someone for the rest of their natural life is cheaper than the two decades or more of mandatory court appeals and processes that need to be completed before an execution can happen. Death penalty cases have a lot of these to try and prevent executing innocent people.

The state is usually paying for the prosecution and defense as well as the court staff in these hearings.

If you spent 30 seconds with a search engine you'd have an answer to this question. Here is an ELI5: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v5wj73/...

We have prisons already dude

> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

Relative to California's law enforcement and judicial budgets required to investigate, arrest, try and convict them in the first place? Irrelevant noise. That's just a silly argument.

(There's also the whole moral thing about "we should kill people because it's too expensive to keep them alive", but even so, the financial thing just doesn't logic.)

I believe that the death penalty is counter-intuitively more costly[1].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...

Indeed. But I believe it's also modern (like post 1976 I think when there were major reforms). On a global historical scale, the U.S. is a massive outlier in this area.

Probably a good thing considering (what I perceive to be) a rise in political violence that seems to push for and/or celebrate summary executions with little to no due process.

I don't think "whatever's cheapest" is a great foundation for a justice system.

> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

Imagine using _just saving some money_ to justify the death of a person. What a country.

It's perfectly reasonable for a person to decide where to spend their tax dollars:

- provide housing, education and medical coverage to people who are trying their best to make a living

- support a person who has killed atleast one more person for reasons that a jury of 12 people found unreasonable

Money unfortunately is zero sum.

> It's perfectly reasonable for a person to decide where to spend their tax dollars

No, it's not. You don't get the right to audit where "your" dollars go. Where the government should better use EVERYBODY's money, sure. But when an USian says "I don't want MY tax dollars to be used in this", is usually because they'd rather apply a fast revenge against any criminal for any crime, not caring if the person is maybe innocent (and trusting their judgement magically will allow them to have perfect knowledge of culpability), or they just don't want those dollars they believe they have the right to audit go to something as, for instance, socialized health care, where "their" dollars accidentally could benefit someone with the wrong skin color.

The speed at which USians classify people they don't like in the "unworthy of human rights" category is truly frightening.

As others have said, the death penalty is actually more costly to the state than simply housing people in prison for life.

The US is also the only "first world" nation that still has the capital punishment.

Our justice system is flawed by bias and careerism (the same is true anywhere, and the US is no exception). The fact that innocent people sometimes exonerated for crimes years or decades later is reason enough to ban the death penalty forever, IMO. Every time an innocent person is put to death, that's horrible itself, but it also means the real offender is still out there somewhere. Even if it happens 1% of the time that's still dozens of people over the years.

I would rather let the worst criminals stay alive in prison if it means one innocent person isn't put to death so they can appeal their case.

Japan also has the death penalty. Being a U.S. ally since WW2 and a member of the G7 means it is both a first world country and a developed country.

This doesn't excuse the immorality of the death penalty.

Should the state implement a system where anyone sentenced to over X amount of years in prison is automatically executed? Should something like the potential value a person can provide to society be considered a mitigating factor in sentencing?

Is it? It's no picnic, but if someone gave me the choice of being executed or live the rest of my life in prison, I'm choosing prison without a doubt. I'd probably get to knock off most of the books on my reading list before dying

I disagree. Just finished a book about a serial killer who relished fame. He really didn’t want to die. He fought death sentence hard to try to live rest of life in supermax prison. I think the preferences of those facing this predicament, who tend to appeal in every possible way is instructive.

The overwhelming majority of prisoners on death row try and appeal their sentence, so that they can live their remaining life out in prison.

‘The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.’

He’s a politician for sure. Make a big scene out of nothing.

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isn't repealing bad laws and practices something that we wished that more politicians did?

"It saves the state money.."

Sure it does.

If he wanted to save the state money he would execute all death row inmates immediately.

He doesn't have the power to do that, obviously

It sure does. Death row is expensive.

I can fix that!

I suspect part of the problem here is that all the lawyers involved get a steady income, if they can keep it going for as long as possible. Self preserving machines form wherever a flow of money exists.

> and in favor of spending more money, not less.

A lot of them still aren't aware that the death penalty costs so much more because of the intense appeals process.

As can be seen with all the people in this comment section who assumed by default that executing people is cheaper.

The apparent contradiction between "pro-life" and "pro-death-penalty", and "anti-spending" and "pro-expensive-appeals" has always been addressed by "tough on crime saves more lives" and "its worth it because the death penalty is a deterrent".

Accusations of hypocrisy generally only work if they're coming from inside the house. Basically, if you know that I already disagree with you on a fundamental level, you're not going to trust that I have a deep enough grasp of your position to point out a real inconsistency.

It permanently protects these people from ever being executed, which the moratorium doesn't.

In what way is he making a scene? All he did was release a written statement, in the midst of ubiquitous coverage of a hugely significant national election. If anything he is trying to minimize publicity.

This story isn't about technology.

Consider that a non-zero number of them are likely innocent. It's hard to know for sure but even 1% is 5 people. There has been some research on it.

if anyone has any information, its these folks - https://innocenceproject.org

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why? Say someone is murdered, and it doesn't take much forensics to determine that they were attacked, restrained while alive, then shot in the back of the head execution style.

Or maybe it's even more blatent. police find a note from the day before that says "im going to kill you" then they end up dead.

Would you construe that the commission of those murders was premeditated? almost certainly yes, ergo whoever it gets pinned on, innocent or not will get premeditation applied, it doesn't take much extra here.

Evidence of pre-meditation !== evidence the suspect applied pre-meditation. You need to tie the premeditation to the suspect, I think. In your example, if you can't prove the suspect wrote the note, I don't think you can convict on first degree murder.

You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.

The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.

Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong by Brandon Garrett (2011)

"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/books?share=book-10

Amazing book on how this happens.

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Most people plead guilty to it.

Let's say the sentencing range after trial is 20 to 60 years (typical across the USA).

Let's also say you killed someone with a gun. That might add 25 years onto the base sentence (e.g. Illinois).

The prosecutor comes to you and says "If you go to trial you're facing 45 years minimum from the judge. Might be 50, 60, 70 years. Trial is a lot of work from my office, and a lot of money. We're going to have to bring in forensic experts and go through reams of police reports. I have a lot of other criminals that need my time, so I'll do you a favor. Plead out for 30 years today."

Also, murders can easily take five years to get through to disposition. Look at Cook County, you have Augustin Toscano who still hasn't got to trial after 15 years.

In that time you are sitting in a county jail. County jails generally have, by far, the worst conditions of any institution a prisoner can be held in. I deposed a warden once to ask him why. "Because these are short term facilities. The average stay is under 30 days. In fact, most people stay less than 48 hours." This is because they bond out, so the stats are skewed and don't provide for the edge cases.

Everybody in a county jail wants to get out of a county jail at almost any cost. I remember a case from a few years back when a homeless guy was snatched up coming out of a food bank with a bag of white powder. He was charged with possession of cocaine and he plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years. Just before shipping out to the big house the test results came back: it was powdered milk. The judge asked him why he plead guilty. "Because I couldn't stand another day in the county."

Fair enough, and fascinating. I guess I’m conflating first degree murder with “death penalty”. Please tell me nobody is pleading guilty and getting the death penalty.

It has happened: https://law.justia.com/cases/indiana/supreme-court/1997/77s0...

There are also many cases of people waving their right to appeal once sentenced, which can cause challenges for their counsel (from the link: "Should a death-row inmate who wishes to waive his appeals be viewed as a client making a legal decision to accept the justness of his punishment, or as a person seeking the aid of the state in committing suicide?"): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

There are difficult issues everywhere you look with the death penalty. The one I can't understand how people get past is execution of the wrongfully convicted. Any justice system is flawed and makes mistakes - it's just too complicated to establish absolute truth when so many people with diverse motivations are involved in the process. We can save money by just putting them in prison until they die, giving us the option to partially undo the sentence in cases where innocence is later established.

Project Innocence helps exonerate innocent people. They claim that about 30% of their “clients” had admitted guilt. My understanding is that it’s mostly based on DNA evidence so not really a matter of opinion: https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/

“Why” seems to be essentially coercion from the interviewers. People told that if they admit guilt then they’ll get a slap on the wrist and be let go, else go to costly trial etc.

Yeah, that's what they did with Kevin Fox who spent 9 months in the jail getting regular off-camera beatings from the guards, because he'd been charged with raping and killing his own daughter, before the prosecution admitted they'd been hiding exculpatory DNA evidence.

https://chicagojustice.org/inside-kevin-foxs-appellate-court...

After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.

Sodium Thiopental could be used to weed out the criminals from innocent, but its use is often considered a violation of the 5th amendment. That's a key phrase equivalent for, "Oh! Oh!, they can prove my guilt with that, regardless of the amount of money and power I have." As such, both the criminals and the innocent will inevitably be sent down the river or the grave while ideologues continue to engage in political debates related to the drug's legality or usage in a criminal setting.

I would want a lot of peer reviewed research before I considered "truth serums" as providing anything actionable. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming.

Read up on the Doolin case, which is mentioned in TFA. At best it's an incredibly shaky conviction based on a badly mishandled legal process, at worst it's an appalling miscarriage of justice.

Globally around 43,000,000 people die from premature /avoidable aka innocent deaths.

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-detail...

We spend a disproportionate amount of time/resources on the 10 deaths of people who have actually committed violent crimes.

FSD, Accelerating cures via AI, safety automation all save 10,000x more innocent deaths. But reams of books/articles/philosophy/debates around capital punishment compared to accelerating technology.

Sad state of humanity

I'm confused. Are you saying we shouldn't put resourced towards saving the criminals or catching them? After all, as you said, it is only a small % of total deaths.

Either way, it sounds like you have a very low opionion of the search for justice in society.

Justice doesn’t mean killing.

That is kind of my point. I was being sincere when I said I was confused by the person I replied to. It seems like they are advocating for less research into the negative/positive effects of the death penalty because those deaths are relatively few.

Alternatively they could be saying all the resources put towards catching murderers since the number of those they murdered are relatively few.

To be clear I'm strongly against the death penalty. OPs comment seemed to trivialize the deaths that happen as a cause of murderers or the actual killing of those murderers and I have an issue with that framing. I think putting resources towards understanding these things are resources well spent since they directly impact what society decides is justice.

I think the point is that innocent people die every day. By the time I’ve typed this out, some more have died. It may seem crass and heartless, but the number of innocent lives in the relatively small population of death row is many orders of magnitude lower than in many other populations such as victims of avoidable vehicular accidents. Yes, both issues can be attacked at the same time. But the purist anti capital punishment view is based on an emotional argument, “even a single innocent life taken by failed justice system is too many”, while fatal accidents are essentially wholesale slaughter, relatively speaking by the numbers.

I think "stop killing people" is easier in a practical sense than "cure cancer"; it's only due to the bloodlust that people feel the need to spend time advocating against it.

We shouldn't put resources in saving violent criminals. There is a reason why they are given death penalties in the first place.

Now you have just exposed the risk of them existing in this planet and doing more harm. Not to mention say 40 * $50,000 or $2 Million spent on keeping them alive

Here's a fun one: crime lab scientist frauded and lied about it all and she just happened to get caught. Terrible that it was not caught earlier. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g22gb9gSPjo

What are the reasons to not believe that this is just a stunt designed to support a flimsy and unprincipled narrative of his shifting away from the side of the party closest in culture to the losers of the midterms?

He's been considering it and talking about it for a couple years now IIRC

Good thing even if mostly symbolic.

Still won't vote for him in a primary.

This, so much! Newsom has demonstrated, with his actions, that his words (and political actions, like this) cannot be trusted.

This is the man that told the entire state, millions of people, to shelter in place ... and then went to one of the fanciest restaurants in the entire state (French Laundry) to solicit campaign donations during lockdown.

Newsom will say or do anything to become president, but he should never become president precisely because he will say or do anything, with no moral compass guiding him.

A true career politician

I don’t normally point to people’s spouses as evidence of anything, but the fact that he and Trump Jr both spent years with Kimberley Guilfoyle tells me that there is not very much difference in personal ideology between the two.

That is, I think the Trump family ideology is “Trump must win” and I think the Newsom ideology is “Newsom must win”. Newsom only appears better than Trump to a certain portion of the population because Newsom understands who he needs to pander to. Put Newsom on the national stage, and he will go just as low as Trump, without hesitation.

Did California have people on death row? I thought that was more a Texan thing.

About half of the people in this thread are of the it is better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent suffer, which is the traditional American view, while it seems that the other half are more in Von Bismarck territory, who said “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape.”

so, that is interesting I guess.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/commentary-on-n-guilty-men-...

Well, when a lot of crime is committed by repeat offenders it’s going to change how you view these things. If we were a lower crime society things would be different.

Letting the guilty live is mercy without justice. Society is bearing the cost of one who would see innocent dead. Simply saying “death penalty bad” is cruelty to law abiding members of society, and that will quickly lead to chaos.

My position is that if we'd like to lower recidivism then treating prisoners poorly is a very bad idea.

Society is bearing the cost (in repeat offending) of treating everyone who goes to prison as a person incapable of acting pro-socially.

It's not just that the death penalty is cruel (though I believe that it is), its that much of the carcerial state is there to do everything possible to make it hard to do anything other than remain a criminal once a person has been to prison.

From my position, much of the cruelty and retribution against criminals (ranging from poor conditions to bad healthcare to lack of post-incarceration support) just increases recidivism and that a real problem for all of us:

cruelty in the name of retribution is the real sacrifice of the good of the whole.

Is anyone suggesting we let people free?

I thought it was just about not killing people. They're still prisoners.

I wish we would shift from a punishment strategy to a rehabilitation strategy.

Maybe we still determine they stay in prison for life but i think we'd feel much better as a society for at least trying to change their behaviors rather than just essentializing them as evil and determining punishment helps us feel better or deters behavior.

You can do both they are not opposites.

Do both what, try to change their behaviors while also believing their core is evil?

I’m pro rehabilitation but I also recognize that some people really are just evil.

I don’t get a sense of pleasure from the idea of them getting punished. Rather, I feel like society benefits when those sociopaths and psychopaths are locked away from it.

Of course, the bar for life imprisonment should be high. I also want to make it clear that I do not think all criminals are irredeemable - only that some are.

There's a lot of people with a lot of undiagnosed mental illnesses.

A good percentage of those can be treated with medication, but also a good percentage of those will not continue any medication they are prescribed and their "evil" thoughts will resurface.

Another percent of people are born with conditions such as severe psychopathy that just seem outright evil, even though they just got given a bad hand in life.

Punishment either has zero effect, or the opposite effect on many of these people. Additionally, prison treats people so severely that they come out with a ton of side-effects which make them vastly more anti-social than when they entered.

Some people are irredeemable, but we need better systems for dealing with those. Right now we put them in mental facilities -- and they do need to be kept away from society -- but we need to take into account those people are born with those defects and they are not the product of their own making.

For the ones who are redeemable we need better support. Rehabilitation is unbelievably difficult. There is almost zero money for programs inside prisons that would help anyone on the outside. All the money goes into the punishment bit, because that is easy. The programs that do exist (cleaning, serving food, stamping license plates) are mostly "do busywork, it will make an honest citizen out of you."

Visit any halfway house where parolees are trying to reenter society and see how badly the system is stacked against their success. It's hard enough for a regular Joe to find a job in 2026, never mind someone who has no money, no phone, no bank account, no address and a criminal record.

Criminal justice is the hardest of the hard problems. Maybe ASI can figure it out...

Didn’t California vote for the death penalty? And then affirm it with another vote a few years ago?

Yes, a number of times. Voters also approved accelerating the process.

This is a very touchy topic. People have strong stances on each side.

I'm on the side of not letting people suffer and rot in a cell. Either we help them be functional adults who can contribute to society and course correct, or give a humane painless death once their crime is proven beyond doubt and that crime is deserving of a death penalty.

Letting people rot in a cell for life, sounds inhumane to me.

This should also be something a prisoner should be able to decide for their life. Not some politician to garner some more votes for their election.

Unfortunately Newsom is a shitbird who thinks doing stuff like this could get him the Dem nomination, hes probably right. But he won't be president.

A wicked action by a wicked man.