LeRoy_Was_Here
Senator
Yup. Arte Johnson was hilarious. I seem to frequently find myself using the Arte Johnson signature line, when conversing with Republicans...
Wrong Man Executed...
- Thread starter Craig
- Start date
LeRoy_Was_Here
Senator
Nearly nil, huh? It didn't help that fellow in Texas.
But carry on with your delusions. If they make you feel better.
But carry on with your delusions. If they make you feel better.
ya-ta-hey
Mayor
But we're in a thread discussing a reality, not a small possibility. The Innocence Project continues to find cases such as this which violate the systems of appeals...or even fair trials.
The answer is glaringly obvious...stop the death penalty.
LeRoy_Was_Here
Senator
Never even broken a speeding limit? Never jaywalked? Never made a turn without a turn signal? Never driven with a broken headlight? Never gone without wearing your seat belt?
Sheesh. Next you'll be telling us your mother was the Virgin Mary.
Sheesh. Next you'll be telling us your mother was the Virgin Mary.
ya-ta-hey
Mayor
Mr. Leroy,
You mean the fellow who was given a fair trial, and a jury of his peers who actually sat through the case and actually saw the evidence first hand found him guilty, and then sentenced him to death, and the same fellow who went through numerous appeals and all the appeals courts who heard the evidence, and didn't just read a summery for a biased source, upheld the conviction?
Is that they guy you are talking about?
ya-ta-hey
Mayor
Mr. Leroy,
Those are infractions, not law. See, you are trying to make a dishonest correlation between regulation and criminal law.
LeRoy_Was_Here
Senator
I see. So your problem is that you simply didn't bother to read the top post. Well, OK. I'll repeat it for you, here, simply to save you from the inconvenience of having to page back to page one:
He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.
Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.
Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.
DeLuna, 27, was put to death after "a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure," Liebman said.
The report's authors found "numerous missteps, missed clues and missed opportunities that let authorities prosecute Carlos DeLuna for the crime of murder, despite evidence not only that he did not commit the crime but that another individual, Carlos Hernandez, did," the 780-page investigation found.
He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.
Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.
Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.
DeLuna, 27, was put to death after "a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure," Liebman said.
The report's authors found "numerous missteps, missed clues and missed opportunities that let authorities prosecute Carlos DeLuna for the crime of murder, despite evidence not only that he did not commit the crime but that another individual, Carlos Hernandez, did," the 780-page investigation found.
Ginnie
Council Member
Why would you bother bringing facts to a discussion with someone who won't be honest in the discussion? Dishonesty makes the entire discussion moot. No matter how many facts you bring, they will be ignored and dismissed if the person in the discussion with you refuses to be honest.
ya-ta-hey
Mayor
Mr. Craig,
so you have no problem with murderers continuing to murder and exploit people? I mean for every one of those "innocents" you say was wrongly executed, I can come up with tens, if not hundreds of murders who should have been put to death, but instead, continued their killing after they were taken off of death row.
Oh, right, you consider convicts as less than human, and if they are killed or exploited, it's their own fault.
Arkady
President
Certainly the irreversibility of a mistake is a huge mark against the death penalty, relative to the alternative (life in prison without parole). But I could handle that as an "acceptable risk" if there were something weightier in its favor. For example, picture if most criminologists believed that the death penalty were an additional deterrent against crime, above the alternative of life in prison without parole. Let's say your typical criminologist projects that there will be 100 murders if we execute 50 murderers, but 150 murders if we merely sentence them to life in prison without possibility of parole. That would be 50 lives saved in exchange for 50 lives taken, and, even with the risk of false convictions, it seems reasonable to assume that the 50 people executed have, on average, less "right to life" than the 50 people saved by the existence of a death penalty. If those were the facts, I could be a death penalty supporter. But, instead, most criminologists believe there isn't an incremental increase in deterrence from the death penalty.
A person who commits the kind of crime that makes life in prison without parole the sentence in non-death-penalty states and countries didn't make that decision because he assessed the sentence and deemed it one worth paying. He did it either because he didn't think about the sentence at all ("heat of the moment") or because he thought he wouldn't be caught. If the death sentence had existed in the place where he committed the crime, he'd have been exactly as likely to commit the crime.
Have you ever looked at the way the Passer Rating (QB rating) is calculated in the NFL? The formula is done in a way that there are several different factors, and you can maximize or minimize a particular factor, such that better or worse performance in that factor no longer draws the rating up or down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passer_rating
So, for example, if you've already thrown enough touchdowns per attempt to maximize the TD/ATT factor in the rating, you can throw ten more touchdowns in a row and not increase that factor one more bit. The only way to push the Passer rating up further is by focusing on some other factor (like interception percent).
I mention this because I think that's how people's minds work when it comes to the sentences for crimes. At some point a particular factor in their mental calculus is "maxed out," and increasing it even more doesn't change the outcome of the formula. Obviously, increasing the severity of a sentence from something fairly mild (a week in jail) to something very severe (20 years in jail) makes a huge difference. But at some point it's only registering as "100% unacceptable" and further increases won't matter... the person is only going to commit the crime because he is thinking about the sentence at all (heat of passion), or because he thinks he'll get away with it. The only way to deter a person more, once you reach that point, is by working on other factors (e.g., the apparent likelihood of the person being caught, or the likely benefit to the person if he gets away with it, or the desirability of competing alternatives). Life in prison without parole is "100% unacceptable" as a sentence -- people only commit crimes that have that sentence because they aren't thinking about the consequence or they think they'll get away with it, and further increasing the severity of the punishment to death won't change the analysis for them.
That's all just my own theory about how the psychology works that results in the death penalty not being an incremental deterrent over a life sentence. But the fact it isn't an incremental deterrent is pretty widely accepted among criminologists, and it's supported by all sorts of statistical analysis. When you compare death-penalty states and countries to non-death-penalty states and countries you just don't see the data fingerprints that would be predicted if having the death penalty acted as a further deterrence to crime, above what you get with life sentences. And when you look what happens to crime in a particular place when the death penalty is instituted (using comparable places that don't implement it as controls), you don't see a change. It's simply not factoring into the potential criminal's decision-making, at least any more strongly than the life sentence would already have factored in.
It's that analysis that leads me to oppose the death sentence. If it's not deterrence, it's just revenge. It's just killing for the catharsis of killing. And even if it weren't for the very real risk of false convictions (which, essentially, are state homicides), I couldn't support that. I can approve of taking human lives to save human lives, but not merely to vent anger.
A person who commits the kind of crime that makes life in prison without parole the sentence in non-death-penalty states and countries didn't make that decision because he assessed the sentence and deemed it one worth paying. He did it either because he didn't think about the sentence at all ("heat of the moment") or because he thought he wouldn't be caught. If the death sentence had existed in the place where he committed the crime, he'd have been exactly as likely to commit the crime.
Have you ever looked at the way the Passer Rating (QB rating) is calculated in the NFL? The formula is done in a way that there are several different factors, and you can maximize or minimize a particular factor, such that better or worse performance in that factor no longer draws the rating up or down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passer_rating
So, for example, if you've already thrown enough touchdowns per attempt to maximize the TD/ATT factor in the rating, you can throw ten more touchdowns in a row and not increase that factor one more bit. The only way to push the Passer rating up further is by focusing on some other factor (like interception percent).
I mention this because I think that's how people's minds work when it comes to the sentences for crimes. At some point a particular factor in their mental calculus is "maxed out," and increasing it even more doesn't change the outcome of the formula. Obviously, increasing the severity of a sentence from something fairly mild (a week in jail) to something very severe (20 years in jail) makes a huge difference. But at some point it's only registering as "100% unacceptable" and further increases won't matter... the person is only going to commit the crime because he is thinking about the sentence at all (heat of passion), or because he thinks he'll get away with it. The only way to deter a person more, once you reach that point, is by working on other factors (e.g., the apparent likelihood of the person being caught, or the likely benefit to the person if he gets away with it, or the desirability of competing alternatives). Life in prison without parole is "100% unacceptable" as a sentence -- people only commit crimes that have that sentence because they aren't thinking about the consequence or they think they'll get away with it, and further increasing the severity of the punishment to death won't change the analysis for them.
That's all just my own theory about how the psychology works that results in the death penalty not being an incremental deterrent over a life sentence. But the fact it isn't an incremental deterrent is pretty widely accepted among criminologists, and it's supported by all sorts of statistical analysis. When you compare death-penalty states and countries to non-death-penalty states and countries you just don't see the data fingerprints that would be predicted if having the death penalty acted as a further deterrence to crime, above what you get with life sentences. And when you look what happens to crime in a particular place when the death penalty is instituted (using comparable places that don't implement it as controls), you don't see a change. It's simply not factoring into the potential criminal's decision-making, at least any more strongly than the life sentence would already have factored in.
It's that analysis that leads me to oppose the death sentence. If it's not deterrence, it's just revenge. It's just killing for the catharsis of killing. And even if it weren't for the very real risk of false convictions (which, essentially, are state homicides), I couldn't support that. I can approve of taking human lives to save human lives, but not merely to vent anger.
Yuri Zhivago
Mayor
Hi, Uncle Joe, I understand your saying that "when forest is cleared some healthy trees can be cut too", that the way Uncle Joe's country operated for many decades.
So how did you manage to penetrate into USA with your hangman's philosophy ?
ya-ta-hey
Mayor
Mr. Leroy,
May I recommend Covey's seven habits, specifically, #5, "seek first to understand, then to be understood."
If your weren't so concerned about presenting your counter argument, and actually read where I said "instead of a highly biased account from an interest group," you wouldn't have wasted all that time re-writing the same highly biased account.
First of all...it's incredibly arrogant of you to make a comment like this: Oh, right, you consider convicts as less than human, and if they are killed or exploited, it's their own fault.
And..it's bullshit. You really have no idea of what I think other than what you read here...and, as we've never had such a discussion, you're fabricating nonsense. I consider convicts convicts. They are humans imprisoned by our system. They are not a monolithic block.
And the rest of your post is nearly as bad. I'm talking about people wrongly executed...not people who were acquitted by the very same justice system you just lauded. Were those murderers released, then they were released by "thoughtful jurors"...after a long and careful trial. So you say when a wrongly executed man turns up.
But...yes...I find it better to release a murderer than kill an innocent man. It is the greatest misuse of state power imaginable.
GordonGecko
President
Has yah-teh even admitted that he thinks executing innocent people...is "bad" or "wrong"??? Did I miss it?
Hasn't crossed my path...
