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Thread for conceding you’ve been wrong about something.

gandalfe said:
The Death Penalty Information Center (admitted not an unbiased source) has found that at least 190 people have been wrongly sentenced to death since 1973. Of those, some have been exonerated prior to execution, but they list 20 who were executed who had, at least, strong reasons to suspect they were innocent. How many innocent people should be executed before we stop?

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Yes to me that is the best argument against the death penalty, for sure. What is the old phrase, I would rather see 1000 guilty men go free than to have one innocent man condemned, or something like that. I can see that argument for sure.
 
LogGrad98 said:
Yes to me that is the best argument against the death penalty, for sure. What is the old phrase, I would rather see 1000 guilty men go free than to have one innocent man condemned, or something like that. I can see that argument for sure.
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Fun fact, when I was in high school I wrote a short story titled "100 Guilty Men" which was about a low IQ convenience store employee who was accused of murder after one of the neighborhood teens was found dead next to the dumpster. The employee had befriended the group of teens this kid was part of and even allowed them to buy beer a few times. The story has three parts, the interrogation, the trial and finally the execution. I wanted to avoid racial issues in my story so that is never mentioned.

No one ever understood my story title. Like no one ever. It was very frustrating.

I used it as my entry for the Young Writers @ Work scholarship and I got the "scholarship" for their weekend conference. They gave out 60 of these scholarships and I was the only person who submitted an actual short story. Everyone else submitted collections of poetry.

Benjamin Franklin stated it as: "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".
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Douchebag K said:
Reading the political and social threads here is so depressing. Almost every single person as a reflex sees issues from their “side”. Pretty much the only person I see who reasonably regularly concedes points from someone who he would generally oppose is One Brow. Otherwise it’s such bitter division and polarisation.

So … who can post something political or social that they have changed their mind about, or agree on something that someone from the opposite wing of politics or the social spectrum has said. Let’s hear something others than “we’re good, they’re bad” …. ???
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I used to be a hardcore Objectivist style Libertarian. If the site crash of 2010 hadn't happened there would be hundreds of posts by me espousing my libertarian beliefs.

It was largely conversations I had here, most specifically with @One Brow , that my outlook changed.
 
gandalfe said:
The Death Penalty Information Center (admitted not an unbiased source) has found that at least 190 people have been wrongly sentenced to death since 1973. Of those, some have been exonerated prior to execution, but they list 20 who were executed who had, at least, strong reasons to suspect they were innocent. How many innocent people should be executed before we stop?

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Somewhat simple solution to that. Execute the ones that there is literally no doubt about. Dahmer. Bundy. Manson.
I mean if a dude kills his whole family, is arrested with their blood all over them and the murder weapon in hand and shows zero remorse and says *I'm glad I killed them and would kill then again if I could" then I think it's ok to execute that person.

If they were convicted in more circumstantial evidence then give em life and allow all the appeals to prove their innocence.
 
Since we're talking about it, I only support the death penalty for people who kill while they are in prison, though I'm not opposed to a total ban.
 
fishonjazz said:
Somewhat simple solution to that. Execute the ones that there is literally no doubt about. Dahmer. Bundy. Manson.
I mean if a dude kills his whole family, is arrested with their blood all over them and the murder weapon in hand and shows zero remorse and says *I'm glad I killed them and would kill then again if I could" then I think it's ok to execute that person.

If they were convicted in more circumstantial evidence then give em life and allow all the appeals to prove their innocence.
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The only issue there is there will always be some kind of judgment call for a certain percentage. And still the possibility we occasionally get it wrong, on both sides of the equation. But I could see someone like this at least minimizing incorrect executions.
 
Back in the 50 years of my conservative days, I believed the death penalty was appropriate. Now that I've moved more toward liberal thought, I am against it in almost all cases.

For starters, it is not carried out in a humane way. And it costs the taxpayers more to have people on death row. And as has been pointed out, it doesn't have a perfect accuracy rate.

However, there are certain people like Charles Manson and the Lafferty brothers, people who have convinced others to kill for them, who should not be mingling in general prison populations.

So I believe in an Isolation Row for certain individuals, with life in prison with no possibility of parole and without the endless appeal process.

And yet, I don't stay awake at night feeling sorry that Bundy and Gacy and McVeigh are dead. It's complicated.
 
LogGrad98 said:
The only issue there is there will always be some kind of judgment call for a certain percentage. And still the possibility we occasionally get it wrong, on both sides of the equation. But I could see someone like this at least minimizing incorrect executions.
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Dont have it be a judgement call. Execute if there is no possible way we got it wrong. Again, bundy, dahmer, manson. No way we could be wrong on those dudes. If someone kidnaps a woman and murders her on video in his basement with him in the video doing the murdering then there is no way to get that wrong.

There are instances where we 100% guranteed know we got the right person. No judgement calls
 
Probably not the best thread for this, but I'd really like to hear everyone's opinion on this...

www.rollingstone.com

Sharon Tate's Sister Criticizes Leslie Van Houten's Prison Release

The sister of Sharon Tate criticized the prison release of Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten for the first time in a new interview.
www.rollingstone.com

Should she have been released? Is it fair, since she served her time? Is it fair to the victims? Is it just simply better because it costs taxpayers a lot of money to keep someone incarcerated long-term? Those were just a few things I thought about. Thoughts?
 
LogGrad98 said:
Probably not the best thread for this, but I'd really like to hear everyone's opinion on this...

www.rollingstone.com

Sharon Tate's Sister Criticizes Leslie Van Houten's Prison Release

The sister of Sharon Tate criticized the prison release of Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten for the first time in a new interview.
www.rollingstone.com

Should she have been released? Is it fair, since she served her time? Is it fair to the victims? Is it just simply better because it costs taxpayers a lot of money to keep someone incarcerated long-term? Those were just a few things I thought about. Thoughts?
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So, again, there are 4 main reasons to imprison someone who has been convicted of a crime - deterrence, protection, rehabilitation, and punishment. In this case, it's obviously not a deterrent - I don't think people are not becoming mass-murdering cultists because they look at the Manson Family and say, "Wow, I don't want to go to prison." I don't feel like she, at 73 years old, is a danger herself, although there is a slim possibility that she could inspire a cult of her own. She has met any reasonable definition of being rehabilitated - she's earned a bachelor's and master's degrees while incarcerated, and has generally made the right noises about guilt and such. So, punishment... Is that in and of itself enough reason to keep her in?
 
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gandalfe said:
The death penalty. I used to think that there were cases where it was appropriate and justified - maybe it was overused, but still there were times when it was the right thing for society to do. In debates, however, I came to realize more and more that I could not justify that position. It doesn't serve as a deterrant, and there's obviously no rehabilitative aspect to it, so that only leaves punishment, eye-for-an-eye style, and that's just barbaric. Couple that with the knowledge that we have actually put to death people who have been exonerated afterwards, or even during the process, but the legal system has failed to consider it, and I can no longer think that it's right under any circumstance.
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Also, the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment. The cost for appeals and all that is more than to just imprison the person for life.
 
gandalfe said:
The Death Penalty Information Center (admitted not an unbiased source) has found that at least 190 people have been wrongly sentenced to death since 1973. Of those, some have been exonerated prior to execution, but they list 20 who were executed who had, at least, strong reasons to suspect they were innocent. How many innocent people should be executed before we stop?

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Lots of innocent people in prison too. Should we stop all incarceration?
 
gandalfe said:
Let me ask again: How many innocent people should be executed before we stop?
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Like I said, I think we should just execute the guilty ones.
 
gandalfe said:
But we don't. So how many innocent people should be executed before we stop? Is 1,000,000 too many?
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I'm ready stop executing innocent people right now. I think we should only execute guilty ones.
 
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