State-Sponsored Horror in Oklahoma

May 1, 2014 9:08 AM

At 6:36 p.m. on Tuesday in McAlester, Okla., Clayton Lockett started kicking his leg, then twitching, then writhing and moaning in agony, and everyone watching knew something had gone terribly wrong. Mr. Lockett, a convicted murderer, was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, about to be executed by lethal injection, but the untested combination of a sedative and a paralyzing agent had failed.

Clayton Lockett writhed and groaned. After 43 minutes, he was declared dead

Then, in a gesture that seemed to echo Oklahoma’s fierce commitment to secrecy in the way it carries out lethal injections, the curtains were drawn over the execution chamber, obscuring the gruesome spectacle from public view. Officials picked up prison phones and left the room.

After a few minutes, the corrections department director, Robert Patton, came to the viewing room. "We’ve had a vein failure in which the chemicals did not make it into the offender," he told the assembled group, which included lawyers for the condemned prisoner, as well as 12 journalists.

Lethal Injection Is a Terrible Way To Kill People

Experts had been watching the proceedings closely because Oklahoma planned to use a combination of drugs that has only been used once before in an execution, in Florida this year. In 2011, international pharmaceutical companies either stopped making or refused to sell prisons the drugs that had long been used in lethal injections, creating a shortage in death-penalty states. These states have sought a variety of dubious ways to address the shortage, including illegally importing the old drugs or trying out new but slower-acting drugs, as they did on Lockett.

When it was first used in Florida, midzolam—one of the new drugs used on Lockett—was given at a dose five times higher than what Oklahoma said it would use. As it turned out, though, the bungled execution may have had little to do with the drug protocol and a lot to do with a pretty common problem in lethal injection. According to Austin Sarat, an Amherst college professor and author of the timely new book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, lethal injection is more prone to these sorts of debacles than any other form of execution used in the US since the late 19th century. His data show as many as 7 percent of lethal injection executions go awry, and often for the same reasons why Lockett suffered so much: The veins of death row inmates can't handle the needles.

Why Oklahoma tried to execute a man with a secret, untested mix of chemicals

State governments that wanted to continue using lethal injections were left with few options. Some imported sodium thiopental illegally from Europe, but federal and European officials appear to have shut down those trades. Some tried importing them from other exporters, but there is not a lot of overlap between countries that produce complex anesthetics and countries that retain the death penalty. One of the few, India, sold a few batches to South Dakota and Nebraska before Indian officials banned the sales.

That left capital punishment states with two final options: they could mix legally available drugs themselves, creating their own ad hoc lethal injections, or they could pay compounding pharmacies to do it for them (compounding pharmacies combine or mix custom drugs, and face little government regulation for small-batch jobs). In effect, they wanted to make up new lethal injection cocktails. But without a way to do rigorous testing before using the drugs, the execution room effectively became the test lab; death row inmates were also lab rats.

Why There Weren’t Any Doctors To Prevent Oklahoma’s Botched Execution

A botched execution in Oklahoma on Tuesday night left a death row inmate writhing, clenching his teeth, and calling out in apparent pain. Clayton Lockett ended up dying of a massive heart attack more than 40 minutes after he received what was supposed to be a lethal injection of drugs to kill him quickly and painlessly. It’s not yet clear exactly what went wrong, but there’s some evidence that the needle was inserted incorrectly.

How is that possible? Because it probably wasn’t done by a medical professional familiar with doing injections.

According to Oklahoma state law, a physician must be present at executions to examine the condemned inmate and officially pronounce them dead. But they don’t do the injections themselves. The American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Board of Anesthesiology, and the American Nurses Association all prohibit their members from assisting in executions, saying that practice violates their medical code of ethics. So the IV is usually administered by another state official who’s not necessarily an expert in anesthesiology, often an EMT.

It’s not entirely clear how this played out in Oklahoma last night. Although the New York Times reported that the doctor in the room administered the drugs to Clayton Lockett, an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution later confirmed the state appeared to be following protocol and using a different individual to insert the IV.

posted by tonycpsu (310 comments total)

I don't understand the complexity. Put to sleep with morphine (pills and/or IV) and then cyanide.
posted by stbalbach at 9:17 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

As a nation that is so good at killing people, we are surprisingly bad at killing people.
posted by dudemanlives at 9:17 AM on May 1, 2014 [47 favorites]

This is a national disgrace. And what's worse is that anyone (including the courts in Oklahoma) knew that it could happen like this, and was likely to.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:19 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

John Paul Stevens is right: The death penalty is unconstitutional
posted by tonycpsu at 9:19 AM on May 1, 2014 [16 favorites]

I'm really stuck trying to wrap my head around the fact that I live in a country where we have an actual debate over whether it's wrong and should be illegal to torture people to death.
posted by crayz at 9:19 AM on May 1, 2014 [28 favorites]

.

Nobody deserves to die like this.
posted by schmod at 9:20 AM on May 1, 2014 [11 favorites]

Better than living in a country where people regularly are tortured to death, regardless of its legality.
posted by Melismata at 9:21 AM on May 1, 2014

Melismata: Better than living in a country where people regularly are tortured to death, regardless of its legality.

Yes, because those are the only two choices.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [96 favorites]

The state goes through these absurd acrobatics to take all the bloodshed out of executions in order to make it look moderately civilized. The crapshoot on unproven drugs serves a dual purpose: keep the clinical veneer going and maybe make the condemned suffer on the way out.
posted by dr_dank at 9:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Better than living in a country where people regularly are tortured to death, regardless of its legality.

I mean, at the moment, it kind of seems like we have both.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 9:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [39 favorites]

Better than living in a country where people regularly are tortured to death, regardless of its legality.

Yeah at least he doesn't live in Cuba. Have you heard what happens to people in their "guantanamo" prison?
posted by Poldo at 9:23 AM on May 1, 2014 [30 favorites]

The most humane way to execute somebody would be sudden destruction of the brain, but that's messy, so we go for the option that looks painless and doesn't traumatize the executioner and peanut gallery so much.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:26 AM on May 1, 2014 [19 favorites]

I'm sure there were folks in there who thought things went horribly right.
posted by Renoroc at 9:26 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The Guardian: US death row study: 4% of defendants sentenced to die are innocent

The study, published in a prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not solve perhaps the greatest single riddle of the death penalty: how many innocent people have actually been put to death in modern times. That remains a haunting unknown.

But Gross is clear that such final and irreparable injustices have occured.

“If you look at the numbers in our study, at how many errors are made, then you cannot believe that we haven’t executed any innocent person – that would be wishful thinking.”

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which supplied some of the data on which the study depends, said “every time we have an execution, there is a risk of executing an innocent person. The risk may be small, but it’s unacceptable”.

The ballpark figure of at least 4.1% innocence is higher than previous studies looking at exoneration rates that had smaller sample sizes and were more restricted in their remit. It is also considerably higher than the estimate given in 2007 by the conservative US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote that American criminal convictions generally had an “error rate of .027% – or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973%”.

The authors comment tartly with respect to Scalia’s skills as a statistician: “That would be comforting, if true. In fact, the claim is silly.”

The single largest group of innocent death row inmates are neither exonerated and released nor executed, the study suggests. Rather, they are left in limbo, somewhere in between those two extremes of fortune.

Gross and his co-authors estimate that 36% of all those sentenced to death between 1973 and 2004 – some 2,675 people – were taken off death row after doubts about their convictions were raised. But they were then put on new sentences, usually life without parole, that mean they will almost certainly die in prison.

posted by zombieflanders at 9:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

Previously.
posted by Lemurrhea at 9:28 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nobody deserves to die like this.

I don't agree with that, but I do believe that the state should never do this. The death penalty just cannot be administered in a just way. It's impossible.
posted by spaltavian at 9:29 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

I'm sure there were folks in there who thought things went horribly right.

Never, ever, ever, EVER read The Daily Mail's comment section. The callous disregard for human suffering beggars belief.
posted by Talez at 9:30 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

This is horrible, and I am very much against the death penalty. But what scares me more than states botching executions is states botching executions despite the fact that their supreme court stayed the execution. This is one for the text books. Why aren't people calling for the resignation of this Governor? CEOs lose their jobs for being racist or homophobic; how can law-breaking, inmate murdering, judiciary intimidating Governors and Legislators keep their jobs?
posted by jeffamaphone at 9:32 AM on May 1, 2014 [27 favorites]

Why aren't people calling for the resignation of this Governor? CEOs lose their jobs for being racist or homophobic; how can Law-breaking, inmate murdering, judiciary intimidating Governors and Legislators keep their jobs?

Well, she's also homophobic, and her daughter is a racist, so she's at least got a trifecta going on.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:36 AM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

how can law-breaking, inmate murdering, judiciary intimidating Governors and Legislators keep their jobs?

People like the death penalty. Places that have abolished the death penalty have not done so because of popular opinion, they have done so despite popular opinion.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:36 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Public schools: Government can't do anything right
Health insurance exchanges: Government can't do anything right
Drug safety regulation: Government can't do anything right
Welfare system: Government can't do anything right

Decide who we kill and how: Government will have a 0% error rate
posted by 0xFCAF at 9:37 AM on May 1, 2014 [151 favorites]

Unfortunately the court situation is not as clear-cut as it sounds. The Oklahoma Supreme Court only hears civil cases; criminal appeals are decided by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. The argument was not "shut up, we like killing people," but "the Supreme Court is injecting itself in a case where it has no jurisdiction, and also we like killing people."
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:38 AM on May 1, 2014

I also disagree with this statement. For some people--and if the executed was guilty, he is one of them--for whom this is a just death.

Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.

posted by Talez at 9:39 AM on May 1, 2014 [56 favorites]

It gets worse - not only did Fallin do an imitation of Andy Jackson, she was followed up by the OK legislature cowing the OKSC into reversing the stay by threatening the justices with impeachment.

Lockett wasn't the only one to die in that room - so did the rule of law in OK.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:40 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Nitrogen asphyxiation would be the most humane method, since the condemned not only wouldn't feel pain, they wouldn't feel any symptoms whatsoever (this lack of any warning is why nitrogen is responsible for more accidental deaths than any other industrial gas). One minute they're awake, the next they're asleep, and the next they're dead- without noticing a thing. All the pigs have to do is remember to shut the door- there's no rare or expensive chemicals involved, no doctor necessary, and at the end the nitrogen can be harmlessly vented to the outside air.

We've known this for decades and it's considered the ethical way to kill chickens, but we don't kill people with it because it removes all uncertainty. Much like loading blanks in one rifle lets each member of the firing squad believe whatever they choose to believe, the chair and the injection allow voters to believe whatever they want- some people get to fantasize that the process is more often humane than not; and other people get to fantasize that maybe everyone suffers.
posted by Hiding From Goro at 9:41 AM on May 1, 2014 [25 favorites]

Decide who we kill and how: Government will have a 0% error rate


You forgot:

Execution: 0.027% is an acceptable rate of innocents that can die.
Voting: 0.00002% voter fraud?! Time to destroy the VRA!
posted by zombieflanders at 9:42 AM on May 1, 2014 [58 favorites]

At the risk of lawyerly hair splitting, I can't figure my way past the idea that, while a criminal may deserve such a fate, it's a separate moral question whether the state is entitled to inflict that fate on him.

And in any event, execution should at the very least be reserved for cases where guilt is beyond question. McVeigh, for instance.
posted by Flexagon at 9:42 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Never, ever, ever, EVER read The Daily Mail's comment section. The callous disregard for human suffering beggars belief.

Is that any different from the articles?
posted by biffa at 9:44 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

At the risk of lawyerly hair splitting, I can't figure my way past the idea that, while a criminal may deserve such a fate, it's a separate moral question whether the state is entitled to inflict that fate on him.

Because one would assume that polite society has a little more decency than a murderer? Or are we to act just as bad as them when inflicting their fate?
posted by Talez at 9:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Serious question...Is there a difference between the chemicals normally used in an execution and the chemicals my vet used to euthanize my dog? I mean, my vet used a surprisingly tiny amount of whatever it was, and my dog was gone in mere seconds.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

If one single innocent person has ever been executed, that should be all the evidence ever required to end the death penalty.

As it happens there are plenty more than one.
posted by greenish at 9:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

Talez

Reductio ad Tolkien much?

But hey, you might be right; Clayton Lockett might have had a crucial role to play in casting the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. And now we'll never know.
posted by The Confessor at 9:46 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Only one of my right-wing "friends" on Facebook has posted about this so far, but I'm sure there will be more. Here's a couple of actual comments:

Based on the heinous crime, I'd say justice was well served

I wonder if his this guy victims where uncomfortable, and thrashed around a little before they died, or if they felt sheer terror? It seems like got a better death than his victims

A LOT of people in this country apparently are stark raving mad, and think this kind of thing is not just abhorrent, but actually a Good Thing.
posted by Curious Artificer at 9:47 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

Serious question...Is there a difference between the chemicals normally used in an execution and the chemicals my vet used to euthanize my dog? I mean, my vet used a surprisingly tiny amount of whatever it was, and my dog was gone in mere seconds.

The European manufacturers of the same drug stopped allowing US wholesalers to sell those same drugs to states to conduct executions.
posted by Talez at 9:47 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Serious question...Is there a difference between the chemicals normally used in an execution and the chemicals my vet used to euthanize my dog? I mean, my vet used a surprisingly tiny amount of whatever it was, and my dog was gone in mere seconds.

Yes, actually. The people who make chemicals used to euthanize animals won't sell them to state correctional departments, because they don't want the bad PR of making execution drugs. That's why the pharmacy that screwed this up is (literally) a state secret - the presumption is that if anybody found out who they were, they'd be picketed and boycotted and whatnot into giving up the contract.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:48 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

This whole thing has been completely insane, and ought to be a disaster for Oklahoma.

...but it won't be.
posted by aramaic at 9:48 AM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

Talez, did you read the rest of the young rope-rider's comment?
posted by spaltavian at 9:52 AM on May 1, 2014

I'd be opposed to the death penalty even if it was proven to be 100% effective and not just a tool of terror.

Hell, I'm even opposed to LWOP.
posted by Talez at 9:54 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

execution should at the very least be reserved for cases where guilt is beyond question. McVeigh, for instance.

How on earth is McVeigh's guilt "beyond question"?
He was convicted using the same tools as everyone else in the USA.
Was there something special about the McVeigh case I missed?

Guilt is pretty much only "beyond question" in the mind of the perpetrator.
posted by fullerine at 9:59 AM on May 1, 2014

What do you mean by 100% effective? Only used on people who are truly guilty?

Correct.
posted by Talez at 10:00 AM on May 1, 2014

This is terrible and shameful.
posted by rtha at 10:01 AM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

I'd be opposed to the death penalty even if it was proven to be 100% effective and not just a tool of terror.

It isn't even an effective tool of terror. Murder rates don't respond much to the addition or removal of capital punishment from a jurisdiction.
posted by jaduncan at 10:02 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

The thing that chills me is the thought I can't shake - that when the prison closed the blinds so witnesses couldn't see into the execution chamber, it was because they wanted to hide the fact that the next thing they did was get a big pillow or a rope or something so they could suffocate the guy by force.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:07 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'd be opposed to the death penalty even if it was proven to be 100% effective and not just a tool of terror.

Hell, I'm even opposed to LWOP.

Max Ehrenfreund: There’s still no evidence that executions deter criminals

[Columbia Law School's Jeffrey] Fagan and two collaborators recently compared murder rates in Hong Kong, where capital punishment was abolished in 1993, and Singapore, where a death sentence is mandatory for murder and other crimes and is typically administered within a year and a half. The researchers found little difference between the two Asian metropolises.

Another study compared the amount of violence in U.S. states with and without the death penalty and also failed to find a deterrent effect.

These studies do not prove that capital punishment does not deter criminals. There might be an effect that is invisible in these graphs because, for example, it is too small.

Given the uncertainty about the death penalty's effect on crime, it's important to ask whether there is a deterrent effect of sentences of life without parole. After all, no one argues that those who are guilty of murder should go completely unpunished. Unfortunately, that is a question that researchers haven't been able to examine due to a lack of comprehensive data.

Still, there are reasons to doubt that criminals would change their behavior to avoid the risk of execution. Killers might not be in a state of mind to coolly evaluate their chances of being caught, tried and put to death, especially since appeals can continue for many years and only about half of those sentenced to death are eventually executed.

In fact, research suggests than criminals are mainly concerned about whether they'll be caught, not what might happen to them afterward.

"It’s the certainty of apprehension that’s been demonstrated consistently to be an effective deterrent, not the severity of the ensuing consequences," said Daniel Nagin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

posted by zombieflanders at 10:10 AM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

they wanted to hide the fact that the next thing they did was get a big pillow or a rope or something so they could suffocate the guy by force.

I can't help but think that would have been more humane than what he went through.
posted by DigDoug at 10:13 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

A LOT of people in this country apparently are stark raving mad, and think this kind of thing is not just abhorrent, but actually a Good Thing.

Because of the nature of Lockett's crime.

I find that conservatives only want to talk about what he did, while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.

What's "justice," in the case of his crime? To lock him up for life, is that a just response to raping a woman, shooting her twice and then burying her while she was still alive?

Is life imprisonment an equitable response, an equitable penalty?

Particularly if you're the victim's family - is it justice? Or can there be no justice for the family? Should those who knew and loved the dead woman simply say, well, the person who did this will never know the terror that my daughter/friend knew. However long they spent in prison, their penalty will never be as harsh as the one they imposed on my child, my friend, etc. But, c'est la vie, I guess I'll just have to get over it.

That's not a call for an eye-for-an-eye. We do and ought to prohibit cruel and unusual punishments, and Lockett's death certainly was that. But this is the core rationale behind continued support for the death penalty. And when we hover at 50,000 feet and see only society's crime while saying, in effect - it doesn't matter what the accused did - a good chunk of America thinks about it and responds - Well yeah. It does.
posted by kgasmart at 10:14 AM on May 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

While we're harshing on the US corrections regime, let's have a big hand for the practice of solitary confinement -- beyond due process! 100% out of public view! 100% discretionary! Proven psychological damage! It's nearly the perfect vengeance.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 10:14 AM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

Hell, I'm even opposed to LWOP.

I can't say that I'd go that far. If you (like this man did) murder a girl by burying her alive? Or someone like McVeigh, who knowingly put a bomb under a government building with a day care center? I don't see why those people should ever see the free light of day.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:14 AM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

I think the counter-argument to the main linked piece -- as demonstrated in the comments over there -- probably runs something along the lines of:

"Good. They deserve it."

So I suspect that if movement is going to be made on this issue in more conservative parts of the country, then a different argument will have to be made. An argument like "it's really, really painful" just won't hold water. Response: "Yeah, well that guy's a completely horrible piece of shit, or else he wouldn't be on death row."
posted by chasing at 10:15 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Is life imprisonment an equitable response, an equitable penalty?

Is death? Perhaps there is no equitable response to certain crimes...
posted by Juffo-Wup at 10:15 AM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

Particularly if you're the victim's family - is it justice? Or can there be no justice for the family?

Would torturing him to death be justice? Would raping him and burying him alive be justice? I don't see how. It's certainly vengeance, but it's not justice. There's no justice that's possible. The only thing society can do at that point is pick up the pieces and try not to work any more injustice.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:17 AM on May 1, 2014 [48 favorites]

while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant

so is the definition of "justice" doing something equally horrible to balance out the universe? for horrible crimes shouldn't we be torturing criminals instead of giving them a quick death?
posted by sineater at 10:17 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Or someone like McVeigh, who knowingly put a bomb under a government building with a day care center?

McVeigh knowingly put a bomb under a government building, and that government building had a day care center, but I think at least according to him he didn't know that the government building he knowingly put a bomb under had a day care center.

I am certainly not excusing McVeigh or minimizing what he did.
posted by Flunkie at 10:18 AM on May 1, 2014

I find that conservatives only want to talk about what he did, while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.

Where are all these liberals who don't want to talk about it? I'm pretty sure most articles do, in fact, talk about the crimes.

That's not a call for an eye-for-an-eye.

What? That's exactly what the hypothetical forms of "justice"--which as others have noted is actually vengance--you talk about are.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:20 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

There's no justice that's possible.

Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice. Best we're gonna do is lock the guy up. You'll have to find solace yourself, somehow.

And we wonder why people continue to support the death penalty?
posted by kgasmart at 10:20 AM on May 1, 2014

What's "justice," in the case of his crime? To lock him up for life, is that a just response to raping a woman, shooting her twice and then burying her while she was still alive?

It is, because the woman is not the only murder victim here; you also have to consider the innocent victims (usually of color) who are murdered by this system. When you look at the totality of the murder victims, the most just course of action is to lock him up for life, and thus you are punishing him and removing the threat he poses, while simultaneously saving the lives of innocent people that the execution machine routinely takes, by dismantling it and allowing for exoneration to no-longer happen on the wrong side of an execution.
posted by anonymisc at 10:21 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Particularly if you're the victim's family - is it justice? Or can there be no justice for the family? Should those who knew and loved the dead woman simply say, well, the person who did this will never know the terror that my daughter/friend knew. However long they spent in prison, their penalty will never be as harsh as the one they imposed on my child, my friend, etc. But, c'est la vie, I guess I'll just have to get over it.

I think we can all learn a lesson from the Amish on this one.

They explained that the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.

posted by Talez at 10:21 AM on May 1, 2014 [44 favorites]

kgasmart: Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice.

In fact, we, as a society, can't offer that "justice". Your appeals to emotion don't change that fact.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:21 AM on May 1, 2014 [46 favorites]

Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice. Best we're gonna do is lock the guy up. You'll have to find solace yourself, somehow.

You're confusing justice, for society, and revenge, for the individuals.
posted by Slackermagee at 10:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [28 favorites]

Is life imprisonment an equitable response, an equitable penalty?

Wrong question. How about:

Is it our responsibility to devise horrors to match the horrors inflicted by criminals?

And to go with that:

Do we not debase ourselves by seeking to emulate the most depraved among us?

And how about:

What is the obligation of society: to exact revenge? To promote public safety?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 10:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [53 favorites]

while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.

Yeah, because to me, it is. No one deserves the death penalty, no matter the crime, and therefore talking about the specifics of the crime is pointless. Acting unjustly towards someone who acted unjustly doesn't solve or fix shit.
posted by rtha at 10:23 AM on May 1, 2014 [27 favorites]

Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice.

Oh, c'mon. It's not "society's" place to offer one justice, nor is the lack of killing someone out of vengance a lack of justice.

And we wonder why people continue to support the death penalty?

60% of Americans have had their loved ones murdered?
posted by zombieflanders at 10:24 AM on May 1, 2014

Is there any reason we can't use inert gases, I mean, if we're going to execute people, shouldn't that be the way to do it?
posted by symbioid at 10:24 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Your appeals to emotion don't change that fact.

And you're seeing this from the vantage point of "society," rather than the individual.

I tend to think the family of someone who's been murdered is going to be a little emotional. Don't you? Ah, but you have the moral authority to tell someone in that situation that they are being too emotional! That'd go over well.
posted by kgasmart at 10:24 AM on May 1, 2014

Of course the family of someone who's been murdered is going to be emotional. That's why they're not on the jury!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:26 AM on May 1, 2014 [39 favorites]

I tend to think the family of someone who's been murdered is going to be a little emotional. Don't you?

There are tons of these families who absolutely don't believe the death penalty is the right thing. What about them?

Ah, but you have the moral authority to tell someone in that situation that they are being too emotional! That'd go over well.

Oh, FFS.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:26 AM on May 1, 2014 [11 favorites]

And you're seeing this from the vantage point of "society," rather than the individual.

I tend to think the family of someone who's been murdered is going to be a little emotional. Don't you? Ah, but you have the moral authority to tell someone in that situation that they are being too emotional! That'd go over well..

I think we have the moral authority to tell them what we as a society will be doing. No one can tell them that they're feeling things that are inappropriate, but we can say "there are other considerations beyond your emotions and we will be basing policy in part on them." Your earlier argument was also premised on the idea that the death penalty is some how justice, not that it satisfies the emotions of the victim's family. I disagree that it's justice, but that's at least an argument for policy; their emotions just isn't.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [20 favorites]

Vengeance is a feel-good emotion. It's too bad that we live in a culture that arbitrarily views destructive emotions as just and logical and compassionate emotions as weak and foolish.
posted by Skwirl at 10:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [19 favorites]

Acting unjustly towards someone who acted unjustly doesn't solve or fix shit.

You're against war crimes trials, then, that would result in execution? "No one deserves the death penalty, no matter the crime."

That's an extreme example. But I ask again - what is justice? It's a given that our system does not deliver justice, if it did half of Wall Street would be in jail and drug laws would have been scrapped long ago. But if society should strive to deliver "justice" - what does that look like? Should the punishment fit the crime? Or should the punishment never fit the crime?
posted by kgasmart at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2014

And we wonder why people continue to support the death penalty?

I don't wonder. It's bloodlust.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

kgasmart, here is the response I typed out (but did not post) to the two people I quoted above on Facebook:

Oh, so what you're proposing is a sliding scale of punishment based on the heinousness of the crime supposed to have been committed. Well, that model certainly works well enough in Iraq and for the Taliban. For your run of the mill criminals, we'll just chop off their hands. For bigamists and fornicators we'll stone them in the marketplace and they may or may not die. For the truly heinous we'll make sure they die with a great deal of pain. Sorry, I just don't think that way is a civilized method either.
posted by Curious Artificer at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2014 [12 favorites]

kgasmart: I tend to think the family of someone who's been murdered is going to be a little emotional. Don't you? Ah, but you have the moral authority to tell someone in that situation that they are being too emotional! That'd go over well.

They can be as emotional as they want. I can sympathize for the families of victims while still denying that their desire for state-sanctioned revenge killings has any merit.

Also, if you want to play the emotional appeal game, people who are executed and later found to be innocent have families too.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2014 [41 favorites]

In my city the baseball games are on a radio station that has a political talk show at afternoon drive time. So I hear this guy three or four times a year when I am driving around and I don't know what time the baseball starts. One of his main bits is death penalty cheerleading; if there is an execution yesterday or one scheduled for later today or tomorrow he is gloating like his hometown team just won a big game.

There are a bunch of voters who seem to really like the death penalty. If they use a guillotine and do it on television in prime time they could get decent ratings I am sure.
posted by bukvich at 10:30 AM on May 1, 2014

I agree with Charlie Pierce. For me the most depressing thing about this is how many people think it is a good thing.

To answer some of the questions above, for a competent, experienced person with access to the right drugs killing someone is almost trivial. But for reasons discussed above and in the links, none of those conditions are present. Furthermore, they are trying to start an IV in a possibly uncooperative adult who may have difficult veins for any number of reasons and who may be resistant to the drugs being used due to prior drug abuse and it can become quite difficult to get it right.
posted by TedW at 10:31 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well, there's many things you can do with people to help alleviate their suffering to get over the need for vengeance or whatever.

People do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a social order. Our current social order in the US certainly promotes a vengeful status quo of punishment. This therefore promotes a psychology of vengeance, and it's hard to get past, but we can do it if we apply ourselves.

Just because someone feels upset because x, y, z doesn't mean you have to cater to their whims, that's the exact OPPOSITE of what JUSTICE is. Justice is a cool, impartial hand (or *should* be, we can debate whether it is), and it shouldn't be swayed by the whims of those who are the victims or the perpetrators of abuse, but should find the correct balance between the rights of an individual as HUMANS and the rights of victims as HUMANS.

Think of all the poor aggrieved victims in Europe who must be haunted by a lifetime of pain that would only be assuaged if they enabled the death penalty.

Funny, I don't hear a groundswell of support in Europe chanting for such retributive actions in capital cases.

I think we need to work on models that embrace forgiveness, understanding and learning to live with pain, while also making people understand that life in prison isn't an escape from death, it's a hell of it's own. If you believe in some divine punishment for these people, relax, then, they've got all eternity, a few more years of life in prison is nothing compared to hellfire. If you don't, then, well, there you go... (I just pascal wagered the death penalty!)
posted by symbioid at 10:31 AM on May 1, 2014 [14 favorites]

Why not try to get conservatives on board with judicial amputation? For crimes like assault that lead to permanent disability only, of course.

Call it "sub-capital punishment" and talk about how it's important to establish justice for the victim, how it's an important deterrent, how a guy with no hands is really unlikely to be able to commit another crime.
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2014

Also, if you want to play the emotional appeal game, people who are executed and later found to be innocent have families too.

Not to mention that the actual criminals in those cases escape justice.
posted by TedW at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2014 [12 favorites]

You're against war crimes trials, then, that would result in execution? "No one deserves the death penalty, no matter the crime."

Yes. I am and I imagine many if not most death penalty opponents are as well. The fact that the International Criminal Court doesn't have a death penalty tells me that this isn't a far fetched notion, either.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2014 [18 favorites]

But I ask again - what is justice? It's a given that our system does not deliver justice, if it did half of Wall Street would be in jail and drug laws would have been scrapped long ago. But if society should strive to deliver "justice" - what does that look like? Should the punishment fit the crime? Or should the punishment never fit the crime?

Following that line of logic, it's also given that the death penalty does not deliver justice, because if it did murders and rapes would have stopped a long ago. The idea that emotion should be the driver for our judicial system, rather than logic and evidence, is mind-boggling.

If you want to define "justice" so broadly as to be unworkable, that's your problem. This form of "justice" has done nothing to prevent injustice of it's kind from being repeated.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

But if society should strive to deliver "justice" - what does that look like? Should the punishment fit the crime? Or should the punishment never fit the crime?

That has changed over time. We used to do some pretty horrific things to people... stoning, burning, floggings, whippings, beheadings (with varying degrees of first-strike success), removal of limbs, hanging/drawing/quartering, etc. At some point we agreed that while the crimes that used to merit those punishments are still really bad things, we were above the hideous punishments we used to dole out for them. Our sense of "justice" is constantly evolving with our sense of civilization and morality. I can't possibly understand how you think a death penalty is an immutable requirement of civilization in this age, when plenty of countries have gotten rid of it already and thus far have not been overrun by mobs of angry victims/victims' families seeking vengeance.
posted by olinerd at 10:33 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

You're against war crimes trials, then, that would result in execution?

Yes. Were you hoping for a gotcha of some sort? Sorry. I do contain multitudes, but my feelings about this issue are pretty absolute.

Would you argue that the (many, many) countries that do not have the death penalty are therefore lacking in justice?
posted by rtha at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2014 [27 favorites]

I've never understood the charade here. How is any of this supposed to be any sort of improvement over a bullet to the head? Whether you you do or do not support the death penalty, what purpose does it serve to dress it up in this nonsense?
posted by tyllwin at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

If I'm not mistaken, this is the exact problem the guillotine was designed to solve.

If we can't accept the visuals of institutionally killing our prisoners with a guillotine, maybe we should think more about our reactions to killing prisoners in the first place.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2014 [23 favorites]

Sorry, I just don't think that way is a civilized method either.

Then I ask you: Should the punishment fit the crime?

Should society show more mercy than the perpetrators themselves showed? I believe it should. But how much mercy? Should we, as a society, say: The punishment will never fit the crime. You can commit the most heinous crime imaginable, but all we're going to do is lock you up. That's it. That's as far as we go. Whatever you do, we'll do no more in response. You may commit the ultimate crime, but you'll never pay the ultimate price.

I simply do not feel this looks like "justice" to the average American. But we've already stipulated elsewhere upthread that there can be no justice. And again, I tell you - a huge chunk of America thinks there could be and should be. And they aren't won over when you say "It doesn't matter what Lockett did." Yes, it does. You have to be willing to wallow in the details of his crime and then still say that - on the basis of his crime, it may be warranted that he pay the ultimate price. But that we, as a society, should not become that which we abhor, because monstrous things lie down that path.
posted by kgasmart at 10:35 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The problem being, prior to the guillotine's invention, cruder tools such as axes would be used. Sometimes the executioner would miss the neck, multiple hacks with the blade would be necessary, etc.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:36 AM on May 1, 2014

That's an extreme example. But I ask again - what is justice? It's a given that our system does not deliver justice, if it did half of Wall Street would be in jail and drug laws would have been scrapped long ago. But if society should strive to deliver "justice" - what does that look like? Should the punishment fit the crime? Or should the punishment never fit the crime?

I think you're asking the wrong question. What do you want from the criminal to forgive them? Are you looking for contrition or are you trying to just make them feel as bad as you. At least for a period of time?
posted by Talez at 10:36 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

when plenty of countries have gotten rid of it already and thus far have not been overrun by mobs of angry victims/victims' families seeking vengeance.

What's the murder rate in those countries? Without doing the research, I'm going to guess that virtually all of them have a lower murder rate than the good ol' U.S. of A.

In other words, murder is more of an issue here, more of a societal problem, and societal problems demand a response. The only argument is over what the appropriate response is.
posted by kgasmart at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2014

Ah, but you have the moral authority to tell someone in that situation that they are being too emotional! That'd go over well.

They can be as emotional as they like. It's their right But I'd prefer that as a society we pass laws that reflect us at our best, or at least at our normal rather than laws that reflect us when we're hurt and angry. That's especially true when we're taking some action we can't take back. And moreso when when we may be wrong.
posted by tyllwin at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

We moved out of Oklahoma a couple of months ago; my wife and I are now just outside of Eugene, Oregon. We're living in a 12x12 room, I can't find steady work, we're broke, and the bills keep piling up. But my wife got on health insurance, we can watch Cosmos uncensored, and there seems to be something in a lot of the people here in Oregon that I never really found in Oklahoma--a modicum of real concern for others.

This whole thing has been completely insane, and ought to be a disaster for Oklahoma. ...but it won't be.
No, this is Oklahoma to the core. It's the only state where Obama lost every county. His election, the ACA, and other things seems to be driving the pols crazy.

"Governor Fallin is a politician and not a lawyer," said Randall Coyne, a constitutional law expert at the University of Oklahoma. "According to well-established precedent of the US supreme court, the courts – not executive officials – have the final word on what is constitutional. She of course has the right to disagree with judicial decisions but they remain the law. The governor is dangerously close to precipitating a constitutional crisis."
This is from jeffamaphone's link above. Mary Fallin and her people feel that, much like Judge Dredd, they are the law. And this is what results.
posted by landis at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

But we've already stipulated elsewhere upthread that there can be no justice.

The goal of the criminal justice system shouldn't be to make the world just it should be to deter crime.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2014

"rights of an individual as a HUMAN" I meant "rights of a perpetrator as a HUMAN".
posted by symbioid at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2014

Should society show more mercy than the perpetrators themselves showed? I believe it should. But how much mercy? Should we, as a society, say: The punishment will never fit the crime. You can commit the most heinous crime imaginable, but all we're going to do is lock you up. That's it. That's as far as we go. Whatever you do, we'll do no more in response. You may commit the ultimate crime, but you'll never pay the ultimate price.

I simply do not feel this looks like "justice" to the average American. But we've already stipulated elsewhere upthread that there can be no justice. And again, I tell you - a huge chunk of America thinks there could be and should be. And they aren't won over when you say "It doesn't matter what Lockett did." Yes, it does. You have to be willing to wallow in the details of his crime and then still say that - on the basis of his crime, it may be warranted that he pay the ultimate price. But that we, as a society, should not become that which we abhor, because monstrous things lie down that path.

Do you want strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree? Because unchecked irrational and emotion driven 'punishments' are how we get strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree.
posted by Slackermagee at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

What's the murder rate in those countries? Without doing the research, I'm going to guess that virtually all of them have a lower murder rate than the good ol' U.S. of A.

Which just shows even more that execution doesn't work.
posted by anonymisc at 10:39 AM on May 1, 2014 [18 favorites]

To me, this is not even a discussion on the merits and methods of the death penalty, but whether the court in this case should have backed down or not when the governor of a state said she was going to ignore a court order.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:40 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

I'm impressed that the failure of the death penalty to reduce murder rates is now a point in its favor. That's some real intellectual jiujitsu there.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:40 AM on May 1, 2014 [15 favorites]

What do you want from the criminal to forgive them? Are you looking for contrition or are you trying to just make them feel as bad as you.

I am saying that some crimes are unforgivable. But since I'm not a Christian I can say that. And I realize, yes, that this contributes to the cycle of violence; good thing I'm not running the country!

But I think any society that considers itself to be a just society must deliver a measure of justice on behalf of those in the society who have been victims in a situation like this.
posted by kgasmart at 10:42 AM on May 1, 2014

Also? I say this as a friend of a woman (from way back in middle school and up) who was brutally murdered and desecrated in a heinous sex crime. I remember sitting out there with her brother, we were still fairly young, I was probably about 20, he was 21... He was like "I don't believe in the death penalty, but this does make you think..." He still opposed the death penalty, even after he mulled it over from personal experience...

All these years later, I believe he still opposes it but it's been a while since I talked to him, so I could be wrong... I sat and chat with her mother a few years ago and we discussed it, and she's the same way, hurt, sad, but still believes in a system that's morally founded upon a better sort of justice.

The point is that not all victims feel the same way about this. No matter how many years of pain we go through and memories of the good times, we still believe that vengeance isn't the answer.
posted by symbioid at 10:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [22 favorites]

The goal of the criminal justice system shouldn't be to make the world just it should be to deter crime.

And how, pray tell, does softening the penalty for crimes like Lockett committed achieve this?

"Don't worry pal. Rape her, shoot her, push her into that freshly-dug grave. We've got a cell reserved for the rest of your days, but no more."

That's deterrence?
posted by kgasmart at 10:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

But I think any society that considers itself to be a just society must deliver a measure of justice on behalf of those in the society who have been victims in a situation like this.

What if we instead know that we live in a society that has been scientifically proven to be extremely unjust and outright racist in it's implementation of the death penalty? Should we not accept our science?
posted by anonymisc at 10:45 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

I certainly don't think there is any justification for the death penalty, but I do think it's futile, unempathetic and wrong to determinedly refuse to engage with the legitimate feelings of rage, fear, love, hate and pain so many people feel when they find out about brutal, sadistic, random, terrible crimes. Comments like:

A LOT of people in this country apparently are stark raving mad, and think this kind of thing is not just abhorrent, but actually a Good Thing.

and

I don't wonder. It's bloodlust.

make no sense to me. There is nothing insane or unusual about wanting murderers to die, or evern suffer. It makes a pretty obvious kind of sense and it's a widespread feeling. So why can't it be a normal, understandable instinct that we nevertheless need to overcome because it's inhumane, risky, wrong and beneath us as a compassionate society? What is civilization but something unnatural and demanding of thought, effort, discomfort, and change - but also something that is worth all that work in the end? What is civilization but a process? I think there is so much room to meet people on (or near) their own terms on this issue.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 10:47 AM on May 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

That's deterrence?

Whether it seems unintuitive to you is less important than whether it actually works everywhere else in the developed world. And it does.
posted by anonymisc at 10:48 AM on May 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

"Don't worry pal. Rape her, shoot her, push her into that freshly-dug grave. We've got a cell reserved for the rest of your days, but no more."

That's deterrence?

And as I posted above, neither is the death penalty. Does it need to be repeated, possibly in bold or all caps?

There is no evidence that executions deter criminals
There is no evidence that executions deter criminals
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT EXECUTIONS DETER CRIMINALS
posted by zombieflanders at 10:48 AM on May 1, 2014 [33 favorites]

That's deterrence?

There is actual data, scientific data, not your intuition, that says that the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent. You can feel differently all you want, but you're wrong.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:49 AM on May 1, 2014 [53 favorites]

Lockett committed his crimes in a state with the death penalty and yet was not deterred. A lot of incredibly heinous murders are committed in states with the death penalty. What's that deterrence effect again?
posted by rtha at 10:50 AM on May 1, 2014 [15 favorites]

kgasmart, what you're elucidating here is just as much of an argument for why people convicted of crimes should be tortured. Do you support judicial torture?

If so, do you at least see why others wouldn't?
If not, why? What's the "justice" argument for the death penalty that doesn't apply to torture?
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:50 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

That's deterrence?

Here's the deal. He wasn't executed for the crime he committed. He was executed because he didn't take a plea deal. If he had plead guilty, he'd be in the lockup for life, for the exact same crime. You're not deterring rape and murder with the death penalty. You're deterring the accused from seeking a fair trial.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:52 AM on May 1, 2014 [133 favorites]

There is no evidence that executions deter criminals

But I say there's a rationale to punishment beyond deterrence - that is, punishment itself.

Crimes should be punished. Don't you agree? What I am saying is that, if the death penalty doesn't deter murderers, it certainly does mete out a measure of punishment that many Americans feel to be just. Not here, no - but then "here" is where people come to bitch about the rest of America anyway, right?
posted by kgasmart at 10:52 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

But I think any society that considers itself to be a just society must deliver a measure of justice on behalf of those in the society who have been victims in a situation like this.

The role of justice should be to heal. Heal the rift between offenders and victims. What you're talking about is good old fashioned revenge.

"Don't worry pal. Rape her, shoot her, push her into that freshly-dug grave. We've got a cell reserved for the rest of your days, but no more."

It's more of a "why did you do it?", "are you sorry?" and "what can we look for so that things like these can be avoided entirely?"

The problem with retribution is that it's entirely reactive. Because you can't have revenge for an action that hasn't happened. Instead of sitting down, talking to and connecting to an offender to figure out what drove them to that behaviour and removing the necessitating factors for the behaviour you just punish them and move on until the next victim comes along.
posted by Talez at 10:52 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

You're not deterring rape and murder with the death penalty. You're deterring the accused from seeking a fair trial.

Mods, I tried to favorite this a billion times but only one registered. Please fix this obvious error.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:53 AM on May 1, 2014 [31 favorites]

The American Gov't is usually really good at killing people.
It seems almost hard to believe that they can't manage a clean kill on one guy.
posted by Flood at 10:54 AM on May 1, 2014

Also, if you want to play the emotional appeal game, people who are executed and later found to be innocent have families too.

I'll support the moral calculus behind executions when it applies to the prosecutors who send the wrongfully convicted to death row.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 10:55 AM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

US death row study: 4% of defendants sentenced to die are innocent

Also from MotherJones last week: (I see homunculus linked to it in the March 31 death penalty thread; I think it could have it's own FPP)

This Man Is About to Die Because an Alcoholic Lawyer Botched His Case

Prince was by no means the first drunk to handle a death penalty trial. There are plenty of well-documented examples. Also of drug-addicted lawyers, lawyers who refer to their clients by racial slurs in front of the jury, lawyers who nap through testimony, and lawyers who don't bother to be in court while a crucial witness is testifying.

...

There are enough of these cases on record that most people in the legal profession no longer find them particularly shocking. What is more shocking, though, is how commonly courts and prosecutors are willing to overlook these situations as they occur, and how doggedly they try to defend the death sentences that result. Trial judges, of course, are often the ones who appointed the lawyers in question. And prosecutors have little motivation to demand that their courtroom adversaries be qualified and effective. It's a flawed system that often results in flawed verdicts.

posted by ceribus peribus at 10:56 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

if the death penalty doesn't deter murderers, it certainly does mete out a measure of punishment that many Americans feel to be just.


You keep using this word "just," I do not think it means what you think it means.
posted by like_a_friend at 10:56 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

Thorzdad: Serious question...Is there a difference between the chemicals normally used in an execution and the chemicals my vet used to euthanize my dog? I mean, my vet used a surprisingly tiny amount of whatever it was, and my dog was gone in mere seconds.

Veterinary euthanasia doesn't always go smoothly either, if the catheter misses the vein or the wrong dosage is drawn up. In every hospital I've worked, the dose of euthanasia solution is always preceded by a dose of propofol or other strong anesthetic, so that even if there is a problem with the euthanasia, the animal is so sedated that it does not react like the poor man in this situation.

I work in a state-run veterinary teaching hospital, and I'm worried that the European manufacturer we buy euthanasia solution from will stop shipping to us, for fear that it might be diverted to the Dept. of Corrections.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:56 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Crimes should be punished. Don't you agree? What I am saying is that, if the death penalty doesn't deter murderers, it certainly does mete out a measure of punishment that many Americans feel to be just. Not here, no - but then "here" is where people come to bitch about the rest of America anyway, right?

Is the only argument you have appeal to what "many Americans" feel is just? "Many" Americans have held bullshit opinions from time immemorial, and it's past time to stop killing people to satisfy them.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:58 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

And how, pray tell, does softening the penalty for crimes like Lockett committed achieve this?

It frees up resources to do things that actually deter people. The death penalty's deterrent effect is nil.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:59 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

There is nothing insane or unusual about wanting murderers to die, or evern suffer.

Yes, but that doesn't make it not bloodlust. You can feel those feelings, but the state has no legitimate business acting upon them.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 11:01 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

what you're elucidating here is just as much of an argument for why people convicted of crimes should be tortured. Do you support judicial torture?

Nope, because I think there's a clear difference between torture, which by anyone's definition is "cruel and unusual punishment," and the death penalty, when administered in a fashion designed to minimize the accused's suffering.

I'm not looking to inflict pain or revel in it.

Because you can't have revenge for an action that hasn't happened. Instead of sitting down, talking to and connecting to an offender to figure out what drove them to that behaviour and removing the necessitating factors for the behaviour you just punish them and move on until the next victim comes along.

You are talking about wholesale societal changes. Can we eliminate poverty? Can we mandate that both mom and dad stick around and raise a kid right? Can we legislate away feelings of anger or resentment that lead to crimes? We can try, and we have tried, and we will continue to try, and we must.

But society itself has a vested interest in saying to its citizens that if you play by the rules we will protect you, and if we cannot protect you we will make sure that those who victimize you are made to pay a price for their actions, and that the punishment will be commensurate with what they have done.
posted by kgasmart at 11:02 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Is the only argument you have appeal to what "many Americans" feel is just? "Many" Americans have held bullshit opinions from time immemorial, and it's past time to stop killing people to satisfy them.

And to piggyback on this, why are the feelings of these "many Americans" more important than the feelings of the other "many Americans" who find the death penalty grotesque, unjust, and immoral?
posted by like_a_friend at 11:02 AM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

But society itself has a vested interest in saying to its citizens that if you play by the rules we will protect you, and if we cannot protect you we will make sure that those who victimize you are made to pay a price for their actions, and that the punishment will be commensurate with what they have done.

So, despite your protestations to the contrary, you are calling for an-eye-for-an-eye. Wonderful.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:05 AM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

And to piggyback on this, why are the feelings of these "many Americans" more important than the feelings of the other "many Americans" who find the death penalty grotesque, unjust, and immoral?

They're not, but let's flip the argument - why is your opinion that the death penalty is "grotesque, unjust and immoral" more important or valid than their opinions?
posted by kgasmart at 11:05 AM on May 1, 2014

Mod note: Hey folks, maybe we can take a step back from this being all about kgasmart's opinions; kgasmart, maybe ease back a little and let the thread breathe? Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:06 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think the arguments for death penalty as deterrent, closure for victims, etc are very strange and labored. They are sort of logical wrangling to try and justify what is actually a totally understandable emotional response to criminals who do abhorrent things. I would honestly be less bothered if death penalty supporters simply said, yeah, this person did some really fucked up things to people, unthinkable things, and it would feel good to see them suffer. That I can wrap my head around. I don't agree we ought to do that, but I certainly understand the impulse. And I think most folks here can too. We are not a community above celebrating "just death" - anyone can go back and read all the fuck yeahs in something like the Bin Laden thread to see that.

What I think is much more paradoxical, strange and even insidious is this struggle for the "humane" way of killing someone, of "putting someone down" as some sort of rationalized and civil way of doling out justice. It's revenge moonlighting as justice. Truly, the death of a criminal by the state does nothing to move the scales of justice in favor of the good. It doesn't deter crimes, it doesn't bring victims back, it doesn't keep a criminal off the street. All it does is bring us down to the level of the criminal act, though dressed up in a sort of ersatz moral superiority.

A big part of the work of becoming a more enlightened human being is learning to temper emotional impulses by keeping close the knowledge that we must accept that the world is not a place where things balance out and no manner of process or whatever on our part will make it so. We can't make things equal but we can make them better.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:06 AM on May 1, 2014 [20 favorites]

Nope, because I think there's a clear difference between torture, which by anyone's definition is "cruel and unusual punishment," and the death penalty, when administered in a fashion designed to minimize the accused's suffering.

I'm not looking to inflict pain or revel in it.

This seems counter to your previous statements asking for the punishment to fit the crime. You rape and torture and shoot and burry someone alive (until they die), and all you get is a comfy cot to lay on until you go to sleep forever? Where's the justice in that? one might ask, mirroring your own perspective on life in prison.

It's strange reading this thread because it seems like you want to be a defender of a certain viewpoint you feel isn't being listened to, acknowledged, or really engaged with. And you're defending that viewpoint by not listening to others, refusing to acknowledge their points, and declining to engage with them in an actual conversation.
posted by jsturgill at 11:09 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

They're not, but let's flip the argument - why is your opinion that the death penalty is "grotesque, unjust and immoral" more important or valid than their opinions?

Because at the very least, that opinion (p.s., I didn't say it was my opinion; it in fact is not my opinion at all) carries zero risk of an additional innocent person being killed.

My personal feelings have little to no bearing on my actual policy stance, which is rooted in our nation's actual justice system and the facts thereof.

The most humanely applied death penalty nonetheless kills its victim, and as at least 20 people in this thread have been at pains to show you, many of those prisoners are in fact innocent.
posted by like_a_friend at 11:10 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's funny how the founding fathers are deified until they get in the way of our desire for retribution. The authors of the Constitution had lived under a kingdom, and decided that they didn't want to expose their citizens to the kingdom's methods of justice.
posted by goethean at 11:12 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted; please reload thread before replying.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:15 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Particularly if you're the victim's family - is it justice? Or can there be no justice for the family?

Nothing has more badly corroded people's understanding of the nature and purpose of a criminal justice system than this bizarre conflation of vengeance and justice. All those "victim impact statements" and suchlike are just so completely antithetical to anything that a system of "justice" should be designed to achieve. There's a reason we have traditionally portrayed justice as blind since the ancient Romans and that is because "justice" must be understood to be impartial--and, in that, the very opposite of "vengeance." Those who were directly, personally impacted by a crime cannot be expected to be impartial in either their judgments as to guilt or innocence or in their assessment of the appropriate penalty to be meted out. Many a person who is the victim of a very minor crime would gladly see the perpetrator burn in hell for it. We do not think it "justice" when someone shoots somebody for cutting them off in traffic--because we do not measure the "just" response to a crime by how pissed off the victim or the victim's family is in response to the crime.

The thing I find bizarre about this sentimental obsession people have with "the victim's family" is how self-evidently absurd and self-evidently and manifestly unjust it is. Just two seconds of reflection should make any thinking person abandon this nonsense immediately. For example, if the punishment is to be calibrated according to how upset the victim's family is, does that mean that if I murder a person with no family I should get off scott free? If you answer "no" to that question then you obviously recognize that "justice" has nothing to do with the feelings of the victim's family. Justice is the response meted out by society at large. Any response to a crime from "the victim's family" other than that collective, impartial, social response is not "justice" and any distortion of the social response in an effort to appease "the victim's family" is a corruption of justice.
posted by yoink at 11:20 AM on May 1, 2014 [60 favorites]

There's a lot of assumptions being made about bloodthirsty victim's families craving vengeance. In fact, there are many families of victims who are opposed to the death penalty. Perhaps it would be good to listen to the people involved, rather than making heat-of-the-moment assumptions about what they would want.

There is also the fact that executing someone, even at a distance, has a profound traumatic effect on the people doing it. Even if you care nothing about the convicted, you should care about the people who have to ensure that he dies and watch it happen. It's not an easy thing to live with.
posted by emjaybee at 11:22 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

And how, pray tell, does softening the penalty for crimes like Lockett committed achieve this
Oh yeah, just like more guns has solved the gun violence problem, lots of executions has completely kept other people from committing heinous crimes.
I really feel you’re trolling at this point, but …

I find that conservatives only want to talk about what he did, while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.
your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice.

And you’re presuming all victims’ families find some great relief and closure in the execution of the murderer.

I’m a liberal, and I’ll talk about it. But what do you want me to do - defend his abhorrent crime? Make him out to not be the monster he presumably was?

NO! What I want you to talk about is how the people can say killing is wrong so we’re going to kill you. Or killing is so wrong *sometimes* so that sometimes we’ll kill you, but in the vast majority of cases we’ll just put you in prison for awhile.

Come on, don’t you think a few hundred people a year dying in the southern states is enough. After all, all murder victims are dead. Why do so many of their killers get to live? Let’s kill them all.
posted by NorthernLite at 11:24 AM on May 1, 2014

It's not an easy thing to live with.

I would very strongly suspect that the people who deliberately get involved in ensuring executions take place have zero difficulty living with what they do.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:25 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

"It doesn't matter what Lockett did." Yes, it does.

Did it matter what Gary Ridgway did? Did it matter what Isaiah Kalebu did? Google those two names if you don't know who they are. You're an advocate of really wallowing in the details of the crime to know exactly how horrible it was so that we can know exactly how bad the punishment should be, right? So really wallow in the details of their crimes. Kalebu's, especially, because his surviving victim gave detailed testimony at trial, and a very detailed article was published regarding his deeds. Hell, do a search here on Metafilter and find the thread about all the crimes that man committed, and all the lives he destroyed.

And then really get comfortable with the fact that the death penalty wasn't even an option for these two men, because the prosecutors decided justice would not be served by executing these men.

You claim that it matters what crime is committed? Bullshit. If it mattered, these men (and countless others) would be dead. But the death penalty is not evenly applied, and hundreds of people who have committed violent crimes will never sit on death row. If you believe the only true justice for murder is death, then where is the justice for all those victims whose killers will never face state-sanctioned death?
posted by palomar at 11:25 AM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

"Don't worry pal. Rape her, shoot her, push her into that freshly-dug grave. We've got a cell reserved for the rest of your days, but no more."

That's deterrence?

Our society and our government and our neighbors constantly and consistently look to the wrong corners for this elusive "deterrence" that will lower crime rates.

Real deterrence consists of providing actual, significant, and real opportunities for success to everyone-- that means eliminating educational and income disparities, providing everyone with access to decent and affordable health care, and not marginalizing or waging class/race wars against people who aren't white-bread enough. That may sound like a bullshit political platform, but I'm not running for office so I can say it genuinely. Those are the things that will deter crime.

We're a long way from that, but let's at least draw its shape so we can start coloring within the lines. Anything else is a dangerous distraction.
posted by mudpuppie at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

There's a lot of assumptions being made about bloodthirsty victim's families craving vengeance. In fact, there are many families of victims who are opposed to the death penalty.

But, again, while I, personally, admire such people's moral outlook, the individual willingness of a victim's family to forgive the perpetrator of a crime also has nothing, at all, to do with what is a "just" response to the crime. We know, for example, that the families of many perpetrators of incest choose to "forgive" the perpetrator and put pressure on the victim not to report the crime. A "just" system will pay no more attention to that family's desire for pardon than it will pay to another family's desire for severe punishment.
posted by yoink at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

I would very strongly suspect that the people who deliberately get involved in ensuring executions take place have zero difficulty living with what they do.

Well, you could suspect that. Or you know, you could ask them.
posted by like_a_friend at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Have there been any studies of murder victim's families looking at 1) how they expected execution [possibly hypothetical] of the perpetrator would make them feel; 2) how they felt when the punishment was meted out (ie, actually executed if the sentence was death [not just in jail awaiting execution], jailed if the sentence was imprisonment); and 3) how they felt 1, 2, ... years down the road? I'm curious whether the anticipated effect jibes with the actual experience, whether feelings of grief/injustice/closure/doubts/&c differ significantly with the type of sentence given (adjusting for their prior feelings about execution), and whether those differences persist over time.
posted by Westringia F. at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

What's the murder rate in those countries? Without doing the research, I'm going to guess that virtually all of them have a lower murder rate than the good ol' U.S. of A.

*cough*South Africa*cough*
posted by PenDevil at 11:30 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes, but that doesn't make it not bloodlust. You can feel those feelings, but the state has no legitimate business acting upon them.

Yeah, OK, I get that. But IMO too much anti-death penalty rhetoric seems designed to make people feel that if they hate the convicted person or feel that they deserve to die, there is no room for them to be against capital punishment. But this movement is not like other civil rights movements, where some kind of fellow feeling is a critical longterm goal. You don't have to want a Ted Bundy type to live in order to believe we should not cause him to die, so why talk as if that were the case? Why the need to call people "bloodthirsty" all the time?

I would very strongly suspect that the people who deliberately get involved in ensuring executions take place have zero difficulty living with what they do.

Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss has an interview (0:44 clip) with an ex-executioner who is traumatised by his work and now opposes the death penalty. It's an amazing documentary, by the way. Anyone who hasn't seen it should add it to their list.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 11:31 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

Even if the majority, or the vast majority of Americans supported the death penalty that does not automatically mean that this is a great position to hold. the number of instances where "the majority" thinks turns out to be absolutely horrible. Was pretty recent that "the majority" was pretty homophobic. The majority supported slavery. the majority turned a blind eye (Godwin!) to what was happening in Germany under Hitler's early days. Or in America just post 9/11, or Russia currently. Anywhere there is a lynching, it's the majority.
I mean just because a whole honking lot of people like something doesn't automatically confer legitimacy to that thing, many times when the majority likes something it's a good indication to take a step back and make sure what is going on is actually ok.
posted by edgeways at 11:34 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

And I just feel like dropping this old chestnut here:

"Why do we kill people who kill people just to show that killing people is wrong?"

It doesn't work. It doesn't deter. It just creates more suffering.

The point of Justice with a capital J is to reduce suffering in the world. Rehabilitation and reconciliation must be the driving forces behind justice, not mere punishment or vengeance. When those two goals are impossible, we say "Sorry, but you have lost your right to freedom for transgressing society's rules. You will be fed and housed, but you will never be free again."

That is horror. That is punishment, waking up every day knowing that it is going to be exactly the same as yesterday and exactly the same as every day for the rest of your life. All the while, locked in a little room. Maybe allowed to interact with unpredictably violent other people--whether inmates or guards.

Stop killing people. It's barbaric.


And what edgeways said. The majority isn't often--in fact historically usually isn't--right.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:35 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

The ballpark figure of at least 4.1% innocence is higher than previous studies looking at exoneration rates that had smaller sample sizes and were more restricted in their remit. It is also considerably higher than the estimate given in 2007 by the conservative US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia

The Scalia estimate came in really low? I am shocked.

That's deterrence?

Yep! Most people don't want to be in jail, believe it or not.

I find that conservatives only want to talk about what he did, while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.

I don't think that's the case. I think it's more a question of wanting the state to be impartial and above the sort of mob justice and retribution that just feels so right, even to me, a guy that is against the death penalty. I'll admit that when I hear about a terrible crime like this guy's my instinct is to think "this sack of shit should be hung, drawn and quartered," but really, no, he shouldn't. The punishments meted out by the state must be humane.

It's also worth noting that this is an example of the "conservatives" you speak of yet again being OK with ignoring the same Constitution they hold up as sacred when it's convenient to their prejudices.
posted by Hoopo at 11:35 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

What's the murder rate in those countries? Without doing the research, I'm going to guess that virtually all of them have a lower murder rate than the good ol' U.S. of A.

Interesting logic there. The USA, which has almost always had the death penalty, has a higher murder rate than most countries that have abolished the death penalty. And somehow that proves that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.
posted by yoink at 11:38 AM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

two or three cars parked under the stars: Yeah, OK, I get that. But IMO too much anti-death penalty rhetoric

INCOMING TONE ARGUMENT ALERT! MAN THE BATTLE STATIONS!

two or three cars parked under the stars: designed to make people feel that if they hate the convicted person or feel that they deserve to die, there is no room for them to be against capital punishment.. so why talk as if that were the case? Why the need to call people "bloodthirsty" all the time?

If you hate the accused and feel they deserve to die, you should be able to articulate a legitimate reason other than a thirst for blood, right? Then how come everyone leads with easily-debunkable canards about deterrence or cost-effectiveness? Once you take those away, and once you realize that the abstract idea of "serving justice" is just a stand-in for revenge, what argument do you have left? Don't blame death penalty opponents for the shitty arguments of death penalty supporters.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:39 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Why the need to call people "bloodthirsty" all the time?

Because the death penalty is barbarism. Pure, naked vengeance, only wrought by the state instead of the relatives of the murdered. It's gussied up in civilized clothing and given cover of the legal system, but it remains a barbaric act.
posted by graymouser at 11:43 AM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

"Don't worry pal. Rape her, shoot her, push her into that freshly-dug grave. We've got a cell reserved for the rest of your days, but no more."

I think a lot of people underestimate the severity of prison. Is there anything for which you'd really give up nearly all freedom of location, association, and activity for the rest of your life? Is there anything for which you'd give that up for 20 years? 10?

I can't imagine the answer being yes for anyone for any double-digit number (and for single digits, it's only barely concievable if there was an accompanying monetary reward that would allow significantly greater freedom once done, not something prison generally confers).

Prison is Count Rugen's machine from The Princess Bride: it sucks away years of your life. Imagine putting the dial on the highest setting and feeding it the rest of yours. Now, tell us how you feel, and be honest, because this is for the purposes of justice. Myself, I think it seems likely enough to match even the pain of victims whose lives were cruelly taken.
posted by weston at 11:44 AM on May 1, 2014 [11 favorites]

Interesting logic there. The USA, which has almost always had the death penalty, has a higher murder rate than most countries that have abolished the death penalty. And somehow that proves that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.

American Exceptionalism at work. Again.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:47 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

The thing is: we don't have supernatural powers. True justice involves making the victim whole, and no matter how bad we torture a murderer, the murder victim never comes back to life. So, yeah. We HAVE to accept that true justice can never be done in these cases, because it can't be. That's not feel-good liberal rhetoric, it's reality.
posted by KathrynT at 11:48 AM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

People die every day for the "crime" of liking to smoke or eat french fries more than they like to take their statins and blood pressure meds. For raping someone, shooting her and burying her alive, no mercy is due, and any death less painful than being buried alive while shot, is nevertheless mercy shown. Don't like, don't stand in the way of corrections departments getting the drugs they need to fulfill their duties.
posted by MattD at 11:49 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

> Real deterrence consists of providing actual, significant, and real opportunities for success to everyone-- that means eliminating educational and income disparities, providing everyone with access to decent and affordable health care, and not marginalizing or waging class/race wars against people who aren't white-bread enough.

And plentiful mental health care, including strong support services for those who are released from hospitals, so that those who suffer from severe mental disorders have access to adequate treatment and support. Often the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes have a history of severe mental illness, but there are not the structures in place to ensure that they get the care they need. [cf]
posted by Westringia F. at 11:50 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

two or three cars parked under the stars: "Werner Herzog's ... It's an amazing documentary..."

But you repeat yourself.
posted by symbioid at 11:50 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

True justice involves making the victim whole

Probably worth noting that making the victim whole is not the task of the criminal justice system anyway.
posted by Hoopo at 11:50 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

as i understand it, mr. lockett was condemned for shooting a young woman and then burying her alive, and my foremost sympathies naturally run to the victim.

i said i was pro-death penalty, i didn't say i was pro-torture. the critical juncture was when the warden closed the blinds to block the observers' view. after that moment, the state can no longer say "it wasn't really that bad"; we are entitled to draw the most horrifying inferences.

lyricists of mefi, can we have a song about this to the tune of "oklahoma!"? all i've got so far is...

oooooooklahoma where the death house glistens in the sun...

but i know there are better lyricists reading this.
posted by bruce at 11:51 AM on May 1, 2014

I've never assumed prison for violent crimes was about deterrence; people who commit violence are generally not being logical or rational about the risks of doing so.

Prison for violent crimes is about keeping a dangerous person from doing more harm, either for the rest of his/her life or until he/she has been determined not likely to commit more crime. It is punishment, by its very nature, as others have pointed out. I sincerely doubt those who scoff at life behind bars have ever done more than an hour in the county jail for an expired ticket, if that. It's not a good life, or a fun one. It's dull and grinding and not the kind of thing anyone dreams of.

It also has the small benefit of allowing those unjustly convicted to be given back some portion of their life if they are exonerated, which execution disallows.
posted by emjaybee at 11:51 AM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Probably worth noting that making the victim whole is not the task of the criminal justice system anyway.

Yeah, which as far as I'm concerned is one of the numerous, numerous ways in which our criminal justice system is fucked up. As far as I can tell, our criminal justice system exists as a machine to turn petty criminals into hardened criminals, for profit.
posted by KathrynT at 11:52 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

lyricists of mefi, can we have a song about this to the tune of "oklahoma!"?

. . . I'd rather we didn't.
posted by Think_Long at 11:54 AM on May 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

For raping someone, shooting her and burying her alive, no mercy is due, and any death less painful than being buried alive while shot, is nevertheless mercy shown. Don't like, don't stand in the way of corrections departments getting the drugs they need to fulfill their duties.

So your view is that we have to show we're better than murderers by doing exactly to them what they did to their victims? That is sick, and it is disturbing in the extreme that there are people who think that is How Things Should Be.

Gacy comes to mind as an example where this would not only be barbaric in a 10 000 years ago sense, but the psychological toll on the people actually having to perform those things? I've read the books about him. I've seen the photographs. You want to make another human being do those things to someone?

Vengeance is sick.

Prison for violent crimes is about keeping a dangerous person from doing more harm, either for the rest of his/her life or until he/she has been determined not likely to commit more crime. It is punishment, by its very nature, as others have pointed out.

It should be rehabilitative first, if at all possible. Truth & Reconciliation commissions have shown the intense lasting value of finding rehabilitation and reconciliation.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:55 AM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice.

frankly, if someone I loved was murdered and the murderer was caught, I personally would think that life imprisonment without parole would be justice.

Because I would want that fucker to spend a looooooooong time living with the knowledge that he is a murderer and is thus worth nothing.

Not everyone believes that "justice for the victim" means "quick death for the guilty".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:55 AM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Much less "quick death for the person we're pretty sure is guilty, unless it turns out police made up his confession and the actual murderer lived out his natural life before he could be charged." But really, what are the odds of that?
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:59 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

MattD: People die every day for the "crime" of liking to smoke or eat french fries more than they like to take their statins and blood pressure meds. For raping someone, shooting her and burying her alive, no mercy is due, and any death less painful than being buried alive while shot, is nevertheless mercy shown. Don't like, don't stand in the way of corrections departments getting the drugs they need to fulfill their duties.

I find your honesty refreshing, if not your many logical fallacies. At least you come right out and say it's about revenge.

I mean, I'd rather not live in the same society as people who think like you do, but at least your logic has certain amount of consistency to it. As long as one believes that seeking vengeance is appropriate, and that the apparatus of the government is competent enough to administer that vengeance, your logic has an internal consistency to it that the arguments of many other death penalty proponents here lack.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:59 AM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Prison for violent crimes is about keeping a dangerous person from doing more harm, either for the rest of his/her life or until he/she has been determined not likely to commit more crime

It's also about rehabilitation, at least theoretically. Thus "Corrections". Some countries manage this better than others.
posted by Hoopo at 12:01 PM on May 1, 2014

The criminal justice system should kill prisoners because people smoke? With that kind of argument, who needs anti-death penalty activism?!?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:02 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Lockett's public defender was interviewed on Democracy Now this morning, and she expressed doubt about whether a blown vein was redponsible for the botched execution. According to the lawyer, each arm is hooked up to an IV that is supposed to provide a lethal dose of drug on its own. My understanding is that even if one vein fails, the execution should still proceed normally. The idea that veins in both arms could have blown seems implausible.
posted by compartment at 12:08 PM on May 1, 2014

while liberals who abhor the death penalty never want to talk about it, as if what he did was somehow irrelevant.

It is -- not because I am against the death penalty in theory, in a perfect world -- but because in this world, what he did is relevant, but it isn't the only relevant thing. Even if we assumed that no one innocent was ever killed (not even close to a safe bet), death penalty judgements are heavily influenced by racism and wealth.

There is nothing insane or unusual about wanting murderers to die, or evern suffer. It makes a pretty obvious kind of sense and it's a widespread feeling.

Yes. And if anti-death penalty advocates were heavily into judging people for having those feelings, that would be a problem. There's a difference between having those feelings (which I often do, as I am a vengeful sort of person) and wanting those feelings to be enacted into law (which I don't).
posted by jeather at 12:11 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Don't like, don't stand in the way of corrections departments getting the drugs they need to fulfill their duties.

Protip: Walter White is still a criminal.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 12:12 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

emjaybee: "I've never assumed prison for violent crimes was about deterrence; people who commit violence are generally not being logical or rational about the risks of doing so.

Prison for violent crimes is about keeping a dangerous person from doing more harm..."

First, that's an interesting way to interpret the concept of "deterrence" as I've always seen the term "deterrence" as a moral deterrent, not as a physical deterrent of which you speak...

---------------

The modern prison system, as originally created, was to be a "Penitentiary". The idea there, was "penance". In this case, a work ethic was spuposed to be built up, the idea that the empowering virtue of labor would help reform those lazy, slackful, useless people who wallow in the streets, the layabouts. Granted, at the time this was happening, there was still widespread death penalty application, but Prison wasn't about deterrence via fear of being locked up, nor about deterrence by keeping them away from potential victims. If there was any concept of "deterrence" it was that they would be rehabilitated via enobling labor (convenient, cheap labor).

Wiki's entry on the development of the modern prison system gives a very brief background on the topic, but there is much depth.

There are a lot more factors, of course, but there is a general thrust of the birth of the modern prison system and the growth of Capitalism during the Enlightenment to have been conjoined with the aspects of labor.

There is no doubt that the authors of works during the enlightenment that dealt with social order who wrote on the issue of prisons truly believed that prison served as a noble, efficient and worthy tool to strengthen the moral centers of "man"...

Without understanding the origins of the modern prison system, the modern system of punishments, and adjudication, how it grew into the current system it acts as today, one lacks a certain historical context to say what the original motivations of these systems were, and more importantly, whether they are properly fulfilling the original functions. If the stories we tell ourselves now about the current system are different from the original reasons/stories, it is only because they have failed in their original purpose, and the defenders of the status quo must find ways to defend that status, and that means that if the old arguments failed, to take on new ones.

One cannot look at the Prison System, in the US in particular, without taking into account the context of race, most especially in the South, and poverty/economics. This is why it's important to understand that the Prison System doesn't exist as a singular solitary thing all on its own, or maybe merely as part of system of governance of actions of behavior by individuals, but also as part of an enforcement mechanism of social mores that are informed not just by "morals", but most especially upon the given concepts of "property rights" that are enshrined in the US constitution. These property rights were given to hold that one group of people, by virtue of being born with a certain genetic code, had a given right to hold other people with a different genetic code, as workers without pay, without human dignity. One cannot look at the prison system without seeing the disparities in action that occur based upon race. We talk of "justice" as dealing with an individual victim or an individual perpetrator, and that is part of the issue, no doubt, but each individual exists as a participant in a wider community based upon their social status, their race, their religious views and more. When we talk of "justice" we need to recognize that these factors play a role in how it is meted out, and how to more readily rectify the human element of adjudication that unfortunately is informed by our prejudices. I am not saying this to call anyone a bigot who acts upon those prejudices, they might not even be cognizant of those prejudices. But they exist, and the goal of a system of justice is to try to remove those constraints. Or rather, it should. Yet again, I say "OUGHT" not "IS".

I figure this reply has gone on long enough. I certainly don't want to confound the issue of the origins of the prison system, it's claimed purposes, it's modern interpretations or such things to detract from my ultimate point is that the concept of Justice is bigger than the one-on-one aspect that we deal with, and it's even bigger than the concept of the "Justice System" and is founded upon a certain mode of thinking that we've built up over the years, philosophically, as an economic/trade system, as a property rights management system, as a system of criminal justice and as a moral system.
posted by symbioid at 12:16 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A few comments removed, cut it out guys.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:21 PM on May 1, 2014

Nobody deserves to die like this.
posted by schmod at 12:20 PM on May 1 [2 favorites +] [!]

So neither did his victim. We would not need a death penalty if people could be satisfied that "life without parole" actually meant that. Every so often a "lifer" gets let free because some Governor has no common sense. Some "lifers" even get weekend furloughs. Some have even killed on their weekend vacations from prison.

With the number of mandatory appeals and the amount of time spent reviewing each death penalty case If it finally comes to it, then whichever way one dies it will never be Sol on a stretcher in "Soylent Green". We as a society have to either accept that or, as it stands now, accept the fact that killers sometimes are let out of jail, only to kill again.
posted by Gungho at 12:23 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

the young rope-rider: It's sort of irritating to have a sort of pacifist, Christian idea of forgiveness being pushed as the only valid objection to the death penalty.

I just read through the thread again, and I do not believe anyone here has said that pacifism is the only legitimate reason to prohibit the state from putting its citizens to death, but if you feel that's been articulated by someone, perhaps you could point us to exactly where you think that view was advanced so we can discuss it. Certainly, people have said that it is their reason for doing so, but that's very different from saying your reasons are invalid.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:28 PM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

Gungho, what is the rate of all these "paroled murderers" who go on their killing sprees as a percentage of the death-row population? Do you have any stats?

Because, as mentioned above, the rate of wrongful death penalty convictions is 4.1%. If we are going to argue about whether it's right or wrong that someone gets out and kills vs someone gets their life taken by the state in vengeance after being convicted of a murder they did not commit (and I"m not even touching the racial disparities that is bound up in this issue), we should at least take this into effect, no? Is it right to deprive innocent people of their life in the name of vengeance at a greater rate than would be caused by potentially letting a few murderers getting out on a vacation wrongly?

I am not arguing, of course, for letting murderers go out unwatched or whatever. I just have a feeling that we've got this Willie Horton narrative thing going on right now with your comment, and I don't think that the statistics back it up, so I am asking you to provide evidence for your assertion that this happens, and if so, what rate this happens.

And then I'm asking in general, what does that mean for "Justice" if more people are on death row (or murdered) vs those who are let out again and kill...
posted by symbioid at 12:28 PM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

So neither did his victim. We would not need a death penalty if people could be satisfied that "life without parole" actually meant that. Every so often a "lifer" gets let free because some Governor has no common sense. Some "lifers" even get weekend furloughs. Some have even killed on their weekend vacations from prison.

I'll need some cites on this, and also evidence that it happens nearly as often as the no less than 4% of executions that were wrongfully conducted.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:29 PM on May 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

I don't understand the complexity. Put to sleep with morphine (pills and/or IV) and then cyanide.

Problem with that is that death by morphine overdose is a bit too blissful to fit the stated purpose of capital punishment, certainly for the purposes of those who demand capital punishment. While one may want a beloved terminally ill relative to drift away beatifically on a high, one doesn't want to see heinous murderers delivered from the living punishment of prison with blissful smiles on their faces, as if borne by Valkyries to some kind of psycho-killer Valhalla.

If you must kill people (which, as an EU national, I disagree with), and must make it not too painful but not euphoric either, why not the guillotine, or hanging (which apparently is reliably instantaneous if the weight/height is calculated accurately). Or if you want to be high-tech and being some Michael Bay-esque shock and awe to the institution, use some kind of vaporising ray gun or something.
posted by acb at 12:37 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The overall practice of capital punishment is pretty questionable, but if it is to be done, I think this documentary made the case that hypoxia is the way to go about it.
posted by Pliskie at 12:38 PM on May 1, 2014

We would not need a death penalty if people could be satisfied that "life without parole" actually meant that.

We also don't need a death penalty because we don't need to lock people up forever.

There are countries that are committed to rehabilitating their criminals in prison, and they save money, have lower recidivism, and have less crime!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:40 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

> We would not need a death penalty if people could be satisfied that "life without parole" actually meant that. Every so often a "lifer" gets let free because some Governor has no common sense. Some "lifers" even get weekend furloughs. Some have even killed on their weekend vacations from prison.

So basically: we need to execute offenders because it's the only way to be sure? Surely we can do better than that.
posted by Westringia F. at 12:45 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Gungho, what is the rate of all these "paroled murderers" ... Do you have any stats?

Because, as mentioned above, the rate of wrongful death penalty convictions is 4.1%. ... we should at least take this into effect, no? Is it right to deprive innocent people of their life in the name of vengeance at a greater rate than would be caused by potentially letting a few murderers getting out on a vacation wrongly?

Are you serious? You later go on to mention Willie Horton, so there's one. So let's say that number is one. is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough? Now in MA they are commuting ALL the life terms of killers convicted before they reached the age of 18. ALL of them! Do you really want to keep score?
posted by Gungho at 12:56 PM on May 1, 2014

is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough?

To justify killing more than one additional innocent person? No. That's even leaving aside that the issue of letting people on life without parole sentences out early is a red herring in a conversation about the death penalty. We could easily keep people in prison for life without killing them.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:58 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Gungho: Now in MA they are commuting ALL the life terms of killers convicted before they reached the age of 18. ALL of them!

18.. 18... There's something about that number in state law... Thinking...

Gungho: Do you really want to keep score?

Yes. We want to keep score. We have a well-sourced 4% of all convictions figure against your one instance and a tangential complaint about MA commuting minors who were given life sentences.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:59 PM on May 1, 2014 [14 favorites]

Well, she's also homophobic, and her daughter is a racist, so she's at least got a trifecta going on.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:36 AM on May 1 [3 favorites +] [!]


Whoah. I just kind of fell down the rabbit hole of the daughter, Native American regalia appropriation, protest/doubling down of cultural insensitivity, and Wayne Coyne is mixed up in all this too?


WTF. I had no idea.
posted by stenseng at 1:00 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

> The Oklahoma Supreme Court only hears civil cases; criminal appeals are decided by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. The argument was not "shut up, we like killing people," but "the Supreme Court is injecting itself in a case where it has no jurisdiction, and also we like killing people."

OK. That makes sense. What do you think of this from the article on lifting the stay:

In removing the stay, the court said the inmates had failed to demonstrate "actual injury" and that "the right of access to the courts does not include the right to discover a cause of action" to litigate.

It seems like the cause of action could have been "hey, this stuff might not work. tell us more about it." and there was reason to suspect that before hand without going on a fishing expedition of discovery.
posted by morganw at 1:01 PM on May 1, 2014

is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough?

is one additional person assaulted by an already convicted assaulter not enough?

is one additional person robbed by an already convicted robber not enough?

is one additional person embezzled by an already convicted embezzler not enough?

why not just do away with sentencing and make every criminal sent to prison without the chance of parole?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:03 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'd also add that not only do we want to keep score, we have to. The death penalty is not a natural policy that exists whether we like it or not; we choose to have it.

Assuming, arguendo, that Gungho's false dichotomy reflects reality, we either choose to execute some criminals, knowing that around 4% of them are going to be innocent or we choose not to execute them knowing that some number of innocent people will die at the hands of people we could have killed. Either way innocent people die, and either way we make an affirmative choice to have in place a policy which leads to those deaths. Keeping score is the only responsible way to make that choice.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:04 PM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

I'm with you, young rope-rider. If the goal really is to end the death penalty, then stories of the falsely accused are what need to be highlighted, not the supposed moral inferiority of people who think an unequivocal murderer/rapist/torturer deserves to die.

It's true the state should be above acting on the human desire for vengeance but castigating the people who feel that desire won't earn you allies in your fight. People sometimes have dark, negative emotions in reaction to these things and that's okay.
posted by Jess the Mess at 1:06 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

We have a well-sourced 4% of all convictions figure against your one instance and a tangential complaint about MA commuting minors who were given life sentences.

So if we go by that number, that 120 folks who the state is planning on killing who are innocent. But even if we say that number is high and go to 1%, that's 30.

Other numbers include the 15 death row inmates that have been released since 1992 due to DNA evidence.

So let's take the conservative look at these statistics and say 45 innocent people would have died to people could safely say that another actual murders would not one day maybe released to possibly kill again. I have no idea how anyone can call that number 'worth it.'
posted by MCMikeNamara at 1:07 PM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Are you serious? You later go on to mention Willie Horton, so there's one. So let's say that number is one. is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough?

Willie Horton didn't kill anyone while he was out on parole, so his case doesn't even give you your "one additional person killed by an already convicted killer." Nor would Horton's original murder conviction be likely to receive the death penalty today.
posted by yoink at 1:07 PM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Bulgaroktonos: Keeping score is the only responsible way to make that choice.

Yes, and for some of us, the fact that the criminals are also put to death counts as part of the score. The death of an innocent victim is more of a tragedy than the death of the person who killed the innocent victim, but both are tragic, so both should be accounted for.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:07 PM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

> So neither did his victim. We would not need a death penalty if people could be satisfied that "life without parole" actually meant that. Every so often a "lifer" gets let free because some Governor has no common sense. Some "lifers" even get weekend furloughs. Some have even killed on their weekend vacations from prison.

I'll need some cites on this, and also evidence that it happens nearly as often as the no less than 4% of executions that were wrongfully conducted.

I'm in the UK. So some cites from over here. Britain's equivalent to Fox News claims that there have been five reoffending murderers released in four years. On the other hand Britain releases an average of over a hundred murderers per year. (And the DOJ claims eight murders by seven people between 2007 and 2012 cited in the link I've just posted). So. If we say that Britain releases just over a hundred convicted murderers a year, and just over one of those goes on to commit another murder? Looks like about 1% to me. Or significantly less than the rate of wrongful conviction...

As for the deterrence of the death sentence? In order to receive a death sentence you need to have been inept enough to get caught (see the Dunning-Kreuger effect for details). You need to have been convicted. And then you need to have been unlucky enough to get the life sentence. In short you need to have won an anti-lottery. No one who commits murder thinks they are going to be the one to get that unlucky - so the deterrence factor is negligible. If you want to deter people from crime, convince them that the cops are fair, competent, and effective so they won't get away with it.
posted by Francis at 1:12 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough?

Remember when "better to let 10 guilty men go free than convict one innocent person" was the cornerstone of the justice system? Has the sentiment really changed into "it's worth the risk of convicting the innocent if just one crime is prevented"?
posted by ceribus peribus at 1:13 PM on May 1, 2014 [14 favorites]

So let's say that number is one. is one additional person killed by an already convicted killer not enough?

One additional person killed by someone almost 30 years ago is horrible, but the estimated 50+ (at a minimum) wrongfully executed in the same time frame are...what, exactly? Collateral damage? Acceptable losses? Human trash? Please tell us why, in your mind, one is a a travesty of the highest order and the other isn't even worth you mentioning.

If the goal really is to end the death penalty, then stories of the falsely accused are what need to be highlighted, not the supposed moral inferiority of people who think an unequivocal murderer/rapist/torturer deserves to die.

I'm bitterly laughing here, since this is what so many of us here are saying, only to be dismissed as molly-coddling, unfeeling sops who are trying to derail the conversation about the horrors that have happened. Y'all need to make up your minds.

It's true the state should be above acting on the human desire for vengeance but castigating the people who feel that desire won't earn you allies in your fight. People sometimes have dark, negative emotions in reaction to these things and that's okay.

Which is why most of us have been pointing out that vengeance is no replacement for justice. We back this up with evidence and all we get is emotional appeals. If you truly believe the state should be above vengeance, then you should stop lecturing those of us saying that.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:14 PM on May 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

First: Even in flagrante delicto cases are going to be subject to abuse at the hands of prosecutors, police, and unreliable or otherwise untrustworthy witnesses, so I can't get behind execution even in so-called open/shut cases.

Second: As people have noted, our justice system in the US is tilted heavily against the poor and minorities. As long as there's an uneven playing field, which there always will be, I can't get behind execution.

Third: I want no part of vengeance. There are always going to be murderers and people who inflict horrific crimes, but isolate them to protect future victims, and rehabilitate where possible. As long as the system, even if it were error and bias free, which it never will be, is designed to inflict vengeance, count me out. One thing humanity needs to do, and do soon if we're to survive one another's retributions, is to stop using vengeance as a motivation. This is a human-level thing - I don't know that we'll ever get there, but by god we've got to start - to try to start.

Capital punishment is as good a place as any to make that start.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:22 PM on May 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

One additional person killed by someone almost 30 years ago is horrible

Then we should all breathe a collective sigh of relief that it didn't happen.
posted by yoink at 1:22 PM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

from way up thread:

If I'm not mistaken, this is the exact problem the guillotine was designed to solve.

If we can't accept the visuals of institutionally killing our prisoners with a guillotine, maybe we should think more about our reactions to killing prisoners in the first place.

I strongly feel that executions should be broadcast on prime time network TV. The way we handle capital punishment now allows us to be comfortable in our moral outrage but not have to accept the true brutality of what we're doing. You want to use my money to kill in my name? I have a right to see it. I never would of course watch it, but if people have a real problem with this showing up on TV, they need to confront the question of why. You're either opposed to capital punishment, or you have no problem pulling the trigger and watching the brains splatter on the wall.

Of course, wide spread broadcast of executions might create a celebratory circus, but then fine, let's admit that we hold the same ideas about justice and punishment as Saudi Arabia.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 1:23 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

First, that's an interesting way to interpret the concept of "deterrence" as I've always seen the term "deterrence" as a moral deterrent, not as a physical deterrent of which you speak...

I'm not sure what you mean. I meant in the sense that prison/death penalty are consequences most people would want to avoid, therefore they are deterrents, though clearly not universally effective ones. I think you could make a good argument that the reasons someone would commit an extreme act like murder are so complex that "whether I will go to prison" may not really enter into it. Would most people murder someone even if you wouldn't go to prison for it? Do people who do commit murder really have any sense of the consequences? If you want to keep people from committing murder, is fear of prison effective at all? Which is why I think prison seems to act more as a way of limiting violence that's already begun, not of preventing it.

Morality has little to do with it, except in terms of preventing someone from hurting anyone else, but that's the state's/society's morality, not the criminal's.
posted by emjaybee at 1:25 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Barbarians In Oklahoma
posted by homunculus at 1:26 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Then we should all breathe a collective sigh of relief that it didn't happen.

Yeah, it's of a piece with every other piece of racist Fox-style arglebargle and has been known as such for a while, I was more addressing the hypocrisy of engaging on moral calculus while excoriating us for same.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:27 PM on May 1, 2014

Ending The Death Penalty Should Be A Conservative Priority
posted by palomar at 1:27 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

It seems like the cause of action could have been "hey, this stuff might not work. tell us more about it." and there was reason to suspect that before hand without going on a fishing expedition of discovery.

I would agree with you! Sadly -- or, well, probably not that sadly -- I am not a judge. If you can't show your injury then your case is "speculative," even if the state is actively concealing whether or not you were injured and you can prove that. See also the attempts to challenge warrantless wiretapping before Snowden.

(Also, re: The courts' actions in the case, this article and this one lay out the chain of events pretty well. The events in question are bonkers. I tried to put together a timeline and got a headache.)
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:30 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

From palomar's link:

"I was wrongfully sentenced to death and am only alive because the real killer had a religious epiphany and confessed to his pastor shortly before my scheduled execution.

I am a lifelong conservative...

Today, I work with Witness to Innocence to put an end to the death penalty."

This has been another edition of 'Conservatives Hate Other People Until Themselves or Their Family Become an Other'.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:31 PM on May 1, 2014 [20 favorites]

I don't know how the term "justice" can even be applied to our system the way it is when the determination of a person's guilt or innocence is based on the skill of the prosecutor and that of the defender to present their case to be more effective than the other guy's. I've been on a jury in a murder trial and it pretty much consisted of nothing more than being sent out of the courtroom while the lawyers and judge argued about point after point; then the jury was brought back in and told to "disregard" the last argument. The witnesses changed their testimony when called back to the stand a few days after their first testimony - a whole bunch of them who claimed to have seen the woman with the gun in her hand suddenly decided they had been dreaming, I guess, because they couldn't remember whether she actually had the gun or not ... and on and on. Every person on the jury knew the woman to be guilty of murdering her boyfriend, but we could not convict her and remain within the rules of law the judge ordered us to. So she went free. Within a few months she had slashed a woman in California and killed her, but the woman's boyfriend shot our lady and killed her. So she killed in Arizona and wasn't convicted but died in California anyway - but only after taking another life.

Yes, people who are innocent are convicted, but a whole lot of guilty people are not convicted due to the manipulation of complex laws and precedent-setting cases. In the above case, for instance, the woman was dressed and behaved in such a way that she appeared to be a little old lady - pah! We were not allowed to know, of course, that she'd already spend 12 years in prison on one offense and 9 years on another (one of those was for selling her 8 and 10 year old daughters into prostitution).

I lived in a very nice area of Spokane for five years and had a neighbor for three of those years who had served 10 or 12 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend. He killed her and half buried her under a bunch of leaves and loose debris in a park and then drove past the spot every day for a week checking to see that her foot was still sticking out so he knew she hadn't been found yet. I didn't know any of this, of course, until he committed suicide by monoxide in his (very nice, very expensive) van. Did you get this? He murdered his girlfriend and served 10 or 12 years and was then released. What???

This is half the problem. A sentence for a terrible crime has no meaning - the person doesn't serve even half the term they're supposed to, and if the crime is especially offensive, as against a child or woman, the perpetrator is actually put into protective custody and given special treatment in the prison so he won't be hurt by the other prisoners. What???

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead. I'm not normally known to be hateful or vicious, but I could and would be happy to push him onto the next world and out of this one - in the name of the young boy he murdered via sex acts and the little girl he hurt so badly as she watched her brother die and wondered when he'd kill her.

As for the death penalty, in theory I'm for it; unfortunately, it has to be in theory only because it's impossible in our justice system to make even a serious conviction of the guilty or release of the innocent happen. But if the death penalty were applied to those whose crimes were heinous and involved the innocent and there was absolutely no doubt, then I'm all for it - but it must be a clean and fast death, with no margin for error. So - idealistic and unrealistic and impossible.

The fiasco that took place in Oklahoma is a disgrace to all humanity - everyone who took part in that mess should lose their job and even face criminal charges if they find any criminal shenanigans were involved. There's a political position in this country now against the death penalty and it involves the drugs used for injection; don't even try to tell me that this dog-and-pony show wasn't part of that - which means it was intentional at some point along the line, and expected - and that's suggestive of a problem needing criminal prosecution. I hope it happens, but I hold no hope for a death penalty that works properly because the law is applied in a just manner.
posted by aryma at 1:31 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead

I hate this as a tactic in support of the death penalty. It's not like people who oppose the death penalty reached those conclusions in a vacuum where they never knew that terrible violent crime existed. We're all aware that awful people do awful things; no one needs education on that point.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:37 PM on May 1, 2014 [22 favorites]

In the interest of getting some numbers for the pro-death-penalty side, since they don't seem to want to put in the effort, I found this PDF, showing only a 1.3% repeat murder rate (Figure 6, "Same Criminal Conduct") in the state of Washington. This journal article that shows an overall violent recidivism rate of 15% among relased homicide convicts, but just 3.2% of those were repeat homicides. Unfortunately, the sample size in that study (92) is rather small, but this is still below the 4% rate of false convictions. Another (paywalled) article has the homicide re-offense rate at 0.8% within the first three years after release.

Happy to see any citations that read more charitably to the capital punishment side, but I can't find them.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:40 PM on May 1, 2014

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead. I'm not normally known to be hateful or vicious, but I could and would be happy to push him onto the next world and out of this one

You spent a bunch of paragraphs decrying the failings of our criminal justice system and then leap off the cliff into the Sea of Vengeance. Do you really not see the irony there?
posted by rtha at 1:41 PM on May 1, 2014 [12 favorites]

Previously.
posted by Lemurrhea at 12:28 PM on May 1

Previously.
posted by cashman at 1:44 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

If I'm not horrified at the idea of coldly and deliberately taking a life, even the life of a callous murderer, then in my eyes I'm no better than the callous murderer himself. If I can stifle my humanity enough to cross the same line he crossed, then that humanity wasn't worth much to begin with.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:45 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die

The argument about the death penalty is not an argument about whether or not there are people in the world who "deserve to die." It is an argument about whether the state is capable of effectively, consistently and fairly making that determination. Centuries of experimentation have conclusively shown that it is not.
posted by yoink at 1:45 PM on May 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

A sentence for a terrible crime has no meaning - the person doesn't serve even half the term they're supposed to, and if the crime is especially offensive, as against a child or woman, the perpetrator is actually put into protective custody and given special treatment in the prison so he won't be hurt by the other prisoners. What???

I don't think you understand. Based on the conversation here, prison should be all about rehabilitation and segregating offenders from the rest of society. But apparently, the idea of punishment - as in, punishment for your crimes, as in paying a price for what you've done, a price roughly commensurate with what you've done - is off-limits, and the sign of an unenlightened society.

The wrongful conviction rate/chance an innocent is being put to death is an utterly valid argument against the death penalty. But as for examples of killers being set free who kill again - why, here's a news story published yesterday on this very topic, from Wilmington, N.C. What are the chances?

Maybe between 1.3 and 3.2 percent, according to tonycpsu.

We're all aware that awful people do awful things; no one needs education on that point.

No, but it appears few want to think about it too much. Easier to cast the state in the role of the villain, and the convicted murderer as a wayward naif, simply in need of greater understanding and compassion.
posted by kgasmart at 1:46 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Who is doing that? Please link to all of these comments positing murderers as wayward naifs.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:49 PM on May 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

kgasmart: Maybe between 1.3 and 3.2 percent, according to tonycpsu.

In addition to all the other reasons you're wrong, 4 is still greater than both 1.3 and 3.2.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:50 PM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

The line from palomar's link that hits at the root of a lot of this for me is:

"Widespread corruption and abuse of power almost led to my execution."

State governments are frequently corrupt. They attract the venal and petty like flames attract moths. Yet in the USA, state governments are given the power to execute people. I can't comprehend why anyone would trust their local state government with a life or death decision like that. But then, I live in New Jersey, and we don't trust our state government with that any more. Which is probably good given the recent extreme pettiness shown by the Christie administration.
posted by graymouser at 1:50 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The argument about the death penalty is not an argument about whether or not there are people in the world who "deserve to die." It is an argument about whether the state is capable of effectively, consistently and fairly making that determination. Centuries of experimentation have conclusively shown that it is not.

Exactly. You go to the execution chamber with the state you have, not with the state you want.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:51 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

if the crime is especially offensive, as against a child or woman

Seriously folks, can't you at least just murder a man if you have to kill someone?
posted by Drinky Die at 1:51 PM on May 1, 2014 [11 favorites]

No, but it appears few want to think about it too much. Easier to cast the state in the role of the villain, and the convicted murderer as a wayward naif, simply in need of greater understanding and compassion.

The state that executes innocent people? That executes people based largely on their skin color or the color of their victims? That is unfair and inequitable at pretty much every level, but still decides to have the power to take the lives of people? Yes. I am comfortable casting that state as a villain, and I'd wager that I am consider the degree of evil in the world far more than you're considering the innocent people who are dead because of the death penalty.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:51 PM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

But as for examples of killers being set free who kill again - why, here's a news story published yesterday on this very topic, from Wilmington, N.C. What are the chances?

That's evidence for life without parole, not the death penalty.

Also, there is an endogenity problem. Because time spent in prison has an effect on someone's propensity to murder. Prisons in the US are hellish places where all sorts of abuses occur. It not a place one is sent to get better.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:53 PM on May 1, 2014

Also, the percentages we're talking about aren't apples-to-apples, because there's zero recidivism of full life sentences without parole.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:54 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Maybe between 1.3 and 3.2 percent, according to tonycpsu.

0.8 and 3.2 I believe. and if you can't do your own research on the matter you might tread a little more carefully.
posted by edgeways at 1:54 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

But as for examples of killers being set free who kill again - why, here's a news story published yesterday on this very topic, from Wilmington, N.C. What are the chances?

Blackstone might say that it doesn't matter, and I for one would agree.
posted by graymouser at 1:54 PM on May 1, 2014

Yes, murderers set free to murder again - it doesn't matter, does it?
posted by kgasmart at 1:57 PM on May 1, 2014

kgasmart: Yes, murderers set free to murder again - it doesn't matter, does it?

Again, the alternative to the death penalty isn't being set free, it's life without parole. But even when we compare it with those who are released, which nobody here is advocating, the number of innocents on death row exceeds the recidivism rate.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:58 PM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

prison should be all about rehabilitation and segregating offenders from the rest of society. But apparently, the idea of punishment - as in, punishment for your crimes, as in paying a price for what you've done, a price roughly commensurate with what you've done - is off-limits, and the sign of an unenlightened society

Numerous people have pointed out to you that being segregated from society is a punishment and, indeed, a severe one. Indeed, at a sufficient degree of segregation (i.e., solitary confinement), there are many psychologists who argue that it is a form of torture. You are really not interested in making a good faith effort to understand the arguments of those whose position you oppose. No one is arguing that all murderers are "misunderstood naif;," no one is arguing that there should be no punitive component to the penal code--these are simply straw men.
posted by yoink at 2:01 PM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Yes, murderers set free to murder again - it doesn't matter, does it?

I am curious. Do you think that literally any intervention to prevent a potential murder is acceptable?
posted by PMdixon at 2:01 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes, murderers set free to murder again - it doesn't matter, does it?

If it seems odd someone might not care about that, you should consider the possibility that the people you are talking with do care about that but see alternative social and criminal justice policies that could prevent one or both murders besides the death penalty. A lot of violence can be linked to things like poverty, past abuse, drug problems, and lack of access to good mental health coverage. I think so anyway, maybe you disagree, but understand that our disagreement about methods needed to reduce violence does not mean either of us does not consider it an important issue.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:02 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yes, murderers set free to murder again - it doesn't matter, does it?

If it comes down to the state murdering innocent people versus murderers going free, the greater evil is for the state to murder the innocent. Blackstone's formula ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer") puts it to us in stark terms: it's not a numbers game, it's morally unacceptable for the state to kill an innocent person even if that has other undesirable consequences. You were trying to make this into a bizarre numbers game, and I'm saying that the exact percentages aren't important at all.
posted by graymouser at 2:02 PM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

I am curious. Do you think that literally any intervention to prevent a potential murder is acceptable?

Being a member of the PreCrime Unit would explain a lot.
posted by zombieflanders at 2:03 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

OH FFS kgasmart. There are multiple causes/effects and arguments going on here. As tonycpsu pointed out, they want to count even murders among those executed by the state in this argument as those who should not be killed. I personally agree with him (assumption of gender here)...

In the argument regarding recidivism and innocents killed by the state ratio, I would argue against including them into the total, because, we are making a specific response to a specific argument put forth by another contributor to this thread. You are being dishonest when you say we can't allow ourselves to make an argument against this individual.

Because there are multiple lines of thought on this topic, each having their own tangential relationship to the parent topic (capital punishment), this means that each of these threads have their own little debates going on, and they may or may not apply to the topic as a whole, they may only assume propriety within that specific subtext, and in this case, the ratio is that subtext.

Essentially, we're talking about a utilitarian argument as put forth by Gungho that, essentially, "better to kill them all and quickly before they get put on parole and kill again!" When one of the arguments above in this thread has been about the wrongful conviction/execution rate, so it is only pertinent that in order to address that argument, we look at the facts and determine the "greater good" (that is, the fewer people who are innocent who are killed. Do you think the innocent person killed by the state feels so much more relieved that they're killed because it's by a supposedly "Just" system? "Oh, right, ay, I'm so glad I'm not being murdered and dumped in a ditch by a psychopath, I'm being killed in the name of JUSTICE, even though I did not a thing!"

INNOCENT IS INNOCENT. (Whether they should be in there for being accessories to a crime, or something else, I don't know the relevant facts are, but we're talking specifically innocence in a capital case, not all 100% innocent of everything ever).

Then you say: "I don't think you understand. Based on the conversation here, prison should be all about rehabilitation and segregating offenders from the rest of society. But apparently, the idea of punishment - as in, punishment for your crimes, as in paying a price for what you've done, a price roughly commensurate with what you've done - is off-limits, and the sign of an unenlightened society."

That's not all our line of reasoning. Some individuals here do believe that prison should be about "letting the punishment fit the crime" and some people believe that rotting in prison for life is as effective a punishment as straight up killing someone.

This, once again, is about making the assumption which we have to make in a secular society, that this world is the only world, and we have to mete out justice as best we can. If the state kills a murderer, they no longer have to worry about the consequences of their actions, as they are dead. You may, as I said, assume they will go to eternal hellfire (or salvation if a prison minister filled their heart with Jesus), but the State in a secular society cannot make that supposition, so in a sense of justice on earth, the earthly torture of living in a prison for a life sentence is more than enough. Unless you just want to be an asshole and torture and brutalize the person, then you get into the question of our Constitituional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. You're arguing for the punishment to be left to the whims of those who feel aggrieved to be able to retribute in kind what they feel is the proper punishment.

Hammurabi called, he wants his eye for an eye back.
posted by symbioid at 2:06 PM on May 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Who prescribes the drugs? Is there a Federal Law which allows states to obtain and use these substances in a way counter to their recommended use?
posted by inturnaround at 2:07 PM on May 1, 2014

This is such a complex issue. My stated stance is that I oppose the death penalty, but it's mostly due to the fact that the risk of executing innocent people is too hard to mitigate. But in a case where there's not a serious question about the identity of the perpetrator, I find it hard to feel too terrible about whether the execution was "botched". Assuming this guy was not wrongly convicted, he shot a stranger for no reason and buried her alive. So he experienced a bit of pain in death - I guess I don't care all that much. I also don't really care if it deters other people - it's more that he did something so awful that it goes beyond youthful mistakes that can later be redeemed. I'm not sure how occasionally executing someone for the most henious crimes is worse that locking up the zillion people we do every year. Frankly I'm much more outraged about people getting long sentences for minor drug crimes than I am about executions of hardened killers or the exact nature of those executions. Let's say someone did something horrible to people in my family - I guess I would not only want them dead, but I'd want to watch the execution. But ... maybe I wouldn't. Of course the way I differ from "conservatives" (I tend to be very liberal on social issues) is that I feel you can't talk tough about crimes without being twice as committed to making a society where everyone gets a fair shake. The Repub leaders seem to work like this:

Increase inequality --> deliberately destroy safety net --> punish harshly those who fall through the cracks.

There was a great public radio 2-part interview about a UNC-Chapel Hill professor whose father was murdered and mother attacked by a guy who was working for his father.

Part 1 is about him planning to go to the execution.
Part 2 is after he want to the execution.

Well worth listening to ... it's not black and white, but he pretty much felt glad to see it carried out. Lots of issues in that case - the murderer was retarded I believe so there's some discussion about whether that matters.
posted by freecellwizard at 2:09 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Do you think that literally any intervention to prevent a potential murder is acceptable?

No, because that's never going to be successful anyway. The day the NSA perfects its craft is the day we can prevent all crimes before they happen and not even then.

What I advocate, and I'll state it here for the last time for clarity's sake, is that I believe society/the state may have a legitimate, moral interest in imposing the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime; but the state will always have an obligation to impose and carry out that sentence in as humane a manner as possible. Because we aren't barbarians - but we have an obligation to respond forcefully to barbarism.

A lot of violence can be linked to things like poverty, past abuse, drug problems, and lack of access to good mental health coverage.

Indeed, but this is where my "wayward naif" comment comes from. There are many factors that may drive a person to kill. Will we, as a society, be successful in eliminating or mitigating all of these factors? I'm all for sufficient medical health care coverage for all who need it, but let's ask what that's going to cost, on top of what it will cost to eradicate poverty, to provide drug treatment to all who need it (but what of those who don't want it); and how shall we erase past abuse? How shall we erase substandard parenting?

How shall we eliminate all these societal factors that may have driven a person to kill? Or do we say - given these factors, the guilty aren't really guilty; and even if they are, the purpose of incarceration should not be to punish?
posted by kgasmart at 2:10 PM on May 1, 2014

Pro-death-penalty arguments based on presuppositions of how victims' families "feel" or what they "need" rarely are sound. First, there's the conflation of vengeance with justice, as has already been mentioned multiple times. I doubt that such a conflation is supported, for example, by any major wisdom tradition. Why do you think that is?

Beyond that, though, people presenting them usually have no actual basis for their presuppositions, nor support for their apparent belief that they are more sympathetic to victims' families. Where is the social psychology research showing how the population of such victim families is primarily oriented to bloodthirstiness and revenge? Where is the research showing that that is what would make them most likely to recover--to heal spiritually and psychologically--from such a tragic event? As it stands, I have usually found people who speak about the rights of victims' families in this way to be patronizing and catering to a lowest-common-denominator view of human grief. It's truthy, but not true.

It's interesting that no one really advocates for families taking revenge into their own hands. So that leaves the state as the only actor able to carry it out. (I mean, if you think the number of erroneously executed people is large when the state does it, just imagine what it would be like if the grieving families did it--refer to the history of lynching if you want some data.) Given that, why should state policy be based on the psychology and thought processes of people who are likely to be the least able to make sound judgements (for very understandable reasons)? So here's my hypothetical: if my child were violently assaulted or murdered (god forbid), the state's job is to stabilize the situation for the entire community, not to make me "feel better". And "providing justice" is just one aspect of this stabilization--avoiding matters devolving into a Hatfields vs. McCoys situation is another. If I can only feel made whole by murdering the perpetrator, well, I'm always free to do so. And then I should be prepared to face the consequences of that.

It's tragic all around. Some things just can't be fixed. Thinking otherwise is what has led us to our current death penalty policy, which I think should be abolished. The fact that I think there are hypotheticals for which the death penalty, even including prolonged suffering, might be justified has no relevance in the face of the demonstrated inability for such penalties to be applied equitably.
posted by mondo dentro at 2:12 PM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

I believe society/the state may have a legitimate, moral interest in imposing the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime

1) State's have moral interests?

2) what is that interest? And what evidence is that that the state can satisfy that interest without compromising other interests?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:16 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead. I'm not normally known to be hateful or vicious, but I could and would be happy to push him onto the next world and out of this one - in the name of the young boy he murdered via sex acts and the little girl he hurt so badly as she watched her brother die and wondered when he'd kill her.

Imagine if he was given help, therapy and medication the first time in prison rather than being left to rot for 14 years then released back into society.
posted by Talez at 2:18 PM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

I doubt that such a conflation is supported, for example, by any major wisdom tradition

"an eye for an eye" dates all the way back to Hammurrabi and variations on that theme have popped up a lot since then. Significant portions of Hammurabi's code seem to be rooted in a concept of retribution and vengeance.
posted by Hoopo at 2:25 PM on May 1, 2014

What I advocate, and I'll state it here for the last time for clarity's sake, is that I believe society/the state may have a legitimate, moral interest in imposing the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime; but the state will always have an obligation to impose and carry out that sentence in as humane a manner as possible.

What is the ultimate crime?

What is the ultimate penalty?

What is the state's interest in punishing wrong-doers?

What is the state's interest in morality? Is the state a moral actor? Why or why not?

What is society's interest in reigning in the state's power?

Why do the world's most evil governments seem to relish public displays of barbarism? Are execution and torture inherently problematic behaviors on the part of a government?

It seems that there are multiple points of inflection at which, for a variety of reasons, someone might decide the state has no business killing people. Meanwhile, it seems like you need a very specific and rigid ideology, that threads these complex questions in just the right manner, to conclude otherwise.

I'd love to read some more takes on first principles and well-grounded philosophical stances that find it OK for the state to take citizens' lives. I'm also interested in why torture is not sometimes warranted, and why death is a valid response to some crimes, but painful death is apparently not.
posted by jsturgill at 2:27 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

"an eye for an eye" dates all the way back to Hammurrabi

I was waiting for that. I do not agree. It does not conflate justice with vengeance. On the contrary: law is established to take vengeance out of the equation. There's an epidemiological dimension to revenge that has a proven tendency to spread and persist (like, you know, in the Middle East). Law aims to stanch that tendency, because it is very much unfavorable to organized society. (Mixed metaphor alert.)
posted by mondo dentro at 2:28 PM on May 1, 2014

It does not conflate justice with vengeance. On the contrary: law is established to take vengeance out of the equation.

All it does is take it out of the hands of a mob and into the hands of the king. The entire principle behind things in the code such as "eye for an eye" or killing someone for petty theft is vengeance for the victim. It basically sets out what particular flavor of vengeance is allowed and when it has to stop.
posted by Hoopo at 2:33 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Matthew 5:38-48
New International Version (NIV)

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’
39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.
41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.
42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Remember when this used to be a Christian country founded on the values that Jesus preached?

Neither do I.
posted by Talez at 2:35 PM on May 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

If there's no way you can ensure that the death penalty is fairly applied, apart from any other valid arguments against it, it shouldn't be allowed.

And I don't think anyone can possibly say honestly that it has been, or ever really could be, fairly applied to all.
posted by inturnaround at 2:36 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Modern judicial execution is seriously amateur-hour. I don't get it. For centuries places had capital punishment and they even had professional headsmen--in many cases, hereditary dynasties of them. Franz Schmidt the 16th – 17th C. executioner apparently had a 98% success rate beheading a man with one stroke of the sword. The British even worked out a nice and tidy table for calculating how long a noose to use to help ensure quick unconsciousness via a hangman's fracture qv.

I can't help but think that twelve men (minus one) firing rifle rounds into your chest, followed by a coup de grâce to the dome, would be mighty effective and tend to minimize suffering.

Then this stupid twentieth-century shitshow of amazing new technical gimmicks. Electrocute an elephant one day, Old Sparky goes up the next. Gas on the western front; gas in a hermetic chamber. Then this medicalized horseshit: lethal injection. You could cut out a lot of problems with a central line, but that would require a physician. Plus it has a complication rate, and nothing would be shittier than getting your death sentence commuted but dying of sepsis and pneumothorax from a botched central line insertion. Then again, it's also silly and potentially brutal to give paralytics and potassium. One huge bolus of barbiturate, benzodiazepine, or opiate will do it.

Why does it have to be injected? Yeah, I guess Socrates drank the hemlock because otherwise they would have forced it into him or killed him another way. But how many inmates would imbibe their own death? I think you'd be surprised. A pill and then some Kool-Aid with pentobarbital is how Dignitas helps terminally-ill people off themselves. Hell, phenobarbital is 90% bioavailable as a rectal bolus versus IV.

Dignitas also does helium asphyxiation. A gas chamber with helium instead of cyanide would be more humane, although the condemned's last words might lack gravitas; pure nitrogen would do the same thing without cartoon voices. As long as CO2 levels don't build up too quickly, anoxia will lead to quick unconsciousness and swiftly thereafter death.

But it's all got to be so damned technical. And no one's a technologist in this particular field. So it ends up being ad hoc with inexperienced volunteers. That's pretty much how any particular project gets fucked up, so why executions should be different I don't know. Probably the best argument against doing executions is that we don't do nearly enough of them to get things down pat, so to speak. Although it's also an argument for doing many, many more of them.
posted by adoarns at 2:38 PM on May 1, 2014 [11 favorites]

A lot of violence can be linked to things like poverty, past abuse, drug problems, and lack of access to good mental health coverage.

Indeed, but this is where my "wayward naif" comment comes from. There are many factors that may drive a person to kill. Will we, as a society, be successful in eliminating or mitigating all of these factors?

No policy eliminates all crime or comes without cost, but you don't have to look far to find countries in the developed world that have managed to bear the cost of these social services and have lenient prison sentences by US terms. These countries have lower murder rates and to me seem like nicer places to live.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:40 PM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

"an eye for an eye" dates all the way back to Hammurrabi and variations on that theme have popped up a lot since then. Significant portions of Hammurabi's code seem to be rooted in a concept of retribution and vengeance.

But that's to miss the forest for the tree. The whole point of Hammurabi's Code is that it is a code. It prescribes a particular set of socially-agreed upon punishments for particular crimes. It so happens that the particular punishment for putting someone's eye out is having your eye put out in turn, but that doesn't mean that the basis of the code is "vengeance." It doesn't say "hey, whatever is done to you, do back to the perpetrator." It doesn't ask for "victim impact statements" to be brought into consideration. It takes the punishment away from the victims and their kin entirely and says "we refer to a neutral and impartial code which is taken to represent the collective will of the society rather than the personal, retributive impulse of offended parties."

Thus you get laws such as:

If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off.

If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina.

If an artizan has undertaken to rear a child and teaches him his craft, he can not be demanded back.

If [a veterinarian] perform a serious operation on an ass or ox, and kill it, he shall pay the owner one-fourth of its value.

Clearly these have nothing to do with "vengeance" and everything to do with taking "vengeance" entirely out of the equation so that the social fabric sustains as little collateral damage as possible in the overall resolution and settling of disputes. You don't have someone saying "hey, that vet killed my cow! I'm going to kill his cow and see how he likes that." Or someone saying "that artisan has stolen my child and I need him now to support me in my old age; I'm going to go kill that artisan's child because he cost me a child!" Personal feelings, personal assessments of just how much I've been hurt and just what ought to be done to "make me whole" have nothing whatsoever to do with it. There's a "code" and we follow what the code says.
posted by yoink at 2:42 PM on May 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

The entire principle behind things in the code such as "eye for an eye" or killing someone for petty theft is vengeance for the victim.

Again, I disagree. If the "entire principle" was vengeance for the victim, then why not just let the victim's family and/or friends do whatever they feel like? After all, vengeance, like beauty, is very much in the, um, eye of the beholder.

The sentences you bookend the above sentence with contain the more fundamental principles that explain why we still remember Hammurabi: a code of law makes a system of justice possible by making it less about the vengeance of a mob, and by prescribing limits. The "eye for an eye" paradigm was a useful hack of mob psychology that helped make such a system feasible.

Over time, we've added things to that, like the avoidance of "cruel and unusual" punishments--but these were actual correctives to the downside of taking it from the mob and handing it to the king, as you say.
posted by mondo dentro at 2:51 PM on May 1, 2014

Then you tell that to the family of victims. Then you say - your loved one was raped and murdered and lived her final seconds in abject terror, but we, society, can offer you no justice. Best we're gonna do is lock the guy up. You'll have to find solace yourself, somehow.

Well, this is something that I'm not fond of talking about but a very close family member of mine was killed in a premeditated act of murder about four years ago. The actor is in prison for the next forty years and I'm fine with that. He took away someone that I miss every day but I have no need or desire to see him put to death and letting him sit in a cell until he's in his eighties seems like the right and proper thing to do. Having the state of New Jersey execute him would do exactly zero good. It wouldn't bring her back and it wouldn't prevent any more murders than just keeping him in jail would.

I obviously can't speak for all families of victims but I and the rest of our family have no desire for vengeance or any more cruelty. So please don't think that you can speak for all families of victims when you use us to justify your barbaric desire for state sponsored killing.
posted by octothorpe at 2:54 PM on May 1, 2014 [35 favorites]

yoink this is what I was referring to by taking vengeance out of the hands of the mob and putting it into the hands of the king. I fail to see any reason why taking an eye for an eye or a life for a theft loses its vengeful nature simply because it has been codified.

Put another way, what I am saying is that Hammurabi could have codified "you have no recourse against someone who took your eye" and it would be no less of a code. He could have codified "the person who took your eye has to pay you one fifth of his earnings for the rest of his life." But instead what was codified was essentially a response that an angry victim would feel justified in, and is in essence codifying a vengeful response--causing harm to a party in response to a grievance.
posted by Hoopo at 3:07 PM on May 1, 2014

He could have codified "the person who took your eye has to pay you one fifth of his earnings for the rest of his life."

You seem not to have noticed the bit where I helpfully showed you that there are many instances of him doing exactly this: i.e., where the punishment is not simply the same injury exacted on the perpetrator as the victim.

When you "tak[e] vengeance out of the hands of the mob and put[] it into the hands of the king" it's no longer "vengeance"; just as when a soldier kills an enemy soldier in the middle of a war that is not at all the same thing as if that person had killed the other in civilian life--even if the method of the killing were in both cases identical. To say that justice is indistinguishable from vengeance is to say that a duly enacted death penalty is indistinguishable from a lynch mob; I don't think the proponents of the death penalty really want to go down that road.
posted by yoink at 3:17 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

You seem not to have noticed the bit where I helpfully showed you that there are many instances of him doing exactly this: i.e., where the punishment is not simply the same injury exacted on the perpetrator as the victim.

And you seem to have missed where I specified that "vengeance" is only evident in certain portions of the code. I am fully aware that the entirety of the code is not "an eye for an eye".

To say that justice is indistinguishable from vengeance

Vengeance is a form of justice.
posted by Hoopo at 3:27 PM on May 1, 2014

Not sure if anyone has pointed this out but I think there's an interesting as well as important meta-question, in understanding why some peoples and subcultures are still in favor of the death penalty. In that I don't believe this is a question that can be answered by attempting to debate with the believers/proponents; rather it requires a sociological, psychological, and economic, approach i.e. altogether a scientific explanation of why and how these [sub]cultural belief systems exist in the 21st century. I feel that would go a long way towards reasoned debate and understanding the political conflict better. I haven't researched this area but surely there's some accessible information out there that tries to grapple with it this way.

In other words we can arm ourselves as much as we like with stats about how execution is ineffective, etc. But that's different from insight into why/how people implicitly value execution, or say vengeance, as part of the social order that they perform (as someone pointed out above). More information is needed.
posted by polymodus at 3:28 PM on May 1, 2014

What is the state's interest in punishing wrong-doers?

What is the state's interest in morality? Is the state a moral actor? Why or why not?

What is society's interest in reigning in the state's power?



I think part of the problem is that many people have an incredibly difficult time truly conceptualizing what "the state" means in these matters. They see the state as being comprised of individuals and therefore, if something is acceptable for an individual person to think or do, it's acceptable for "the state." And if the full might of the state has never been arrayed against you (or against people who look like you, or share your economic situation, etc...) it can be incredibly difficult to truly envision the extent of the power imbalance.

Executing a criminal in present-day United States strikes me as less like an avenging angel bringing justice, and more like a person squashing a bug that he or she finds repugnant.

Maybe the bug IS repugnant. Maybe it's actively, or potentially, dangerous. That's not the point--the point is, when the human decides to squash that bug, instead of just putting it out of doors, there's pretty much no contest. Few people are going to intervene on your little bug behalf. So if you are a little spider that isn't a brown recluse, but kind of looks like one...you live in a world where the machinery to squash you with relative impunity is EVERYWHERE.

So yes, many of the criminals on death row are guilty of horrible crimes. Many of them would pose a danger to others. I don't think anyone's arguing otherwise, or arguing that all murderers are fine, or none of them should be jailed, or anything like that. But a non-zero number of them are being wrongly executed, because the state's power is just that unwieldy once it's in motion.
posted by like_a_friend at 3:35 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

And you seem to have missed where I specified that "vengeance" is only evident in certain portions of the code.

This is hopelessly muddled. "Vengeance" is not the same thing as "reciprocity" or "proportionality"--which is what you seem to be confused about. Just because the code occasionally specifies that the perpetrator has the same thing done to him/her as s/he did to the victim (i.e. "an eye for an eye") does not mean that those portions of the code are any more codifications of "vengeance" than any other. I can get "vengeance" on you for stealing my cattle by shooting you. Or I can get "vengeance" on you for running off with my daughter by raping your sister. Those would all be quite normal acts under a social code of "vengeance." The fact that some parts of Hammurabi's code specify reciprocal acts as the appropriate punishment for specific crimes doesn't make them any more 'vengeance based' than the ones that specify monetary payment or any other form of penalty.

Vengeance is a form of justice.

You don't actually believe this. Here, I'll prove it to you. My two-year-old daughter comes home and tells me that another girl in her day-care called her a "poopyhead." The next day I get my AK-47 and take it along with me to day care. I get my daughter to point out the offender, and I put a bullet through her head. That was, unquestionably, an act of vengeance. Are you going to argue it was an act of "justice"? I will do you the kindness of assuming you will not. You therefore do not, in fact, believe that vengeance is "a form of justice" QED.
posted by yoink at 3:37 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

"People die every day for the "crime" of liking to smoke or eat french fries more than they like to take their statins and blood pressure meds."

Wait, the state executes people for liking to smoke or eat french fries?
posted by klangklangston at 3:37 PM on May 1, 2014

Wait, the state executes people for liking to smoke or eat french fries?

They tried to warn us about Obamacare, but we wouldn't listen!
posted by yoink at 3:40 PM on May 1, 2014 [15 favorites]

Some people have already mentioned the essential impossibility of ever obtaining "justice," even if we could agree about what that looks like, but to muddy the waters a bit further, let's look at this scenario:

A baby boy is born in to a poor minority family in a society that still effectively, though subtly, limits opportunities for wealth and advancement for members of his caste.

The child has inherited some mental health issues--unfortunate genetics from his father's side, although he doesn't know his father well--and those issues are exacerbated by poor parenting that crosses the line into neglect, and sometimes into abuse. His street is unsafe; his home is chaotic.

He goes to school, but it, too, is loud and sometimes unsafe. The teachers are underpaid and overworked and can't adequately address his learning challenges, much less his psychological needs. In his teens, he joins a gang for community and to gain the advantage of safety in numbers. To make ends meet he will participate in some petty crime. Lacking insurance, or a way to get to a doctor even if he could pay, he soon finds that alcohol and drugs help take the edge off his anxieties. He probably hasn't heard the term "self-medication," but that's what he is doing.

A few years later, he is involved in a robbery that goes bad. People die. He was there and he had a gun. He may be responsible for some deaths. It's hard to say for sure, because his legal counsel was inadequate--but he couldn't afford his own attorney--and in his country, and especially his state, people of his skin tone are convicted at a much higher rate and for much more severe penalties than people of lighter skin tones.

If he had pled guilty and short-circuited his own judicial process, he would have received life in prison. But he didn't agree that was fair, and he wanted to tell his side of things to a jury.

A jury that consisted solely of people more advantaged than he is, and mainly of lighter-skinned people who have never been in his neighborhood, find him guilty and sentence him to die.

What is just for him? Is it even possible to find a sentence that is just for both him and his victim?

From where I sit, the answer is no. Perfect justice is beyond mortal striving. What we can do is choose our priorities. We can err on the side of retribution, and keep sending people like this young man to their deaths; or we can err on the side of rehabilitation and redemption. That's a philosophical matter, and I won't pretend anyone can prove which is the better way to go. I myself have been heavily influenced by Alistair MacIntyre's notion that the only way to think about ethics is to figure out what kind of story you are living, and what you want the end to be. I want the end to be compassion, redemption, equal opportunity, and mercy. I want to make the kind of society that refuses to give up on anybody--and what is the death penalty but fully, completely, giving up on a person and declaring them of no worth whatsoever? We can avenge the death of good people by ending the lives of the wicked (to write in stereotypes) or we can honor the character of good people by helping form the wicked, eventually, into newly good persons as well. A needle in the arm is easy; and perhaps more immediately satisfying. But the society I want doesn't do things just because it's quicker and easier, either.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 3:44 PM on May 1, 2014 [35 favorites]

"People die every day for the "crime" of liking to smoke or eat french fries more than they like to take their statins and blood pressure meds."

Wait, the state executes people for liking to smoke or eat french fries?

This is exactly what my dumb spider comment was trying to get at. People really don't stop to distinguish between nature and the state, the individual and the state, between things that are merely unfair and things that are actually unjust.
posted by like_a_friend at 4:02 PM on May 1, 2014

This is hopelessly muddled.

It would be nice if you could tone it down with this stuff. It's not muddled.

"Vengeance" is not the same thing as "reciprocity" or "proportionality"

You are correct. Vengeance is taking a harmful action against someone in response to a harm committed against you. Reciprocity and proportionality would limit the kind and degree of what the harmful act of vengeance could be. There is no reason why vengeance could not be reciprocal or proportional to the original harm, and no reason why it must necessarily be uneven and out of proportion to the original harm.

Just because the code occasionally specifies that the perpetrator has the same thing done to him/her as s/he did to the victim (i.e. "an eye for an eye") does not mean that those portions of the code are any more codifications of "vengeance" than any other.

I disagree. It is imposing harm against someone because they committed a harm against someone else. It effectively limits how far vengeance for the harm done to the victim can go for those particular acts.

You don't actually believe this.

I don't condone vengeance as the basis for a justice system, no, and I don't think your example is an example of a "just" revenge. I wouldn't rule out that vengeance can be just, though.
posted by Hoopo at 4:21 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

TIL/of interest:

"Conceptualizations of public support for the death penalty that suggest that punitiveness, desire for vengenance, authoritarianism, polital conservatism, or other characteristics generally held in low esteem by many in the academic and research communities are the primary or most significant predictors of citizen responses to this issue are challenged. It is proposed instead that fear of crime, perceptions of increasing crime rates, a belief in the efficacy of punishment as a means of deterrence, and a willingness to employ punishment as a response to criminality have a far more important causal role than has previously been recognized."

—"A sociological perspective on public support for capital punishment." [Thomas 1975] American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
posted by polymodus at 4:22 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

So what you're saying is death penalty proponents should start prefixing their statements with

"I'm not vengeful but...."
posted by Talez at 4:36 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

No policy eliminates all crime or comes without cost, but you don't have to look far to find countries in the developed world that have managed to bear the cost of these social services and have lenient prison sentences by US terms. These countries have lower murder rates and to me seem like nicer places to live.

That's what happens when you see poverty as circumstance and not a giant moral failing on behalf of a person.
posted by Talez at 4:39 PM on May 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

Not for nothing, but I think it is real fierce of all the European drug manufacturers to embargo the United States when it comes to these drugs. Especially because we Americans have done such a shitty job of curbing the death-industry ourselves.

Also, .
posted by likeatoaster at 4:51 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's been mentioned previously in this thread by TedW, but I want to highlight something in Charlie Pierce's column for those who aren't Pierce aficionados. Pierce nearly always bowdlerizes "fucking" as "fcking" when not quoting someone. In this column he does not. At every mention of Governor Fallin's name he explicitly calls her a "fucking barbarian" or calls the execution an "act of fucking barbarism." Pierce isn't known for pulling punches, but I read his column regularly and thought this one was extraordinary.

As for the death penalty, given that we know that innocent people are convicted by our courts with alarming frequency, I cannot support any punishment that cannot be undone.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:20 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Whoah. I just kind of fell down the rabbit hole of the daughter, Native American regalia appropriation, protest/doubling down of cultural insensitivity, and Wayne Coyne is mixed up in all this too?

How the Flaming Lips Lost a Drummer Over Native American Appropriation
posted by homunculus at 5:35 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Why an Iranian mother saved her son's killer.
posted by BinGregory at 5:36 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

"It is proposed instead that fear of crime, perceptions of increasing crime rates, a belief in the efficacy of punishment as a means of deterrence, and a willingness to employ punishment as a response to criminality have a far more important causal role than has previously been recognized."

This is really interesting. If this is true we can chalk yet another societal atrocity up to the inability of most people to objectively assess risk. If this is true, then all that hooing and hawing about family's rights for closure, being unwilling to pay for 3 hots and a cot and about justice only being served if a murderer experiences being murdered is a cover. All those arguments may be easier for the pro side to admit than to admit, "I have fear."

If the pro side of this debate is really coming from a place of fear and risk assessment, then they need to concede to that so we can address the factual flaws of their position instead of the ethical flaws of their position.

I have a personal litmus test: Is this risk greater than my risk of dying in a car accident? My risk of being murdered by a murderer who could have been swayed by the death penalty is way low! Way, way low! In fact, there are so many studies that say that they're not swayed to any statistically significant degree at all. The only type of murder that makes the top actuarial list is murder by firearm and that's the other societal atrocity that is fueled by the inability to assess risk ... p(death by own gun) > p(death by any other gun).

Murder is way below automobile death in the charts, folks, so maybe if you're going to trigger a state constitutional crisis, do it over highway safety instead of over your irrational fear of dudes that are already behind bars.

If this is really about ethics, which it is also, then there is no ethical system where the death penalty makes sense in modern society. Arguing ethics won't matter much if it's really about perceived fear, though.
posted by Skwirl at 5:36 PM on May 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Or someone like McVeigh, who knowingly put a bomb under a government building with a day care center?

I think McVeigh's execution is one of the very best examples that could possibly be used to argue against the death penalty, because merely sentencing him to death gave the public a false sense of closure, and that let a justice system which has never had the guts to investigate crimes by the extreme right on its own off the hook, effectively eliminating any possibility that the extensive network infrastructure supporting far right terrorism in this country, and which aided and abetted McVeigh, would suffer any exposure whatsoever as a result of his crime -- thereby setting the stage for an unending series of crimes such as the recent murders by Frazier Glenn Cook of three people he believed to be Jews, and nearly one hundred murders in the last five years by registered members of Stormfront alone.
posted by jamjam at 5:47 PM on May 1, 2014 [22 favorites]

Nobody deserves to die like this.
posted by schmod

In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood's William Money, said to Gene Hackman right before blowing his brains out, in Unforgiven, "deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
posted by spitbull at 5:56 PM on May 1, 2014

Out of curiosity how would death penalty supporters define "justice" for the family of a person wrongly executed?
posted by Poldo at 6:03 PM on May 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

Wow, man, Wayne Coyne has really become a tremendous asshole, huh?
posted by klangklangston at 6:10 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

For a minute there, he thought he was the next Perry Farrell. But then that shit fell by the wayside.
posted by valkane at 6:16 PM on May 1, 2014

If killing folks is wrong, then how can killing folks that kill folks be right?
posted by valkane at 6:31 PM on May 1, 2014

Execution is an expression of the idea that violence is a solution. Executing people makes us less evolved as humans.

For reasons of racial justice alone, the death penalty should be ceased. There's no question that the death penalty is racist as hell. If you are African-American and kill a white person, your sentence will be vastly different than a white person who kills an African-American.

Nobody should have to have, as their job, the task of cold-bloodedly killing a person. That's just twisted.
posted by theora55 at 6:37 PM on May 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

the inability of most people to objectively assess risk.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why is one of those books I keep buying, because I follow Adama's rule.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:50 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

I haven't read any of this yet, the article or the comments, because I'm opposed to the death penalty and unexpected violence, like exploding veins, is panic attack territory for me. But I'm going to leave this tab open and read it all, to witness. My discomfort is small, comparatively speaking. (Voicing this thought gives me a stronger incentive to follow through, which is why I'm posting this.)
posted by Ruki at 6:59 PM on May 1, 2014

.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:12 PM on May 1, 2014

"Imagine if he was given help, therapy and medication the first time in prison rather than being left to rot for 14 years then released back into society."

Most Level 3 sex offenders, considered the most likely to reoffend, are at that level because they refused treatment, counseling, or medication. That refusal of help didn't keep them off the street, however. Duncan wasn't "left to rot" in prison; instead, he had access to every kind of help imaginable at no cost. He's a very intelligent man who used the law library at the prison to learn enough law that he thought he was able to defend himself when he finally got caught. He took the meds they gave him because it made him appear cooperative and it might enable him to earn an earlier release - would anyone seriously believe he stayed on his meds during his killing sprees?. He's also, for the record, white, nice-looking, has even been called "charming" and did not come from a poverty-stricken childhood.

Joseph Duncan ravaged, tortured and murdered children across the country for years and years. His stint in prison had no effect. He liked to drive around and find little kids who were playing outdoors, then plan and plot the kidnapping, then grab the kids, use them for days for sexual torture, then finally kill them. When he hit this area, it was only one stop along his road.

I don't know anything about Wilmington NC - sorry; what I do know is that Duncan, like many others, was in and out of jail, over and over again, and he took each of his turns at freedom as an opportunity to kill some more kids. His story is hardly unique.

As for "Seriously folks, can't you at least just murder a man if you have to kill someone?" - oh, please. If you want to go to the idea of whether murdering a woman or a child or a man is worse than the others, that isn't what I was saying at all and I think you know that. What my point is, to make it clearly clearly clear, is that I believe it's part of incarceration to separate men who have murdered children from the other prisoners for their own protection; I think that also holds true in the case of men who have raped, murdered or mutilated women. Apparently that man's life is in serious jeopardy from fellow prisoners and that's why he's kept out of the general prison population.

Again, my point is that the death penalty needs to be eliminated because it cannot be applied as a form of justice under today's laws; for some, this is a good thing because they don't believe anyone should be put to death no matter how heinous their crime, but for others who might accept death as a penalty under certain circumstances, they too have to recognize that it simply can't work.
posted by aryma at 7:21 PM on May 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Scenes like what happened in Oklahoma, and the other botched executions that have happened since states decided to start experimenting to see what might kill people after the supply of their drugs was cut off, cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.

These "executions" are not executions, they're experiments to see what happens. They won't tell the public what's in the cocktail, it could be drano for all we know. There is no data on how these drugs will react together, because it is illegal to do experiments like that. You know, unless you happen to have a death row inmate handy.

Even if you are pro-death penalty, the question in these cases is; should we be allowing human experimentation in the same of "justice"?
posted by dejah420 at 7:27 PM on May 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

Again, my point is that the death penalty needs to be eliminated because it cannot be applied as a form of justice under today's laws; for some, this is a good thing because they don't believe anyone should be put to death no matter how heinous their crime, but for others who might accept death as a penalty under certain circumstances, they too have to recognize that it simply can't work.

Yeah. Heinous. Death. You said you would wield the sword, so to speak, to put your example Joe under ground. I get that. I think I would too. That's simple black and white. But That's not what these anti-death penalty folks are talking about.

I'm sure you understand that.
posted by valkane at 7:42 PM on May 1, 2014

Thanks to the people in this thread arguing against the death penalty for giving me a bit of hope that not everyone in this country is an ignorant and sanctimonious barbarian.
posted by maxwelton at 12:33 AM on May 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

As a nation that is so good at killing people, we are surprisingly bad at killing people.

I liked James Nicoll's deeply bitter take on this:

Oklahoma tortures black man to death.

Most Americans worship a dark god that has reportedly vowed to torture most people for eternity, so this would presumably a sacrament to them.

posted by MartinWisse at 1:10 AM on May 2, 2014 [8 favorites]

I am deeply ashamed that such barbaric horror is permitted, let alone sanctioned. It is time for the US to pick itself up out of the dark ages and stop this.

But then, universal health care will probably never happen here, so I guess I have to accept that my country does indeed choose to torture people to death, especially if they have no money. In a truly capitalist society, only the wealthy have real value, apparently.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:00 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead

Not everybody gets what they deserve in this world, good or bad.
posted by empath at 5:11 AM on May 2, 2014

Do not go gently into the night: Oklahoma inmate Tasered by prison staff on day of botched execution
posted by Mister Bijou at 5:43 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

It baffles me that the largest group of people who support the death penalty contains two large subgroups who

a) claim to be Christian

b) claim to be afraid of a tyrannical government
posted by Legomancer at 5:43 AM on May 2, 2014 [10 favorites]

Read about Joseph Duncan and tell me he doesn't deserve to die - go ahead

Not everybody gets what they deserve in this world, good or bad.

Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.
posted by koebelin at 5:45 AM on May 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

It baffles me that the largest group of people who support the death penalty contains two large subgroups who

a) claim to be Christian

b) claim to be afraid of a tyrannical government

To be fair, they are almost always either or both of those in extremely selective fashions.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:20 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lots of interesting discussion here, but one person that seems mostly left out of the discussion is the actual executioner. From a link in adoarns excellent comment above:


Tell me more about how the profession was viewed by the public.
Traditionally, it was odious. In Frantz Schmidt’s lifetime there was more of a mixed feeling—that it was important work that needed to be done by a professional. But no one would want their daughter to marry an executioner. So there was a kind of professional respect but it didn’t translate into sociability. An executioner could not go into somebody’s home, or into a tavern or public bath. Most churches wouldn’t let an executioner inside. So it was a really lonely life.

And that was in a time when capital punishment had almost universal acceptance. If you kill others on a regular basis, even with state sanction, what does it do to your respect for human life? And for those who support the death penalty and say they would be happy to carry it out, especially those who think murderers should die the way they killed their victims; what they are really saying is that they would willingly kill, even torture to death, another human being. Im not sure that makes them much better than those they would put to death. I'm not even sure I like the thought of those people walking the streets, especially since I live in a state that has taken our gun fetish to a new level.
posted by TedW at 6:22 AM on May 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

Drugs in botched Oklahoma execution leaked from IV

OKLAHOMA CITY — Some of the three drugs used in a botched Oklahoma execution this week didn't enter the inmate's system because the vein they were injected into collapsed, and that failure wasn't noticed for 21 minutes, the state's prison chief said, urging changes to the state's execution procedure.

Medical officials tried for nearly an hour to find a vein in Clayton Lockett's arms, legs and neck before finally inserting an IV into his groin, prisons director Robert Patton wrote in a letter to the governor Thursday detailing Lockett's last day.

By the time a doctor lifted a sheet covering the inmate and noticed the line had become dislodged from the vein, all of the execution drugs had already been administered and there wasn't another suitable vein, the report noted.

"The drugs had either absorbed into tissue, leaked out or both," Patton wrote. "The director asked the following question: 'Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?' The doctor responded, 'No.'"

posted by tonycpsu at 7:10 AM on May 2, 2014

Do not go gently into the night

It reminds me of this exchange from Boston Legal:

Zeke Borns: Let's do this. I'm ready to die. I'm strong.

Alan Shore: Zeke, you talked about being a hero. Strong and brave, may not go with hero here.

Zeke Borns: What do you mean?

Alan Shore: The State of Texas wants people to believe you're a monster. I think you should show them you're a human being. The human thing to do here is be afraid. If you wanna be a hero, show people what it really feels like to be executed. We're led to believe it's peaceful, painless, humane even. I think you should fight to the end, Zeke. And show your fear.

Zeke Borns: This cause you're against the death penalty? Right?

Alan Shore: Well. Whether a person is for or against the death penalty, he or she should just know what it is. The best way for you to be a hero Zeke, is to be human.

posted by Talez at 8:47 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Re: Christians and the death penalty, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I got a hate-tweet from a stranger in response to a dark joke I made about Oklahoma on twitter. (I said that Oscar Hammerstein was in heaven wishing he'd written a catchy song about some other damn state.)

After this person sent me a pithy, "Up Yours" I looked at his bio. It read "LIVE FOR JESUS." If I'd further wanted to inflame him I could've responded, I understand you support the barbarous death penalty, you religion wouldn't exist if the Romans hadn't had one ...

(That large -or is it just a vocal minority - subset of Xians who crave authoritarianism, relish violence, loathe everyone who isn't exactly like them, believe everything opposite of my interpretation of the statements attributed to Jesus - you're really not surprised by them at this point, are you?)
posted by NorthernLite at 10:10 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the Guardian article linked from Mister Bijou's comment above:

Oklahoma's timeline also goes into detail about what happened before and during the attempted execution. At 5.22pm, Lockett was restrained on the execution table, but a suitable vein could not be found anywhere on his body in which to insert an intravenous line. Veins on his legs and arms were rejected before a doctor examined his neck, and then finally his groin.

The timeline reveals that the insertion point was covered by a sheet “to prevent witness viewing of the groin area”. The execution began at 6.23pm with the injection of the first of a cocktail of three drugs, but the intravenous line – covered by the sheet – was only checked after 6.44pm, when the blinds between the execution chamber and the viewing room were lowered.

There are so many things wrong here that I don't even know where to begin, but I'd very much like to hear from any medical types in the room: what is a femoral IV, when is it indicated, what are its risks, &c. Almost everything that turns up in my PubMed & Google searches focuses on the use of the femoral vein by injecting drug users (where it is associated with DVT [1,2,3]), but that's not applicable here. The only other thing I find are a handful of references to femoral vein cannulation for placing central venous catheters (eg [5,6]), which also doesn't seem quite right. So can someone please explain what this was, why they did it, and what the potential complications of it could be?
posted by Westringia F. at 10:37 AM on May 2, 2014

"The drugs had either absorbed into tissue, leaked out or both," Patton wrote. "The director asked the following question: 'Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?' The doctor responded, 'No.'"

Million dollar question: if enough drugs were not administered, how did he die?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:46 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

(Partially answering my on question about complications, I just found this metaanalysis which states femoral CVC routes are associated with higher risk of thrombotic events (blood clots) than subclavian routes, not unlike the higher risk of DVT in drug users who inject into their groin; I'm curious if the femoral IV could have anything to do with the heart attack he [supposedly] suffered 30 min later. But I still don't understand: if they were looking to place an IV on arms/legs then they didn't need central venous access, right? So what were they doing there in the first place?)
posted by Westringia F. at 10:48 AM on May 2, 2014

Million dollar question: if enough drugs were not administered, how did he die?

Air embolism will cause a heart attack.
posted by KathrynT at 10:54 AM on May 2, 2014

KathrynT, it is my understanding (medical person correct me if I'm wrong) that a heart-attack causing air embolism needs to travel to the heart directly via vein.

Since apparently they didn't even get the needles into the veins, the question remains:

How did this man actually die?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:09 AM on May 2, 2014

A guess: they pumped a bunch of poison into his tissue/muscle, which stressed his body enough to kill him - just slower and more painfully than if they had gotten the injection right.
posted by Mid at 11:11 AM on May 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

So can someone please explain what this was, why they did it, and what the potential complications of it could be?

Until an actual medical type chimes in, I can tell you (ER doc) mr. ambrosia's reaction to this timeline: an IV in the groin is really tricky to do properly, because the IV needle itself is not very long, and it doesn't take very much motion from the patient to dislodge the IV needle from the vein. If you need to use the groin area, a central line is a much better method, but that can't be inserted by a phlebotomist, it must be inserted by an actual doctor. Which gets back to the whole problem of physicians observing but not participating in executions.
posted by ambrosia at 11:40 AM on May 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thanks, rope-rider & ambrosia!
posted by Westringia F. at 11:41 AM on May 2, 2014

Forgot to add: when an IV needle inserted in the hand is dislodged, it's obvious right away because the fluid makes the hand all puffy. But there is space around the groin for IV fluid to go in the event that the needle is dislodged from the vein where it is not immediately obvious that IV is no longer in the bloodstream.
posted by ambrosia at 11:46 AM on May 2, 2014

In law school we spent weeks in criminal law discussing the purpose of sentences and the death penalty. I still think about the issue of rehabilitation versus punishment versus deterrence.

Then and now I don't think the death penalty serves any of those ends but it does serve the purpose of revenge. And if that is so, I fail to see why we worry so much about making it comfortable or humane except to make us, society's citizens, feel better about doing such a deed.
posted by OhSusannah at 12:53 PM on May 2, 2014

They want revenge but they want it bloodless and sanitized. They want suffering, but they don't actually want to see it, and if they do it can't be too much, because then they're Bad People who made someone suffer.

Supporting the death penalty is as egregiously vomit-inducing to me as racism or sexism. It simply has no place in a civilized society, period.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:28 PM on May 2, 2014 [9 favorites]

"Oklahoma’s executioners accidentally killed Clayton D. Lockett last night while trying to put him to death." --Jack Shafer, Reuters
posted by maggieb at 5:58 PM on May 2, 2014

If we're going to have executions, sometimes I wonder if they shouldn't be like jury duty -- anyone might get selected. You, your sister, your son, your grandmother, any of you might be called on to perform the actions that end someone's life.

Except you don't get paid. You don't even get free counseling. You can't kick yourself off during a selection process. You can refuse, but you can also spend up to six months in prison for it.

Only way you can opt out is by signing a registry officially opposing the death penalty. If a plurality opt out, we don't do it anymore.

Of course I'm assuming more than half the population isn't made of folks like George Zimmerman who are perfectly willing to personally wield lethal force casually. Perhaps optimistic.
posted by weston at 6:32 PM on May 2, 2014 [15 favorites]

The timeline reveals that the insertion point was covered by a sheet “to prevent witness viewing of the groin area”.

This, in one sentence, sums up everything that's wrong with America.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:50 AM on May 3, 2014 [9 favorites]

jeffamaphone: "This is horrible, and I am very much against the death penalty. But what scares me more than states botching executions is states botching executions despite the fact that their supreme court stayed the execution. This is one for the text books. Why aren't people calling for the resignation of this Governor? CEOs lose their jobs for being racist or homophobic; how can law-breaking, inmate murdering, judiciary intimidating Governors and Legislators keep their jobs?"

I hate to defend the waste of space I (not so) affectionately refer to as Mary Failin', but it's at least arguable that the Oklahoma Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to issue a stay of execution. (I disagree..they would have been overstepping their authority had the stay been based on the criminal case itself, but it was not) That is the Court of Criminal Appeals' bailiwick here. That particular court is packed with a group of bloodthirsty moral degenerates.

On the bright side, this particular incident has caused most of the incredibly sick people who share this state with me and who are just delighted that this guy was tortured the way he was to separate themselves from those who are not as morally suspect as the criminals we put to death despite their support for the death penalty. Well, I don't know if I'd call it bright, but it's about the only good thing to come of it, knowing who I need to watch out for.
posted by wierdo at 11:10 AM on May 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

kgasmart: "we have an obligation to respond forcefully to barbarism"

Unfortunately, the degenerates do not see torturing a man to death as barbarism, so they do not respond forcefully, they celebrate it.
posted by wierdo at 11:26 AM on May 3, 2014

Adding more barbarism to an already barbaric act (the original crime) doesn't really do a whole lot to reduce the amount of barbarism in the world.

Plus there's all that stuff about how the death penalty isn't a deterrent of any kind whatsoever, and all you're talking about is vengeance. Nothing more.

Barbarism must be met with compassion and the possibility of rehabilitation, even redemption is possible in some cases. That doesn't mean don't lock dangerous people up.

I'm curious, kgasmart. We've had an oft-quoted statistic in this thread that 4% of executions/death row inmates are in fact innocent.

Do you believe that killing 4 innocent people is acceptable collateral damage for killing 96 guilty ones? What if you were one of the innocents?

To say nothing of the travesty of justice involved, where according to that statistic 4/100 murderers walk away scot free.

Do you truly believe either of those things do anything to further the course of a just society? Do you truly believe it's okay to kill some innocent people as long as we get more badguys?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:41 PM on May 3, 2014

Vengeance has been brought up a lot in this thread.

But what's the best, ethically defensible case for death penalty supporters? A swift and painless death inflicted on an undeniably guilty torturer, rapist and killer. But, that's the kind of death we give the animals we love. And we don't allow assisted suicide in this country, plenty of people drown in their own fluids, or die in pain after suffering for weeks or months. But murderers - in theory - are supposed to get a mercifully quick death? That seems like a pretty unsatisfying, milquetoast kind of vengeance to me.

Anyhow, innocent people get convicted of murder, that's an irrefutable fact, which is enough to make the rest of the discussion academic for me. You can release an innocent guy from jail and give him a million dollars and say Sorry! but you can't un-kill him.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 5:51 AM on May 4, 2014

mrbigmuscles: "A swift and painless death inflicted on an undeniably guilty torturer, rapist and killer. But, that's the kind of death we give the animals we love."

If the majority in this country who claim to believe in Christianity took it seriously, they would talk about how even the worst of us deserve at least as much love and mercy as a beloved pet whose time has come, and how it is God's place to punish the evildoers. They would not be talking about how murderers deserve to be tortured to death.

I agree that it is pretty weird how when it's the death penalty, it's just God's will being carried out, but if someone wants to end their life rather than live out the last, worst, days of their terminal illness that's taking God's power into human hands and that's not OK. I grasp that some level of cognitive dissonance is necessary to make religion work, but you'd think they'd be more self-consistent. Either killing by human hands outside of immediate self defense is wrong or it is not.
posted by wierdo at 2:45 PM on May 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Death Penalty
posted by homunculus at 1:52 AM on May 5, 2014

In Email Exchanges, Oklahoma Officials Joked About Trading Lethal Injection Advice For Football Tickets
posted by desjardins at 10:58 AM on May 5, 2014

This was not a death penalty case, technically, but:

3 Men Are Exonerated of Murder in Cases Tied to a Discredited Brooklyn Detective

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office will ask a judge to vacate the murder convictions of three half-brothers whose trials relied on questionable evidence produced by a now discredited homicide detective, several lawyers close to the cases said.
[...]
If the prosecutors’ request is granted, only one man, Mr. Hill, will actually gain his freedom. Mr. Jennette, 50, was released on parole in 2007; Mr. Austin died in prison 14 years ago at age 37.

For Mr. Austin, who died in prison, and for the murder victim, whose actual murderer has never been brought to justice thanks to a corrupt detective and a corrupt system.

.

.
posted by rtha at 8:45 PM on May 5, 2014

This world map of prison populations is an embarrassment to every American
posted by homunculus at 1:50 PM on May 7, 2014

That's a hideously depressing graphic even if you know roughly what it's going to display.
posted by rtha at 2:04 PM on May 7, 2014

And in "irony that makes you cry" news, there's this gem of a comment:

Oklahoma Representative Mike Christian is a lawmaker who pushed to have state Supreme Court justices impeached for briefly halting Tuesday's execution.
He says he doesn't care whether inmates are executed by injection, electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or "being fed to the lions."
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:02 PM on May 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

In the wake of a botched execution, an Oklahoma court has granted a six-month stay for a man on death row.
posted by desjardins at 7:19 AM on May 9, 2014