Bringing Death Penalty Back at the Federal Level After Two Decades

South Korea has a moratorium on the death penalty and hasn't executed anybody in over twenty years.

Of the 58 countries considered "very high" on the human development index, only 11 have the death penalty still:

United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus (weird one), Oman, Malaysia, Taiwan.

Not exactly a great list to be on for the US and Japan when you look at the other human rights issues these countries have.

tigerswood said:

South Korea and Japan hang death row inmates. China shoots them in the head (not joking). Seemed relevant.

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Those processes sound way more efficient than the US system.

Buttermaker said:

Those processes sound way more efficient than the US system.

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Does efficient modify mode of death here or the overall process?

Junebug said:

I would rather 100 guilty men walk free than execute a single innocent man.
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If you are actually being honest here, then you cannot support the death penalty in this country. We have put far more than 1 innocent person to death , and big shock here but these people are almost always poor and African American.

Here is one particular heinous abuse of the death penalty that happened in South Carolina

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article231467578.html

So it’s doesn’t matter because it happened a long time ago? It sure mattered to that 14 year old kid that the state murdered.

Junebug said:

Depending on how it is administered, [capital punishment] is neither cruel nor unusual.

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Can we go back to this for a second?

Setting aside that, yes, the public executions Junebug is inexplicably advocating for are absolutely cruel and unusual, what method of execution are you suggesting isn't?

Because, uh, lethal injections sure as shit are both cruel and unusual, mostly due to the problems states have in finding a.) someone qualified to perform an execution and b.) appropriate drugs to do the necessary steps (especially the anesthetic, which a capital punishment advocate might argue is crucial in making lethal injections neither cruel or unusual).

Junebug said:

I’m not suggesting suspending habeas or anything. I’m suggesting specialized death penalty courts to expedite the process.

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Only those on death row deserve a speedy trial?

It will be interesting to see how/where the federal government acquires their pentobarbital for executions. European manufacturers do not sell it to states that may be using it for lethal injection and several of the American sources (compounding pharmacies) have had their licenses revoked. In fact, states that use pentobarbital - either in a three drug cocktail solution or as a one drug solution, as two other of the other frequently used compounds were similarly difficult or even more difficult to acquire than pentobarbital (so states opted to go to a one drug solution as this method had already been upheld by the courts) - are already encountering difficulty in continuing to acquire the drug.

Guillotining was common in the public square in France until a law in 1939 brought it behind the prison wall.

Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish convincingly that the evolution of criminal justice through reform has mostly gotten crueler and more unusual. His four stages were: torture (public), punishment (public), discipline (private), prison (private, intentionally and aggressively). Though legal scholars critique the work for focusing too heavily on political history and not enough on legal, I find most of his thesis compelling.

In the US though the best early intentions were rehabilitation through "penitent reflection" in a penitentiary, we designed a ton of panopticon style prisons and then privatized them so quickly that we never really got reform right. The arguments I'm hearing from Junebug just seem so closely to reflect the torture side:

"It [torture] assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be manifested and annulled. It also made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces."

Or to borrow a phrase we're hearing a lot lately "the cruelty is the point."

Shooshmoo said:

Load of shit. First of all, no one believes you have empathy for victims and society as a whole given your politics. Second, sitting on death row, again, is a severe punishment.

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He feels empathy for some victims. I forget again what characteristics they all share...

Junebug said:

I would rather 100 guilty men walk free than execute a single innocent man.

But, again, the delays in death penalty cases do not typically relate to guilt or innocence.

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But people on death row have been exonerated. Which means that a more efficient system would lead to more innocent people dying. No big deal, you could always explain to the families of the innocent people executed by the state that you had their interests in mind when you put in place a more expedient system for their loved ones to be murdered in the public square.

Over 180 people on death row have been exonerated. It’s not a small number.

Hey I think I found a boards poster.

Wakeforest22890 said:

Over 180 people on death row have been exonerated. It’s not a small number.

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in the history of the country?

Junebug said:

That’s hilarious and all, but juries must find facts relevant to convictions and imposition of the death penalty.

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So, you'd rush the death penalty. When innocent people are executed, you wouldn't give a fuck. In your world, it's the cost of doing business.

The death penalty should be unconstitutional because it is impossible to apply accurately because of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. The SCOTUS found that at one point but sadly they came back to it a few years later. It’s no surprise that the states that are the highest killers are all Southern states.

And Junebug, the point of criminal justice should be to rehabilitate, not punish at all costs until some subjective equilibrium has been achieved.

Junebug said:

That’s hilarious and all, but juries must find facts relevant to convictions and imposition of the death penalty.

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This is dumb and all, because the government decides whether we kill the person the jury finds guilty.

Irrespective of whether you believe the state possesses the right to put someone to death, this is a situation where ideals should give way to empiricism. There is an abundance of evidence showing our system makes the death penalty too costly, too protracted of a process, and too frequently misapplied. And we shouldn’t be willing to alter the system that makes it that way. Ergo, just stop doing it.

Bingo, my fellow Alabamian!

The criminal justice system is already fucked up by having a bunch of rubes sitting on a jury deciding the outcome. If I’m actually guilty and want to get away with it, bring on the sailors of the world. If I’m innocent I want no part of that mongoloid army deciding my fate with life or death in the equation.