I am very against medicalised punishments like this. It’s bad for medicine as a whole to be associated with it. I also think it prolongs the suffering of the person and often has things like this happen, and is mainly for the benefit of the audience not wanting to see icky blood.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
Medical professionals do not take part in executions. Lethal injection has the vague trappings of a medical procedure, but is fundamentally not one. Prisons even must resort to trickery to obtain the drugs, as pharmaceutical organisations are prohibited ethically and even sometimes legally from selling to them.
By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.
This is what I don’t understand. You don’t need a doctor to tell you what to do. Like ChatGPT 3.5 could tell you the best way to kill a person painlessly and effectively. Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation or a morphine overdose or something?
> Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation
Alabama have just started using this method - and it appears to be extremely torturous. Rather than just passing out, the person suffocates while conscious:
The news is that lethal injections are legal, but required a retry. GP asked: So why not a firing squad? Them retrying might be less cruel than reinjection.
Agreed. Mock executions are considered to be a form of torture. Botched executions are perhaps even worse, given the actual physical pain and severe risk of brain injuries being inflicted.
Studies are warranted to determine the pattern of introduction of nitrogen that eliminates any adverse sensations. The studies could probably be done on those seeking assisted suicide.
Because in the cases where we've used nitrogen gas we've observed people suffering. Nitrogen works if the victim breathes normally. But people naturally won't do that when you put the murder mask over their mouth and nose.
I would guess that most people being shot and dies do so from bleeding out or disruption to breathing, and not the impact itself. The only thing that actually is guarantied to work, fast and produce minimal pain would be an high speed explosion.
I thought overdosing on opiates was highly easy to achieve, basically pain free, and also relatively cheap even in the social backwaters of the world where they have death penalties?
How an opiate impact a person varies from person to person. Some would fall asleep, others would violently convulse, some would get trouble breathing, and others would get irregular heart rhythms and multiple heart attacks.
This is how pets are euthanized, usually, and it's about as humane as it gets. That said, you'd never sell this because the portion of the population who want the death penalty either want it to be inhumane, or would balk at the possibility of making the condemned euphoric before death.
I’m against capital punishment and I agree with you. If it’s to be done at all, it should be brutal, bloody, and instant. Capital punishment is barbaric and shouldn’t be concealed under false cover like medical procedure.
If I had to die I want the injection because if it works right you just doze off and die. That compared to being tied to a pole and have people fire guns at you seems terrible. There is a significant chance of serious pain and suffering.
"If it works right" is doing quite the heavy lifting here. The adminsitering guards are not medical professionals, nor are the people designing the protocols.
I think you have that the wrong way round. The injection is far more likely to cause intense pain and suffering due to the lack of medical professionals being involved (it's not a medical procedure). The drugs are often obtained from "dodgy" sources and so the dosage can't be determined due to the variability of the drugs. The lack of medical professionals will often mean that the injections are poorly administered (e.g. missing a vein).
I was just reading a Reddit post from a veterinarian and the protocol for euthanising animals is far better than that used for lethal injections - notably pre-meds are used to sedate the patient and prevent breathing issues and panic.
A bullet or two to the head is far more effective and reliable. The only downside to lethal shooting is that it looks too barbaric to observers.
Firing squads should be making a comeback given recent Trump DOJ guidelines that break with what had been the precedent on these questions.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
It may make pharma look bad, but that is an entirely accurate conclusion, and that is a big reason that they’ve begun refusing to distribute the lethal drugs that have been extremely efficacious.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
> for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me
She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.
> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now
Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
> Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.
I interpreted it as an implication that it should be viewed as a lesser crime due to the perpetrator's age. At 18 you can:
• Vote
• Fight in the military
• Act in pornography
• Rent a car in MI, NY, QC
• Many other adult things
The crime perpetrated was premeditated and particularly demonic. It's a far cry from shoplifting a Snickers bar.
> is kind of upsetting
Bringing a chunk of the victim's skull to school to show your friends how good you are at murdering was probably pretty upsetting to a few people, like the victim's family and friends.
The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.
Even now, though, in every state in the US, you're not a full adult when you're eighteen. You're not allowed to buy alcohol until you're 21. In a lot of states you're not allowed to buy cigarettes. We've decided that, despite being "grown ups", they're still not grown up enough to be trusted with these things.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
> The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.
I think you have it backwards: "They" didn't have any trouble sending 18 year old that couldn't vote to fight in Vietnam. It was those 18 year olds who demanded a greater say in the political process because that was being demanded of them.
> This means young men could be required to fight and possibly die for their nation in wartime at 18. However, these same citizens could not have a legal say in the government's decision to wage that war until the age of 21. A youth rights movement emerged in response, calling for a similarly reduced voting age. A common slogan of proponents of lowering the voting age stated "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote".
Also, according to that article, there were efforts before 1971 to lower the voting age, they just couldn't pass the very high constitutional amendment bar.
Sure. I am just saying that until the 70s eighteen year olds weren’t even considered “full” adults with all the privileges thereof. They still aren’t given that they’re still not allowed to drink (in the US).
The state-administered judicial violence of locking someone in a cage until they die of old age strikes me as pretty similar to the state-administered judicial violence of executing someone, in terms of severity.
The point (or one of the points) is that execution is reversible. I mean there are some cases of people who sat in prison for decades when it was determined they were innocent. If you accept potential failure of the legal system (which is obviously the case) how can you be a proponent of executions?
I extrapolated from the fact that 18 year olds couldn’t vote prior to 1971. I will admit that “agreed” might have been a bit too strong of a word, but it seems like the United States didn’t think that 18 year olds were “full” adults yet.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
I don't want my taxes going to private prison companies for the rest of her life.
I also don't want to see or hear about executions with whatever methods, it's revolting, but then again, public executions in Europe stopped like what, less than 200 years ago? And the public craved it.
Fun fact, France practiced guillotining through 1977.
The problem with this argument is that being a few months older or younger would decide between life and death for the very same crime.
Her boyfriend who was just a couple of months younger got a lighter sentence with the option of parole, partly because he was 17.
You don’t suddenly become a different person on your 18th birthday.
Execution is a weird thing for a civilized society to do and the bizarre people that fetishize it say weird shit like “It makes sense to murder somebody if they made other people upset” to avoid talking about how it doesn’t solve any problems that aren’t already solved by life imprisonment. The justification for execution is always “I want the state to kill people because I enjoy that sort of thing”
Society does not have an obligation to house and feed such people for decades on end. I'd rather they be killed because it should be much cheaper; whether it actually is or not by some aberration of dumb policy is not relevant to the philosophy. They are the enemy of society and are owed absolutely nothing but swift death, not room and board.
It’s not cheaper, and it really can’t or shouldn’t be.
In the US you have a right to appeal your sentence, which is a good thing. If the government is going to be killing people, we want to (at the very least) make sure they have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. You have to pay someone to read these appeals, typically an attorney or multiple attorneys and/or a judge. There can be a backlog so it can take awhile to get through all of them.
This is inherent to how capital punishment works in the US, and anything less would be borderline tyranny, so I reject your framing of it as “aberration or some dumb policy”.
Well I reject your framing of it being impossible. If it is cheaper to house and feed a man for sixty years than it is to kill him, that is a policy decision, not a law of the universe. Other respectable countries manage to achieve this.
Most other “respectable” countries have actually gotten rid of capital punishment entirely.
I think we are at a fundamental disagreement though; I think it should be expensive and difficult to execute someone. I think the slow appeals process is a good thing. It should hard for the government to kill people who aren’t a direct threat.
I don’t know your politics but it doesn’t matter the specifics. Imagine whichever politician that you think is most stupid and tyrannical. Do you really want to give them the ability to rapidly kill people they don’t like without at least some bureaucratic checks in place?
Politicians don't convict people. It's not a political issue; the person was convicted by a jury of their peers, which philosophically should indicate something important: the body politic unanimously believes he is guilty of heinous crimes. They believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this man, for example, raped and killed a dozen infants. Then in the court of appeals it was upheld. I believe that it is better for society* in that case for that man to then be swiftly executed.
* In the sense that society needs to feel that the state executes justice and that such people are not being kept alive on their own dime. That breeds contempt for the system and for the state.
We can certainly agree that if an innocent person is executed that is just state-sponsored murder, right?
The jury system of the US is a good system but it’s certainly not immune to mob mentality. It’s certainly not immune to appeals to emotion. It’s certainly not immune to any number of the things that make humans human. This is partly why we have an appeals process. If we are going to put someone to death, I think it’s better for them to be given every single avenue possible to prove their innocence so that we aren’t murdering someone innocent.
We are just disagreeing about the ideal number or length of appeals, then. You can never be 100% sure; you could allow a constant state of appeal forever. This applies just as much to locking someone innocent away for life, which is also a big problem, but we don't allow infinite appeals for that either. I just think the current amount of appealing is too much.
If we can’t be 100% sure then I think maybe we shouldn’t have potential state-sponsored murder of innocent people.
People who are a risk to normal society do need to be separated, and for that I am willing to not be 100% sure (though with plenty of chances for appeals). If we lock up someone for a crime they didn’t commit, we at least have the option to release them and potentially pay out some kind of financial settlement as a means of punishing the state for their mistakes. If you kill someone, there’s not really much of an opportunity to even try and make it right.
Politicians literally write the laws that people get convicted of violating, and they can write those laws pretty much however they want. A juror's job is not to decide if they think an act was morally wrong, it's to judge them against the law as written. Laws can and have been written in all kinds of horrible and negligent ways.
Those policies are there to make sure all possible appeals can go through. And can you believe even then it's not enough to stop all executions of innocents?
At the end of the day, the death penalty's only possible justification is retribution. It does not deter crime and incapacitation of the criminal can already be achieved by locking them up. Your logic presupposes that "an eye for an eye" is a legitimate philosophy for a modern State to hold, which is reprehensible.
The philosophy of a state should be that which engenders the greatest wellbeing among its citizens. People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed. Ivory tower philosophizing at the cost of social unity is not so great. Some innocents will die; we accept worse consequences for smaller gains. There have only been ~140 people in the history of the death penalty who have been exonerated from appeal. 140 people die in war every day for less worthy ends.
How do you explain the Nordic countries and Western Europe generally, where retribution has been explicitly rejected as a principle in the criminal justice system? Moreover, how would eliminating the death penalty endanger social unity?
1. Cultural homogeneity; 2. When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.
Can you elaborate on this? How does cultural homogeneity relate to the State being able to ditch retributive principles?
> When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.
That just seems like a problem for education, no? If people are told by their teachers and other figures of authority that retribution isn't good, that should be enough. Again that's how the Nordics do it and it seems to be working out for them.
Sorry, is there any evidence for point 2 or is this just vibes? Violent crime is significantly lower in these countries than the US.
There are a billion potential reasons for this, but it doesn’t appear to be that people have started dawning costumes and LARPing as the Punisher in large numbers.
Evidence for "When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done" is the history of any society prior to 1800 and basic human nature? I don't know, read history and literature and philosophy of the premodern age, or I guess you could call it vibes sure. I believe it to be true and find it self evident.
It is decidedly not self evident given that it is directly contradicted by statistical evidence. Again, violent crime in most European countries is significantly lower than the United States. I would agree that there are lots of reasons for it but it certainly doesn’t appear that the lack of capital punishment is causing massive spikes in crime.
Eudamoniac is pretty clear that this is entirely about their feelings. When the state murders somebody it feels good and when it doesn’t murder people it feels bad.
> society needs to feel that the state executes justice
> People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed
> people feel that justice is not being done
(and again)
> people feel that justice is not being done
They’re not going to give anybody a rational argument here because
> I guess you could call it vibes sure
It’s like asking somebody to justify why they’re really into ABDL stuff. The important part is that they just are, and won’t be talked out of it.
Correct. The value judgements (feelings) of the demos should be reflected in the policies that the democracy enacts and is governed by. That's part of what a government of and by the people means. Governing by any other system, like utilitarianism, or arbitrary moral principles like 'killing criminals is wrong' that the majority of constituents don't hold, needs heavy justification, and may not be justifiable in a democracy. If you'd prefer an oligarchy or monarchy wherein someone can impose their own minority value system on the people, even if that system objectively results in 'better outcomes' whatever that means to you, that's fine, but just be honest about it.
In brief, it doesn't matter what "is best" in some utilitarian framework if the democracy is not attuned to that framework. It doesn't matter if the death penalty actually increases crime. What matters is that the government should be doing what the people want it to be doing. If the people really want to kill criminals, any system that prevents that is non-democratic.
Well, good thing we don't live in any time prior to 1800! What even is that answer? Of course premodern societies would appeal to different aspects of human nature in different ways. The question is whether a society can sustain its own survival and welfare even when certain facets of human nature are frawned upon and discouraged. I see no reason for doubting that this is the case for the retributive instinct, at least when killing is involved.
> I'd rather they be killed because it should be much cheaper; whether it actually is or not by some aberration of dumb policy is not relevant to the philosophy.
I appreciate this rephrasing of “I want the state to murder people because I enjoy that sort of thing”
I would ask if you think that the ~200 death row inmates that been exonerated of their convictions should be alive but uh you already answered that, unprompted
> nothing but swift death
“I want these people murdered because of a reason in my head, but even if the reason in my head weren’t true I’d still want to see them murdered” lmao I know it’s 2026 and it’s considered rude to kink shame but c’mon
No, I'm just making two claims at once. It ought to be cheaper, normatively, and thereby it ought to be done. It's kind of like "I want to see slaves freed because humans should be free, even if there exists a lynch mob that is killing all the freed slaves." The existence of the pathological problem making the claim overall worse, currently, does not affect the philosophy that the slaves should be free (and also that there should not be a lynch mob).
The death penalty is supported by over half of the US population; any argumentative style that attempts to belittle or mock as niche this position in a form of appeal to consensus only works in certain bubbles. Your position is the more unpopular one, lmao.
At 18 you know better than taking a class mate to the jungle, slit the throat and bring the skull to the class. If your gripe is about punishment its a different thing, saying that a person did the crime at 18 somehow does not count as a crime is misguided at best.
Where did I say it didn’t count as a crime? Of course it’s a crime, and of course there should be consequences. I just have some uneasiness about killing people when they were still basically children, but as I said I am pretty anti-capital-punishment regardless.
Did you read to the part of the article where they mentioned the trauma she had gone through since being a toddler was “almost impossible to grasp”? It’s easy for me to think that if you pick a model citizen today, go back in time and put them through the same struggles, they would not fare much better in society than Christa. And yes I know going through a hardship doesn’t justify cruelty to others, but again she was, by all reasonable measures, a child at the time. The world she experienced throughout all of her formative years gave her nothing to hold on to. She did not fail us any more than we failed her first, and now she’ll be punished for it.
Not only a poor childhood but she was still effectively a child when she committed the crime. We don’t expect children to be able to manage their emotions properly. I’m not saying let it slide obviously but I don’t see how a lethal injection makes anything better in this case, never mind a botched one.
Your logic as good as all my faults and mistakes are responsibility of my parents. They can use the same arguments. So everyone's faults are of Adam/Eve. And then God's for creating them. Bunch of nonse logic.
18 is not a child. Hell even 14 is not a child. Whether it is her fault or her upbringing, it doesn't matter: things that can't belong in our societies need to be removed.
It's wrong to give "the State" the right to take a life. Period.
My opinion, of course.
To be sure, there are crimes so heinous that the perpetrator can no longer be allowed to roam freely in society. You might even believe that, from a moral standpoint, they have forfeited their own right to life. But you still don't give the state the power to take it.
There are plenty of arguments for why you should not allow this, but, just an obvious one, in doing so you also give the state the right to take yours.
I think I am in broad agreement. If someone isn’t an immediate threat (and in the case of capital punishment they’re by definition confined and separated from society) then there’s no justification for killing them.
I’m not a complete bleeding heart here; I am not going to pretend that the world is a worse place because we killed Ted Bundy. He was an awful human who you could make a pretty good argument for deserving to die. I just find the idea that the state is killing people pretty bad.
Where should the exact cut off be? How many units of time after birth is it not too young for certain punishments? To me 18 sounds as reasonable as any. Why not even 16 in some cases. Or should it be say 21? Or 25? or 30?
I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.
The medical community would not set a hard and fast date for this; or if they did they might well go with the legal and social definition (in most Western countries) of 18 years old.
I think the latest studies suggest adolescence can keep going until your late 20s. I agree you can’t set a firm line on that because of course these aren’t discrete things and everyone is a bit different, but maybe set an admittedly-still-arbitrary age of ~26.
Or I would just do what the UK did and stop capital punishment since I think it’s wrong.
For me the issue isn't so much to execute someone for something they did at 18 (18 is plenty old enough to knowingly do atrocious things), but rather to do it 32 years later with all the time spent in jail.
The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.
The state shouldn't be able to take your life outside of war. I've had this strict belief since junior high, maybe because I was raised catholic. I don't understand how anyone can see otherwise. Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
Is your belief based in something? You say "shouldn't be able to..." but, like, why not? To convince anyone else of it you'd have to agree on the framework in which states are and aren't allowed to do things.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
No they're just two different things. That's my point. On the one hand the state is delegated with using violence for protection. On the other hand the state is delegated with carrying out retribution.
If you had no state you would see people build the exact same delegations in private: first, people would enact their own protection and retribution; then, they would coordinate to make it more just by centralizing those powers and (theoretically) subordinating them to some system of justice that uses them more fairly than individuals would. We're just on the other side of that process, which is why I'm saying it's the explanation for why the state has those powers.
This has no bearing on the morality of "should the state do this"; it's just how it actually is, and why it makes sense of the minds of people who are okay with it (since the OP said they couldn't imagine a reason).
But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen. (In practice though, you definitely are, you're just going to modulate how extreme it can be, i.e. killing people vs incarcerating them.) Just, IMO, the people who pretend like the justice system is not at all about retribution and only about rehabilitation/protection are... living in a fairy tale version of reality. Like I would love if that were the case, and if everyone was reformable and came out repentant for their behavior then it would be possible, but in practice, people want other people punished for their crimes. Consider that the point of jailing executives for fraud, which everyone wants more of, is not to prevent fraud but to actually punish them. Since it is the punishing that has a theoretical chance of stopping other people from fraud.
> But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen.
You educate/culture it out of them, which is what the Nordics, and Western Europe more generally, choose to do. Seems to be working fine so far.
> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.
What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.
Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.
you will be glad to know my weight against killing someone innocent is very high. personally i think the only defensible version of capital punishment uses it only in the case where there is literally no doubt about the guilt, like, many unbiased people saw it happen or there's a recording or they credibly confess or stuff like that. it boggles my mind that it is used outside of this. Feels like people say "beyond the shadow of a doubt" and then somehow don't mean it? Everyone is detective-story pilled like they think a watertight explanation of a thing is the same thing as eliminating doubt, and that's just not at all true.
I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.
but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.
The state has a monopoly on violence. In exchange for this great power we expect great responsibility. A state that is flippant with its use of violence signals something to its people. I believe that even if there are zero incorrect convictions that the state should use the minimum of violence to improve the safety of the populace. The death penalty (as opposed to lwop) does not protect anybody from crime. It does not deter people. Its only function is vengeance. And when the state uses violence in vengeance it degrades society.
yeah but then you quibble over the definition of "flippant". What if the state is maximally responsible about its use of violence, so there's no arguing that it could be any more violence. Now what? You have to find a different argument.
(Well, there is the "the limiting case of maximum responsibility is still nonzero errors therefore it is always unjust", which is a coherent stance, but I kinda get the impression that it's a fake one? Like it is not the actual reason that the people who profess it are opposed to the death penalty; instead it's a reason they kinda confabulate to justify their opposition even though it's not their actual reason. Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly. (this is all me trying to vibe out where other people are coming from, though, so I could be wrong)
I was describing the thought process: the reason for a death penalty (which, to be clear, I am not arguing for either way, I am describing why I think it has come to be at a practical level) is that given that vengeance/retribution is a thing that people 'want', the state assumes the responsibility of carrying it out (responsibly) so as to avoid vigilantism / preserve the monopoly.
> Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly.
Huh? I just told you that this is my opinion. There is nothing that will ever get me to fully trust the state with killing. Even if God Himself came down and said that so-and-so was definitely guilty I would still oppose executing that person.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about you. I was trying to disentangle three arguments:
1. we can't trust the state with killing because it is always necessarily imperfect
2. we can't trust the state with killing abstractly, because we simply don't trust the state in principle
3. we don't want the state to do killing for moral reasons unrelated to trust
I was saying that people say (1) but, I suspect, they really mean (2) or (3). It's not the imperfection of the state, or its flippancy, that is the actual problem. It's other stuff, which is perfectly fine. I just think that's it a lot less confusing if people say the other stuff outright instead of talking about the imperfectness of the system which is just a distraction.
uh... no? that's not what I said. I wasn't arguing for the position. I was describing how the position works. And I don't think it's a motte/bailey at all because they really do have the one thing for protection and the other thing for vengeance. It's not a case of using one to justify the other, it's just two separate things that they justify.
I didn’t realize you weren’t arguing in favor. Still I do see this formulation frequently used to argue for capital punishment. They will fall back on claims of protection whenever challenged, but the core argument (that not everyone accepts!) is that victims have a right to vengeance.
I think people are get very muddled when they attempt to put their positions into words. That doesn't necessarily mean they're being deceptive. Sometimes it's just a skill issue. I think that what I have described is the "coherent" version of the position (the steelman, if you like). I like to lay it out like that because it makes the discussion about the thing it is actually about, which is, as you said, whether a right to vengeance makes sense or is something we want to enshrine in our society.
Now that I'm thinking about it there is at least one other coherent position I know of for it, which is: if you start out thinking of life as rather 'disposable' (so humans are somewhat equivalent to animals, which we regularly raise to eat; war is okay; things like that), then the argument for keeping people alive is that they contribute to society or at least don't heavily detract from it, and the argument for putting them to death is that people have proven themselves not even worth keeping alive. This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is. but I do think it is ultimately how a lot of people think about it, as well---at least in regard to people who are not part their personal community.
> This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is.
This risk shouldn’t be understated—there’s a lot of unpersoning happening right now among those with political sway, and if it continues we could easily swing back around to the eugenics and mass killing of the early 20th century. The modern notion of human rights was explicitly created as a reaction to the mass death and atrocities of the world wars.
There’s a tendency among the powerful to view those at the bottom as “useless eaters,” so when you start making decisions about who should be “kept alive” this can become quite dangerous.
Could you defend your claim if the exception for war was confined to non surrendering enemy combatants? After all, I did not take the comment on "except war" to envisage the slaughter of civilians or execution of POWs.
I mean if it was a just war I don’t disagree, but people on both sides of every modern war I can think of deserved to die a lot less than people who commit whatever sort of crime still lands you on death row these days (with the possible exception of the actual leadership in a small number of those wars but still not many).
I think it is fair to assume they meant a just war. At least, that would have been my starting assumption. This concept also has a rich literature in Catholic history, fwiw. The question of whether most modern war qualifies as just feels like a separate question that is out of scope for the present discussion, though I don't disagree with you.
How nice to see that in truth, we have the three of us all found ourselves - at least at a high level - in agreement.
So if most modern wars were just and a handful weren’t I would think it’s unfair to focus on the minority case. But it’s the other way around and it’s not even close.
Though, I am coming from a perspective rooted in the theory of human evolution, where for me warfare is just if the men fighting instinctively register that it’s just based on the true situation (the instinct which propaganda aims to stir up artificially with lies), and this precludes basically all top down state directed offensive warfare from being just. If there was a draft or if the men were not aware of the real reasons for the war, it isn’t a just war. That covers everything America was involved in for at least 100 years. Something like the Poles defending themselves against Germany could be considered just, though as far as I can tell that war started due to the Polish government stubbornly acting against the interests of its own people (land bridge and Danzig demands weren’t that unreasonable, not worth sacrificing your own people over), and if the government is acting in an unjust way towards the interests of its own people then the reaction of others becomes sort of a fruit of the poison tree situation (defense is just in isolation, but the actions of the Polish state in general were not IMO).
I don’t really care what the Catholics think or thought, they were operating from a pre-Darwinian understanding of human nature which is largely incorrect.
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
> What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
I’m against death penalty, but if you must do it, can’t you give them a massive and gradual drug overdose? It’s reliable and maybe less horrific than some of these stories you read.
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
I was super busy in 1989 with work and family. I was "Mister Mom" for the evening shift, talk about busy.
Worth a look-see. Thanks. I saw the Lon Chaney Jr. and Lionel Atwill, when we had the "slightly above lowest tier" cable, which brought the old movie channels.
The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
If you read her bio, this lady was dealt some of the worst cards you could possibly get. She stood almost no chance.
More recently, she seems to have saved more than one life in prison.
> Jones later testified that Pike had intervened to protect other inmates before the 2001 incident. A 2025 episode of the podcast Unrestorable, which examined Pike's years in solitary confinement, reported that Jones had attempted to kill at least three other women and that Pike had intervened in each incident, including pulling one woman away from cell bars, pulling another away from a toilet, and intervening when Jones was strangling another woman with a telephone cord. In reporting on Pike's scheduled execution, WTVF-TV, republishing reporting from the Nashville Banner, reported that Jones later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.
> An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
I believe it is the same in the case of unsuccessful abortions, in the US at least. Sometimes they result in a birth, presumably of a heavily injured and premature baby, who is then entitled to emergency medical care. Some of these people survive long term. One example is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Jessen
That was the most "WTF?" in the article. No one working there thought about the nonsensicalness of calling for medical aid for someone who was supposed to be killed?
It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.
At least the press in Nazi Germany is honest when they witness the regime botching an execution:
> In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honourable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.
But I am sure this whole thing makes for a nice laugh at the next ballroom dinner with the president for the conservative majority of the judges.
May their lobster always taste bland and the oysters give them diarrhea.
I am very against medicalised punishments like this. It’s bad for medicine as a whole to be associated with it. I also think it prolongs the suffering of the person and often has things like this happen, and is mainly for the benefit of the audience not wanting to see icky blood.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
Medical professionals do not take part in executions. Lethal injection has the vague trappings of a medical procedure, but is fundamentally not one. Prisons even must resort to trickery to obtain the drugs, as pharmaceutical organisations are prohibited ethically and even sometimes legally from selling to them.
By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.
This is what I don’t understand. You don’t need a doctor to tell you what to do. Like ChatGPT 3.5 could tell you the best way to kill a person painlessly and effectively. Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation or a morphine overdose or something?
> Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation
Alabama have just started using this method - and it appears to be extremely torturous. Rather than just passing out, the person suffocates while conscious:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/26/alabama-nitr...
> or a morphine overdose
Nebraska has tried using fentanyl. But the drug manufacturers are against it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45185687
> What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again.
Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.
(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)
The news is that lethal injections are legal, but required a retry. GP asked: So why not a firing squad? Them retrying might be less cruel than reinjection.
Agreed. Mock executions are considered to be a form of torture. Botched executions are perhaps even worse, given the actual physical pain and severe risk of brain injuries being inflicted.
>Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.
US case law disagrees. From a botched execution of a child, even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Francis
> What is wrong with firing squads?
Coming back in fashion? I've heard of at least two executions recently in which the condemned requested and were granted a firing squad execution.
Nice, citations?
Why not use pure nitrogen gas? 100% working, no suffering.
Alabama did. In reality, the executions did not go as cleanly as the proposals suggested they would.
https://eji.org/issues/alabama-botched-executions/
Studies are warranted to determine the pattern of introduction of nitrogen that eliminates any adverse sensations. The studies could probably be done on those seeking assisted suicide.
Because in the cases where we've used nitrogen gas we've observed people suffering. Nitrogen works if the victim breathes normally. But people naturally won't do that when you put the murder mask over their mouth and nose.
I'm against the death penalty, but the engineer in me wants to solve this problem.
So why not put the patient to sleep first with anesthetic drugs? After that the mask should not be a bother.
The problem is that anaesthesia has proven difficult for non-medics to reliably administer.
(As demonstrated by this botched execution, which used pentobarbital - a barbituate used for anaesthesia)
Right, then you need a medical professional willing to do it, and that probably gets difficult.
I would guess that most people being shot and dies do so from bleeding out or disruption to breathing, and not the impact itself. The only thing that actually is guarantied to work, fast and produce minimal pain would be an high speed explosion.
I thought overdosing on opiates was highly easy to achieve, basically pain free, and also relatively cheap even in the social backwaters of the world where they have death penalties?
How an opiate impact a person varies from person to person. Some would fall asleep, others would violently convulse, some would get trouble breathing, and others would get irregular heart rhythms and multiple heart attacks.
This is how pets are euthanized, usually, and it's about as humane as it gets. That said, you'd never sell this because the portion of the population who want the death penalty either want it to be inhumane, or would balk at the possibility of making the condemned euphoric before death.
I’m against capital punishment and I agree with you. If it’s to be done at all, it should be brutal, bloody, and instant. Capital punishment is barbaric and shouldn’t be concealed under false cover like medical procedure.
A guillotine would also be acceptable.
> A guillotine would also be acceptable.
The last execution by guillotine in France was surprisingly recent; 1977, the same year Star Wars was released.
There is also some evidence that the head may stay conscious after decapitation (which would make it unnecessarily cruel):
https://www.newsweek.com/nerve-connection-body-mind-decapita...
Just do stop killing people like any civilized country.
If I had to die I want the injection because if it works right you just doze off and die. That compared to being tied to a pole and have people fire guns at you seems terrible. There is a significant chance of serious pain and suffering.
"If it works right" is doing quite the heavy lifting here. The adminsitering guards are not medical professionals, nor are the people designing the protocols.
Doze off and die is not what happens.
I think you have that the wrong way round. The injection is far more likely to cause intense pain and suffering due to the lack of medical professionals being involved (it's not a medical procedure). The drugs are often obtained from "dodgy" sources and so the dosage can't be determined due to the variability of the drugs. The lack of medical professionals will often mean that the injections are poorly administered (e.g. missing a vein).
I was just reading a Reddit post from a veterinarian and the protocol for euthanising animals is far better than that used for lethal injections - notably pre-meds are used to sedate the patient and prevent breathing issues and panic.
A bullet or two to the head is far more effective and reliable. The only downside to lethal shooting is that it looks too barbaric to observers.
Firing squads should be making a comeback given recent Trump DOJ guidelines that break with what had been the precedent on these questions.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
It may make pharma look bad, but that is an entirely accurate conclusion, and that is a big reason that they’ve begun refusing to distribute the lethal drugs that have been extremely efficacious.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5cp4NxZt8KMjA9Wa7?g_st=ac
Pharma would rather stick to their core competencies, such as pesticides and herbicides.
Oh yeah, I read about this.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
> for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me
She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.
> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now
Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
> Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.
I interpreted it as an implication that it should be viewed as a lesser crime due to the perpetrator's age. At 18 you can:
• Vote
• Fight in the military
• Act in pornography
• Rent a car in MI, NY, QC
• Many other adult things
The crime perpetrated was premeditated and particularly demonic. It's a far cry from shoplifting a Snickers bar.
> is kind of upsetting
Bringing a chunk of the victim's skull to school to show your friends how good you are at murdering was probably pretty upsetting to a few people, like the victim's family and friends.
The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.
Even now, though, in every state in the US, you're not a full adult when you're eighteen. You're not allowed to buy alcohol until you're 21. In a lot of states you're not allowed to buy cigarettes. We've decided that, despite being "grown ups", they're still not grown up enough to be trusted with these things.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
> The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.
I think you have it backwards: "They" didn't have any trouble sending 18 year old that couldn't vote to fight in Vietnam. It was those 18 year olds who demanded a greater say in the political process because that was being demanded of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_to_the_...:
> This means young men could be required to fight and possibly die for their nation in wartime at 18. However, these same citizens could not have a legal say in the government's decision to wage that war until the age of 21. A youth rights movement emerged in response, calling for a similarly reduced voting age. A common slogan of proponents of lowering the voting age stated "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote".
Also, according to that article, there were efforts before 1971 to lower the voting age, they just couldn't pass the very high constitutional amendment bar.
Sure. I am just saying that until the 70s eighteen year olds weren’t even considered “full” adults with all the privileges thereof. They still aren’t given that they’re still not allowed to drink (in the US).
The state-administered judicial violence of locking someone in a cage until they die of old age strikes me as pretty similar to the state-administered judicial violence of executing someone, in terms of severity.
The point (or one of the points) is that execution is reversible. I mean there are some cases of people who sat in prison for decades when it was determined they were innocent. If you accept potential failure of the legal system (which is obviously the case) how can you be a proponent of executions?
I don’t love the way American prisons work either, but I guess we have to agree to disagree on that particular point.
Where do you get this "Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed"? Agreed by whom? Go read the biography of David Farragut
I extrapolated from the fact that 18 year olds couldn’t vote prior to 1971. I will admit that “agreed” might have been a bit too strong of a word, but it seems like the United States didn’t think that 18 year olds were “full” adults yet.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
I don't want my taxes going to private prison companies for the rest of her life.
I also don't want to see or hear about executions with whatever methods, it's revolting, but then again, public executions in Europe stopped like what, less than 200 years ago? And the public craved it.
Fun fact, France practiced guillotining through 1977.
There is no middle ground.
The problem with this argument is that being a few months older or younger would decide between life and death for the very same crime. Her boyfriend who was just a couple of months younger got a lighter sentence with the option of parole, partly because he was 17.
You don’t suddenly become a different person on your 18th birthday.
Execution is a weird thing for a civilized society to do and the bizarre people that fetishize it say weird shit like “It makes sense to murder somebody if they made other people upset” to avoid talking about how it doesn’t solve any problems that aren’t already solved by life imprisonment. The justification for execution is always “I want the state to kill people because I enjoy that sort of thing”
Society does not have an obligation to house and feed such people for decades on end. I'd rather they be killed because it should be much cheaper; whether it actually is or not by some aberration of dumb policy is not relevant to the philosophy. They are the enemy of society and are owed absolutely nothing but swift death, not room and board.
It’s not cheaper, and it really can’t or shouldn’t be.
In the US you have a right to appeal your sentence, which is a good thing. If the government is going to be killing people, we want to (at the very least) make sure they have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. You have to pay someone to read these appeals, typically an attorney or multiple attorneys and/or a judge. There can be a backlog so it can take awhile to get through all of them.
This is inherent to how capital punishment works in the US, and anything less would be borderline tyranny, so I reject your framing of it as “aberration or some dumb policy”.
Well I reject your framing of it being impossible. If it is cheaper to house and feed a man for sixty years than it is to kill him, that is a policy decision, not a law of the universe. Other respectable countries manage to achieve this.
Most other “respectable” countries have actually gotten rid of capital punishment entirely.
I think we are at a fundamental disagreement though; I think it should be expensive and difficult to execute someone. I think the slow appeals process is a good thing. It should hard for the government to kill people who aren’t a direct threat.
I don’t know your politics but it doesn’t matter the specifics. Imagine whichever politician that you think is most stupid and tyrannical. Do you really want to give them the ability to rapidly kill people they don’t like without at least some bureaucratic checks in place?
Politicians don't convict people. It's not a political issue; the person was convicted by a jury of their peers, which philosophically should indicate something important: the body politic unanimously believes he is guilty of heinous crimes. They believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this man, for example, raped and killed a dozen infants. Then in the court of appeals it was upheld. I believe that it is better for society* in that case for that man to then be swiftly executed.
* In the sense that society needs to feel that the state executes justice and that such people are not being kept alive on their own dime. That breeds contempt for the system and for the state.
We can certainly agree that if an innocent person is executed that is just state-sponsored murder, right?
The jury system of the US is a good system but it’s certainly not immune to mob mentality. It’s certainly not immune to appeals to emotion. It’s certainly not immune to any number of the things that make humans human. This is partly why we have an appeals process. If we are going to put someone to death, I think it’s better for them to be given every single avenue possible to prove their innocence so that we aren’t murdering someone innocent.
We are just disagreeing about the ideal number or length of appeals, then. You can never be 100% sure; you could allow a constant state of appeal forever. This applies just as much to locking someone innocent away for life, which is also a big problem, but we don't allow infinite appeals for that either. I just think the current amount of appealing is too much.
If we can’t be 100% sure then I think maybe we shouldn’t have potential state-sponsored murder of innocent people.
People who are a risk to normal society do need to be separated, and for that I am willing to not be 100% sure (though with plenty of chances for appeals). If we lock up someone for a crime they didn’t commit, we at least have the option to release them and potentially pay out some kind of financial settlement as a means of punishing the state for their mistakes. If you kill someone, there’s not really much of an opportunity to even try and make it right.
Politicians literally write the laws that people get convicted of violating, and they can write those laws pretty much however they want. A juror's job is not to decide if they think an act was morally wrong, it's to judge them against the law as written. Laws can and have been written in all kinds of horrible and negligent ways.
Those policies are there to make sure all possible appeals can go through. And can you believe even then it's not enough to stop all executions of innocents?
At the end of the day, the death penalty's only possible justification is retribution. It does not deter crime and incapacitation of the criminal can already be achieved by locking them up. Your logic presupposes that "an eye for an eye" is a legitimate philosophy for a modern State to hold, which is reprehensible.
The philosophy of a state should be that which engenders the greatest wellbeing among its citizens. People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed. Ivory tower philosophizing at the cost of social unity is not so great. Some innocents will die; we accept worse consequences for smaller gains. There have only been ~140 people in the history of the death penalty who have been exonerated from appeal. 140 people die in war every day for less worthy ends.
How do you explain the Nordic countries and Western Europe generally, where retribution has been explicitly rejected as a principle in the criminal justice system? Moreover, how would eliminating the death penalty endanger social unity?
1. Cultural homogeneity; 2. When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.
> 1. Cultural homogeneity
Can you elaborate on this? How does cultural homogeneity relate to the State being able to ditch retributive principles?
> When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.
That just seems like a problem for education, no? If people are told by their teachers and other figures of authority that retribution isn't good, that should be enough. Again that's how the Nordics do it and it seems to be working out for them.
Sorry, is there any evidence for point 2 or is this just vibes? Violent crime is significantly lower in these countries than the US.
There are a billion potential reasons for this, but it doesn’t appear to be that people have started dawning costumes and LARPing as the Punisher in large numbers.
Evidence for "When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done" is the history of any society prior to 1800 and basic human nature? I don't know, read history and literature and philosophy of the premodern age, or I guess you could call it vibes sure. I believe it to be true and find it self evident.
It is decidedly not self evident given that it is directly contradicted by statistical evidence. Again, violent crime in most European countries is significantly lower than the United States. I would agree that there are lots of reasons for it but it certainly doesn’t appear that the lack of capital punishment is causing massive spikes in crime.
Eudamoniac is pretty clear that this is entirely about their feelings. When the state murders somebody it feels good and when it doesn’t murder people it feels bad.
> society needs to feel that the state executes justice
> People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed
> people feel that justice is not being done
(and again)
> people feel that justice is not being done
They’re not going to give anybody a rational argument here because
> I guess you could call it vibes sure
It’s like asking somebody to justify why they’re really into ABDL stuff. The important part is that they just are, and won’t be talked out of it.
Correct. The value judgements (feelings) of the demos should be reflected in the policies that the democracy enacts and is governed by. That's part of what a government of and by the people means. Governing by any other system, like utilitarianism, or arbitrary moral principles like 'killing criminals is wrong' that the majority of constituents don't hold, needs heavy justification, and may not be justifiable in a democracy. If you'd prefer an oligarchy or monarchy wherein someone can impose their own minority value system on the people, even if that system objectively results in 'better outcomes' whatever that means to you, that's fine, but just be honest about it.
In brief, it doesn't matter what "is best" in some utilitarian framework if the democracy is not attuned to that framework. It doesn't matter if the death penalty actually increases crime. What matters is that the government should be doing what the people want it to be doing. If the people really want to kill criminals, any system that prevents that is non-democratic.
Well, good thing we don't live in any time prior to 1800! What even is that answer? Of course premodern societies would appeal to different aspects of human nature in different ways. The question is whether a society can sustain its own survival and welfare even when certain facets of human nature are frawned upon and discouraged. I see no reason for doubting that this is the case for the retributive instinct, at least when killing is involved.
> I'd rather they be killed because it should be much cheaper; whether it actually is or not by some aberration of dumb policy is not relevant to the philosophy.
I appreciate this rephrasing of “I want the state to murder people because I enjoy that sort of thing”
I would ask if you think that the ~200 death row inmates that been exonerated of their convictions should be alive but uh you already answered that, unprompted
> nothing but swift death
“I want these people murdered because of a reason in my head, but even if the reason in my head weren’t true I’d still want to see them murdered” lmao I know it’s 2026 and it’s considered rude to kink shame but c’mon
No, I'm just making two claims at once. It ought to be cheaper, normatively, and thereby it ought to be done. It's kind of like "I want to see slaves freed because humans should be free, even if there exists a lynch mob that is killing all the freed slaves." The existence of the pathological problem making the claim overall worse, currently, does not affect the philosophy that the slaves should be free (and also that there should not be a lynch mob).
The death penalty is supported by over half of the US population; any argumentative style that attempts to belittle or mock as niche this position in a form of appeal to consensus only works in certain bubbles. Your position is the more unpopular one, lmao.
“My lust for blood is like my courageous and bold stance against slavery. No one would mock me for saying this” lol
At 18 you know better than taking a class mate to the jungle, slit the throat and bring the skull to the class. If your gripe is about punishment its a different thing, saying that a person did the crime at 18 somehow does not count as a crime is misguided at best.
Where did I say it didn’t count as a crime? Of course it’s a crime, and of course there should be consequences. I just have some uneasiness about killing people when they were still basically children, but as I said I am pretty anti-capital-punishment regardless.
Sounds more like they to be in a mental hosptial than a prison.
If you spent even a single day in these you'd know it's much more inhuman than death
[dead]
No, why even bother. Irredeemable
Yeah that is all horrible but it doesn't make me want to commit homicide.
Did you read to the part of the article where they mentioned the trauma she had gone through since being a toddler was “almost impossible to grasp”? It’s easy for me to think that if you pick a model citizen today, go back in time and put them through the same struggles, they would not fare much better in society than Christa. And yes I know going through a hardship doesn’t justify cruelty to others, but again she was, by all reasonable measures, a child at the time. The world she experienced throughout all of her formative years gave her nothing to hold on to. She did not fail us any more than we failed her first, and now she’ll be punished for it.
The idea that a poor childhood is an excuse for committing murders is highly modern and misguided.
Not only a poor childhood but she was still effectively a child when she committed the crime. We don’t expect children to be able to manage their emotions properly. I’m not saying let it slide obviously but I don’t see how a lethal injection makes anything better in this case, never mind a botched one.
Your logic as good as all my faults and mistakes are responsibility of my parents. They can use the same arguments. So everyone's faults are of Adam/Eve. And then God's for creating them. Bunch of nonse logic.
18 is not a child. Hell even 14 is not a child. Whether it is her fault or her upbringing, it doesn't matter: things that can't belong in our societies need to be removed.
It's wrong to give "the State" the right to take a life. Period.
My opinion, of course.
To be sure, there are crimes so heinous that the perpetrator can no longer be allowed to roam freely in society. You might even believe that, from a moral standpoint, they have forfeited their own right to life. But you still don't give the state the power to take it.
There are plenty of arguments for why you should not allow this, but, just an obvious one, in doing so you also give the state the right to take yours.
I think I am in broad agreement. If someone isn’t an immediate threat (and in the case of capital punishment they’re by definition confined and separated from society) then there’s no justification for killing them.
I’m not a complete bleeding heart here; I am not going to pretend that the world is a worse place because we killed Ted Bundy. He was an awful human who you could make a pretty good argument for deserving to die. I just find the idea that the state is killing people pretty bad.
Where should the exact cut off be? How many units of time after birth is it not too young for certain punishments? To me 18 sounds as reasonable as any. Why not even 16 in some cases. Or should it be say 21? Or 25? or 30?
I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.
The medical community would not set a hard and fast date for this; or if they did they might well go with the legal and social definition (in most Western countries) of 18 years old.
I think the latest studies suggest adolescence can keep going until your late 20s. I agree you can’t set a firm line on that because of course these aren’t discrete things and everyone is a bit different, but maybe set an admittedly-still-arbitrary age of ~26.
Or I would just do what the UK did and stop capital punishment since I think it’s wrong.
For me the issue isn't so much to execute someone for something they did at 18 (18 is plenty old enough to knowingly do atrocious things), but rather to do it 32 years later with all the time spent in jail.
The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.
I mean I’d rather live for 32 years than have them quickly do everything and kill me at 20.
The state shouldn't be able to take your life outside of war. I've had this strict belief since junior high, maybe because I was raised catholic. I don't understand how anyone can see otherwise. Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
Is your belief based in something? You say "shouldn't be able to..." but, like, why not? To convince anyone else of it you'd have to agree on the framework in which states are and aren't allowed to do things.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
No they're just two different things. That's my point. On the one hand the state is delegated with using violence for protection. On the other hand the state is delegated with carrying out retribution.
If you had no state you would see people build the exact same delegations in private: first, people would enact their own protection and retribution; then, they would coordinate to make it more just by centralizing those powers and (theoretically) subordinating them to some system of justice that uses them more fairly than individuals would. We're just on the other side of that process, which is why I'm saying it's the explanation for why the state has those powers.
This has no bearing on the morality of "should the state do this"; it's just how it actually is, and why it makes sense of the minds of people who are okay with it (since the OP said they couldn't imagine a reason).
But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen. (In practice though, you definitely are, you're just going to modulate how extreme it can be, i.e. killing people vs incarcerating them.) Just, IMO, the people who pretend like the justice system is not at all about retribution and only about rehabilitation/protection are... living in a fairy tale version of reality. Like I would love if that were the case, and if everyone was reformable and came out repentant for their behavior then it would be possible, but in practice, people want other people punished for their crimes. Consider that the point of jailing executives for fraud, which everyone wants more of, is not to prevent fraud but to actually punish them. Since it is the punishing that has a theoretical chance of stopping other people from fraud.
> But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen.
You educate/culture it out of them, which is what the Nordics, and Western Europe more generally, choose to do. Seems to be working fine so far.
> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.
What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.
Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.
If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...
you will be glad to know my weight against killing someone innocent is very high. personally i think the only defensible version of capital punishment uses it only in the case where there is literally no doubt about the guilt, like, many unbiased people saw it happen or there's a recording or they credibly confess or stuff like that. it boggles my mind that it is used outside of this. Feels like people say "beyond the shadow of a doubt" and then somehow don't mean it? Everyone is detective-story pilled like they think a watertight explanation of a thing is the same thing as eliminating doubt, and that's just not at all true.
I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.
but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.
The state has a monopoly on violence. In exchange for this great power we expect great responsibility. A state that is flippant with its use of violence signals something to its people. I believe that even if there are zero incorrect convictions that the state should use the minimum of violence to improve the safety of the populace. The death penalty (as opposed to lwop) does not protect anybody from crime. It does not deter people. Its only function is vengeance. And when the state uses violence in vengeance it degrades society.
yeah but then you quibble over the definition of "flippant". What if the state is maximally responsible about its use of violence, so there's no arguing that it could be any more violence. Now what? You have to find a different argument.
(Well, there is the "the limiting case of maximum responsibility is still nonzero errors therefore it is always unjust", which is a coherent stance, but I kinda get the impression that it's a fake one? Like it is not the actual reason that the people who profess it are opposed to the death penalty; instead it's a reason they kinda confabulate to justify their opposition even though it's not their actual reason. Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly. (this is all me trying to vibe out where other people are coming from, though, so I could be wrong)
I was describing the thought process: the reason for a death penalty (which, to be clear, I am not arguing for either way, I am describing why I think it has come to be at a practical level) is that given that vengeance/retribution is a thing that people 'want', the state assumes the responsibility of carrying it out (responsibly) so as to avoid vigilantism / preserve the monopoly.
> Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly.
Huh? I just told you that this is my opinion. There is nothing that will ever get me to fully trust the state with killing. Even if God Himself came down and said that so-and-so was definitely guilty I would still oppose executing that person.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about you. I was trying to disentangle three arguments:
1. we can't trust the state with killing because it is always necessarily imperfect 2. we can't trust the state with killing abstractly, because we simply don't trust the state in principle 3. we don't want the state to do killing for moral reasons unrelated to trust
I was saying that people say (1) but, I suspect, they really mean (2) or (3). It's not the imperfection of the state, or its flippancy, that is the actual problem. It's other stuff, which is perfectly fine. I just think that's it a lot less confusing if people say the other stuff outright instead of talking about the imperfectness of the system which is just a distraction.
I personally know people (my mother is one of them) who legitimately are in category 1.
Motte: protection
Bailey: vengeance
uh... no? that's not what I said. I wasn't arguing for the position. I was describing how the position works. And I don't think it's a motte/bailey at all because they really do have the one thing for protection and the other thing for vengeance. It's not a case of using one to justify the other, it's just two separate things that they justify.
I didn’t realize you weren’t arguing in favor. Still I do see this formulation frequently used to argue for capital punishment. They will fall back on claims of protection whenever challenged, but the core argument (that not everyone accepts!) is that victims have a right to vengeance.
I think people are get very muddled when they attempt to put their positions into words. That doesn't necessarily mean they're being deceptive. Sometimes it's just a skill issue. I think that what I have described is the "coherent" version of the position (the steelman, if you like). I like to lay it out like that because it makes the discussion about the thing it is actually about, which is, as you said, whether a right to vengeance makes sense or is something we want to enshrine in our society.
Now that I'm thinking about it there is at least one other coherent position I know of for it, which is: if you start out thinking of life as rather 'disposable' (so humans are somewhat equivalent to animals, which we regularly raise to eat; war is okay; things like that), then the argument for keeping people alive is that they contribute to society or at least don't heavily detract from it, and the argument for putting them to death is that people have proven themselves not even worth keeping alive. This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is. but I do think it is ultimately how a lot of people think about it, as well---at least in regard to people who are not part their personal community.
> This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is.
This risk shouldn’t be understated—there’s a lot of unpersoning happening right now among those with political sway, and if it continues we could easily swing back around to the eugenics and mass killing of the early 20th century. The modern notion of human rights was explicitly created as a reaction to the mass death and atrocities of the world wars.
There’s a tendency among the powerful to view those at the bottom as “useless eaters,” so when you start making decisions about who should be “kept alive” this can become quite dangerous.
There's not really any need for sophisticated arguments, it's a constant shit show and we should abolish it for the simplicity.
I guess that or go full on Judge Dredd.
I agree, but for me it's not anything to do with religion, but to do with the many failure modes of governments and justice systems.
I don't know why you make an exception for war but not the judicial death penalty.
Raised Quaker—they have no exception for war either.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill". Quakers kind of take that to mean what it says.
Yeah most death penalty cases are massively more justified than most modern wars, especially from the perspective of the individuals involved.
How so?
Could you defend your claim if the exception for war was confined to non surrendering enemy combatants? After all, I did not take the comment on "except war" to envisage the slaughter of civilians or execution of POWs.
I mean if it was a just war I don’t disagree, but people on both sides of every modern war I can think of deserved to die a lot less than people who commit whatever sort of crime still lands you on death row these days (with the possible exception of the actual leadership in a small number of those wars but still not many).
I think it is fair to assume they meant a just war. At least, that would have been my starting assumption. This concept also has a rich literature in Catholic history, fwiw. The question of whether most modern war qualifies as just feels like a separate question that is out of scope for the present discussion, though I don't disagree with you.
How nice to see that in truth, we have the three of us all found ourselves - at least at a high level - in agreement.
So if most modern wars were just and a handful weren’t I would think it’s unfair to focus on the minority case. But it’s the other way around and it’s not even close.
Though, I am coming from a perspective rooted in the theory of human evolution, where for me warfare is just if the men fighting instinctively register that it’s just based on the true situation (the instinct which propaganda aims to stir up artificially with lies), and this precludes basically all top down state directed offensive warfare from being just. If there was a draft or if the men were not aware of the real reasons for the war, it isn’t a just war. That covers everything America was involved in for at least 100 years. Something like the Poles defending themselves against Germany could be considered just, though as far as I can tell that war started due to the Polish government stubbornly acting against the interests of its own people (land bridge and Danzig demands weren’t that unreasonable, not worth sacrificing your own people over), and if the government is acting in an unjust way towards the interests of its own people then the reaction of others becomes sort of a fruit of the poison tree situation (defense is just in isolation, but the actions of the Polish state in general were not IMO).
I don’t really care what the Catholics think or thought, they were operating from a pre-Darwinian understanding of human nature which is largely incorrect.
>outside of war
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
> What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
“executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring”
2026 is really something else. 3 months left.
I’m against death penalty, but if you must do it, can’t you give them a massive and gradual drug overdose? It’s reliable and maybe less horrific than some of these stories you read.
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
The Saudis really are the 10x engineers of administering capital punishment.
The problem is that you need to find an equivalent or worse psycho who don't mind chopping heads as a 9 to 5
With AI, now everyone can be a 10x engineer (of administering capital punishment)!
Iran is like 10x that
I recall a sci fi movie about a man who grew stronger with electrical current. Man made monster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Made_Monster
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/alfred-hitchcock-gun-contr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shocker_(film) is better.
I was super busy in 1989 with work and family. I was "Mister Mom" for the evening shift, talk about busy.
Worth a look-see. Thanks. I saw the Lon Chaney Jr. and Lionel Atwill, when we had the "slightly above lowest tier" cable, which brought the old movie channels.
The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
If you read her bio, this lady was dealt some of the worst cards you could possibly get. She stood almost no chance.
More recently, she seems to have saved more than one life in prison.
> Jones later testified that Pike had intervened to protect other inmates before the 2001 incident. A 2025 episode of the podcast Unrestorable, which examined Pike's years in solitary confinement, reported that Jones had attempted to kill at least three other women and that Pike had intervened in each incident, including pulling one woman away from cell bars, pulling another away from a toilet, and intervening when Jones was strangling another woman with a telephone cord. In reporting on Pike's scheduled execution, WTVF-TV, republishing reporting from the Nashville Banner, reported that Jones later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.
Ladies and gentlemen, The United States of America.
What a cruel mess.
Personally I'm opposed to capital punishment but the best line I heard about this was - why didn't they just ask Canada how to do this right?
Whatever happened to like a bullet to the head?
> An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
They can’t even figure out if they want the inmate to be dead or alive. Incompetence has no limit.
Well, they can’t kill someone who is dead so they have to save her. Duh.
And then try to kill her again next month ?
I believe it is the same in the case of unsuccessful abortions, in the US at least. Sometimes they result in a birth, presumably of a heavily injured and premature baby, who is then entitled to emergency medical care. Some of these people survive long term. One example is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Jessen
That was the most "WTF?" in the article. No one working there thought about the nonsensicalness of calling for medical aid for someone who was supposed to be killed?
It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.
Cruel and unusual.
At least the press in Nazi Germany is honest when they witness the regime botching an execution:
> In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honourable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.
But I am sure this whole thing makes for a nice laugh at the next ballroom dinner with the president for the conservative majority of the judges.
May their lobster always taste bland and the oysters give them diarrhea.