Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time.

This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham

Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point.

If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code.

Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem.

Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with.

Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.

While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that.

So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.

Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.

At that point, it'd probably be more economical to just have the universal nanotechnology modify humans to be unable to commit crimes, indeed, unable to think them.

That can't possibly go wrong.

Better, both of the above and the AI is bright enough to contrive that a crime fails when it isn't targeting a willing victim or a sockpuppet.

You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible.

But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.

>> You're solution is to have a perfect system?

No. My "solution" is to focus on fixing the part that's really broken, not the thing that later becomes an issue from that breakage.

That doesn't result in a perfect system. However, if you're not convicting innocent people very often, then very few will ever have the "opportunity" to face execution.

I'm not sure I follow. If you admit that you'll still end up with innocent people being sentenced to death, you haven't fixed anything. You can work on not convicting innocent people and remove the death penalty, they aren't mutually exclusive.

Summary: Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

Hard to do though.

> Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

Actually, sending innocent people to prison will kill a significant number of them, especially if the sentence is "life without parole".

If you're innocent, you're actually much better off being sentenced to death.

People have their opinions on what sort of life is worse than death, so I won't argue with you.

I was simply saying that the parent of my above comment was arguing that the problem is doing bad things to innocent people, and that we are focusing on a subset of that problem, rather than the problem as a whole.

And then I said that the problem as a whole is hard to fix.

> People have their opinions on what sort of life is worse than death, so I won't argue with you.

You misunderstand - I'm not saying anything about quality of life.

I'm pointing out that innocent people on death row are far more likely to be released than innocent people sentenced to life without parole.

In fact, even less than life sentences are frequently fatal.

Prison life is very deadly.

FWIW, death row is safer and has better quality of life in many respects.

Comparing death penalty to exception handling is the most distasteful metaphor ever. The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence. That is the problem.

Luckily, the analogy had nothing to do with the death penalty, and was simply about focusing on the symptom instead of the root problem.

You'd have to really go out of your way to read it wrong to draw any sort of "this is comparing death penalty to exception handling" conclusion.

According to Freakonomics it does. But the deterrence isn't the only aspect important to the matter. The risk of false positives alone is enough to forget about possible deterrence value. And that's not even about the ethics of the matter.

1) Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. I don't care what Freakonomics says.

2) I believe that the risk of false positives should be enough reason to abolish the death penalty.

I absolutely agree that the risk of false positives is enough reason. I can't understand how people think that can be acceptable under any circumstances. I'm just not sure that the death penalty is not a deterrent.

> The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence.

What do you suggest in order to deter an innocent man from committing the crime that he never committed?

That was not my point. My point was that death penalty does not prevent actual criminals from murdering people. Hence, I don't see what is the point of capital punishment. Moreover, I don't think that judges and juries should have the right to play God and decide who lives or dies.

I agree with your comment about the DP not being a deterrent. People who murder people aren't thinking, "I can handle life without parole, but gee, I can't handle that death penalty!". Thoughts about consequences only begin for them after getting caught.

I'm neutral on your second point. I think there are examples of criminals with crimes that are so sick and heinous in nature to where I could see the argument that taking their life away is a just and proportional penalty.

I do think there's one thing that has to be taken into account when talking about the DP, though: it seems to be a powerful bargaining chip. Here's a paper from earlier this year that finds criminals are significantly more likely to plea to life or long sentences in states where they may face the DP compared to states where they will not: http://www.cjlf.org/papers/wpaper09-01.pdf

There are papers, though, which make arguments that come to different conclusions. This is well outside of my area of knowledge, but my point in bringing it up is to identify it as another thing that bears consideration in the DP discussion.

And it certainly wasn't the first time, either.

The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_.

Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?

We do put up with it in anti virus programs - mcafee deletes Daneware mini remote control service and angryziber ip scan both of which are innocent useful tools.

5 seconds with Google would have given you http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty which links to multiple sources that have looked into the issue and found that the additional cost of prosecuting the death penalty is significantly more than life without parole. The amount of difference varies with jurisdiction and the methodology of the study, but the differences support the claim.

Fair enough. I was on my iPhone and about to go to bed. It was an interesting claim and I wanted to know if it was founded or not.

You could try reading the article.

Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.

Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet?

To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.

So... it only count as human if it is a citizen?

That's clearly not what was said. The most basic function of government is to protect its citizens. If a government executes one of its own citizens, it has fundamentally failed. You and I may consider many other actions to be failures of governments, but the citizen distinction matters here.

By definition, collateral damage is unintended killing, whereas capital punishment is doubtlessly intended killing.

Ah, but this is (retroactively) unintended killing.

Imagine a car being hit from the air by a Predator drone because analysis wrongly believes it's full of terrorists. Intended killing. They later realise they made a mistake a killed some family. Now it's unintended killing. Not much of a difference there by my reckoning.

Except that the scenario you've described is not collateral damage. According to the U.S. Air Force:

"Broadly defined, collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities."

Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#pa...

If a Predator blows up a car and the family traveling inside it because some intelligence analyst believes it's full of terrorists, that is killing, pure and simple. There's no "collateral" here. If during the same strike, another car with another family is accidently destroyed by the blast, that is, indeed, collateral damage.

To summarize, if you destroy what you're targeting, there's no collateral damage. If you destroy something other than what you're targeting, then there's collateral damage. Collateral damage is unintended killing, but not all unintended killing is collateral damage. Hence, your argument is fallacious.

"I used to support the death penalty until I realized the government can't even run the Post Office." - my father, Moshe Yudkowsky

That's the most outrageous, devilish thing that can and eventually had happened or will happen with death penalty. Someday, we will know we killed an innocent man, and in that day we will ALL be murderers. We all being murderers, we should all be sentenced to death (the Death Penalty Paradox).

Technically we would all be accomplices to murder (after all it is quite hard to find a not-Orient-Express scenario in which more than a couple of people kill another one), which does not usually get the death penalty, so paradox is avoided. I do agree with you, though :-)

When there is a miscarriage of justice, those responsible for it must be brought to justice.

All of the people that contributed to his execution with their b.s. science and swayed testimony need to be severely punished IMO. Maybe a prison sentence will deter these "experts" from claiming their findings are 100% correct without some sort of scientific proof.

This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.

I thought the quote near the beginning of the article about how the death penalty proves the sanctity of life gave a pretty good solution to the "problem" of the death penalty:

Anyone who, either knowingly or negligently, contributes to the execution of any person later found innocent, is guilty of murder punishable by death.

Now, who wants to be the first to help put someone on death row?

Just based on the title, I'd have to say "more probable than any other state". I should probably have flagged this article, but 'eh.

"Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids."

Did Stacy have jealous boyfriend or secret admirer? She did work at a bar. Murdering Stacy's partner Willingham and their kids could bring them a step closer. Maybe someone was targeting Stacy. Who knows?

The system went for the dad because he was an easy target, and so the system could then move on.