Fuck

[filkertom]

Troy Anthony Davis was killed by the state of Georgia for crimes which many believe he didn't commit.

Songs and comfort to his family and supporters, and also to the family and supporters of slain police officer Mark MacPhail. There is nothing good about this situation -- nothing.

Here is actor Jeremy Irons speaking out on the death penalty.

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

This case quite likely constitutes an error in the system. We know there have been others.

My question to you, and supporters of the death penalty in general, is: What's an acceptable rate of false positives in executions?

Certainly 50% is too high a number. I think 10% is too. 1%? Personally, I'd rather see 99 murderers have to live out their lives in prison than see one wrongly-convicted person be executed. Maybe 0.1% is okay?

How many actual murderers do we need to kill to make it okay that a single innocent is wrongly executed?

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

I agree with the maxim "better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to prison", but also that for some crimes the only appropriate punishment is death.

As for a specific percentage, that's a nonsensical question. The only real answer is however many are convicted. Beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Okay, let me make my point clearer. Given that the justice system is going to make mistakes, from time to time - it's a system run by humans, using their best judgement, but it's not perfect - then if the death penalty is in place, some percentage of those executed will in fact be innocent. And whereas with other punishments, those errors can eventually be recognized and fixed - for example, the large number of death-row convicts that have been exonerated by DNA evidence years after their convictions, which predated the availability of that technology - once you kill someone, there's no way to go back later and fix it.

I hope you'll agree that if 50% of the people sentenced to death were innocent, implementing the death penalty in so inaccurate a justice system would be a horrible idea. Clearly you're fine with it if the number is 0%. So presumably there has to be a point somewhere in the middle where, in your opinion, the benefit of killing all the rightly-executed criminals outweighs the harm of executing innocents. Where is it?

I'm personally fine with the death penalty in the case of a 0% false-execution rate. I'm not okay with it at 1%. Given that I actually don't see much marginal benefit in executing a prisoner over imprisoning them for life with no parole, whereas I see the cost of executing an innocent person as nearly unimaginably high, if I had to pick a non-zero number it would probably be in the range of 0.00001% - one executed innocent for ten million executed criminals might be an acceptable risk.

And then I note that the false positive rate of our death sentences is much higher, and the death penalty just isn't worth that cost to me. So I'd like to know where your cost-benefit analysis differs.