[calderarrow]

I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.

Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.

[foxyv]

I used to think that false convictions were rare. In capital cases like this one it is close to 4%! That made me think, is it worth killing 4 innocent people to avoid having to imprison 96 guilty ones for the rest of their life? If I went out with a gun and killed 100 people, 4 innocent and 96 justifiably, I may as well be number 97.

[infamouscow]

I'm curious what percentage of false convictions are caused by LEO and DA omitting or destroying evidence.

I suspect, ignorantly, that it's north of 70%. If anyone should be getting the death penalty, it should be those that abuse power granted to them by the people.

[mystified5016]

Another way to frame it:

Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.

That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.

[handoflixue]

This is true of any punishment, though: if we want to hold people in prison, we're going to have innocent people in there too. Why draw the line specifically at "death"?

[seec]

So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him. From a humanity standpoint the first option is much more barbaric.

Besides, what is the chance an innocent gets out if he was convicted in the first place?

I believe it's so low that the mistake is not giving a decent out (and avoiding large costs to society) to problematic peoples on the off chance that you might get an innocent released 10 years earlier. If he was truly innocent, his life is ruined already, he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life...

[za3faran]

There is an approach that works, see i.e. the Islamic Judicial system. Hudud (Penal laws) are immediately waived with an ounce of suspicion.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.

[moshun]

This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

[mystified5016]

So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?

You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

[calderarrow]

Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.

I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.