this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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The part you're being criticised for is the part where you gargle the boot over the concept that people get a fair trial and "due course of justice" when at least 4% of people are falsely convicted and sentenced to death.
You're absolutely out of your mind if you think the system is fair when nearly a minimum of 1 in 20 people sentence to death by it shouldn't be there.
You are an extremely propagandised person living in the most propagandised nation on earth, you should do something about this. You have completely and totally internalised the national propaganda to the point of regurgitating it uncritically like you're a fucking school text book. It is exactly what we mean when we say americans have a civil religion.
You keep messaging me and I keep not seeing anything you have to say because either you delete it yourself or mods remove it lmao.
Either stop wasting both our times or take it to PM if you're actually interested in engaging in good faith. I suspect you're not though.
Do you think you're being fucking clever with this game playing? A single apology completely insincere apology only after being chastised and called out as full of shit multiple messages in a row, followed by lying in the thread about it?
Like holy shit why are liberals this fucking dumb? Do you think you're the first person to come here and think that you're being clever and can play games? It's fucking transparent. Fuck off.
👆 This is kind of why I won't engage you.
I am genuinely sorry I misgendered you. If you won't take my apology, I'm sorry. It's all I can offer you.
Drown yourself
Reading comprehension helps. The part "we tell children" (i.e. that is false) is not that death row inmates typically spend many years in prison, but why they do or, more specifically, that the justice system is particularly concerned with safeguarding the rights of convicts.
Ok, and you don't think that if they weren't explicitly concerned with the appeals process or the questionable mental health of the prisoner, that they wouldn't just execute them immediately?
Again, I'm not here saying that unjust deaths don't happen. I'm saying that the reason they wait so long in the first place is due process.
So you tell me in your own words: if not for at least the illusion of due process, what do you think is the reason that the grand majority of inmates spend years waiting?
Look bro I've been where you've been arguing with people online and trying to justify your opinions more than you try to listen to what the other person has to say or just feeling misunderstood. I probably shared the majority of your political views just a month or so ago and would have done the same.
You'll share a link to something you maybe just skimmed over or move the goalpost a little or admit you aren't really that knowledgeable to lessen the blow a bit. It sucks being in arguments where you feel like you're being attacked on all sides for something you simply "know" to be correct.
Trust me when I say that a lot of the people in this community and instance really knows things and have perspectives way outside your worldview. They get things wrong sometimes but tend to get generally well read. Trust me when I say to give them a shot and listen. I made a post a while back asking for resources and information about communism/socialism and the stuff they had me read shattered my world view. Give them a shot, trust me. They are a lot nicer and more accepting than you think.
GOOD post
You're trotting the goalpost back, whether you mean to or not. Death sentences represent a substantial liability to the state, because killing someone on the basis of an accusation that turns out to be false is a danger, one that is worse with a faster turnaround to these events. The state is happy to have false convictions, so long as they don't cause the boat to rock.
There are surely even true-blue people like you who help promote these measures on some high-minded basis of minimizing infringement on the rights of citizens, but what has been most consistently demonstrated by the state is that if lofty liberal principles come into conflict with material interest, the latter wins. If the state gave a shit about "rights" among the general population, we wouldn't have hundreds of de-facto summary executions per year doled out by the cops (this making allowances for actual violent conflict, since the total number of killings is past 1000)
The simple fact of the matter is that these long periods of internment work as an alibi for the state and, most egregiously, allows for the killing to be carried out with substantially less ado. This is a well-tested method that is notoriously used for the crimes of federal agencies wherein they wait a few decades and then publish what they did once things have cooled down, defusing the liability of another discovery like Cointelpro.
You are hopelessly naive.
They're not concerned with whether it hurts people or there simply wouldn't be death sentences at all.
What they're concerned with is convincing heavily propagandised naive dumbasses that they're acting with good intentions, and implement the bare minimum that they're politically pressured into implementing in order to achieve that without fundamentally changing the core of the system itself.
Misgendering people deliberately just because you don't fucking like what they have to say to you puts you in the category of people I would have thrown in a pit.
Eat shit and die liberal.
If a country has institutionalized and legal slavery (13th amendment), by its very nature it cannot have free and fair trials (6th amendment). These are contradictory statements.
We know that a significant portion of many state-run labour forces in many states are made up of enslaved people, whether they're chain-gang road workers in Louisiana or conscripted to fight wildfires in California. Life sentences or long, harsh penalties are incentivized because it provides a state with free labour. Even when their labour is not being literally exploited as legal slavery, the US runs prison as a strictly punishment focused system, not a reform based system - the cruelty is the point.
In that environment, you fundamentally cannot have fair trials.
You are the living breathing embodiment of this image:
At least 1 in 20 doesn't seem like an exception to me. It seems like they don't care. If they cared, they'd ban the death penalty.
Yeah, you're right. I 100% agree with you.
I think there is also an element of the whole private prison complex coming to bear here, but that is another issue entirely. The interesting thing in this article wasn't really that the majority spend a decade or more on death row, but that the time has been getting longer and longer even as convictions have become harder and longer to exonerate. Basically, even as we become more 'sure' in our convictions, the longer they have to sit.
interestingly enough, a big reason for some of them waiting so long these days has alot to do with the fact that they can't get the chemicals in to actually do the execution, as several legislatures where the death penalty was legal, but is now not but still has convicted death row inmates still kicking around, have banned the manufacture of those chemicals from being in state (in part because they just don"t work very well at the whole 'humane execution without pain' deal that the courts are trying to do, a common problem with most forms of execution).
My point is, some of it is 6th amendment stuff, but a lot of it seems to just be material considerations, either financial or literally physical.
Edit: I would be interested in seeing a more state-by-state breakdown of the numbers. The U.S. is pretty large and federalized, so talking about de jure legal practices in any generalized sense is pretty factually hazardous.
Ok, supply vs demand is a valid point. I'll give you that.
But the act of requiring the chemicals in the first place, as opposed to just hanging or shooting, echos the protection of the 8th (separate, relevant ammendment) anyway, what with cruel and unusual punishment not being allowed.
I kind of don't get how the people here can be shown evidence of a system working in accordance with the constitution and then whole sale espouse the notion that the US doesn't afford any kind of protection whatsoever.
Again, I believe that there is no just murder by the state. An dead man cannot be exonerated. But it's a little dishonest to imply that it's all a racket and that we're just lining these guys up to kill willy nilly.
I think that, if you were in anywhere in the U.S. that practiced the death penalty prior to DNA evidence, there was a lot of 'let God sort em' out' happening in the U.S. court system. Basically, I think the 4% exoneration rate is a really really low estimate, it could potentially be as high as even 10%, particularly during the wild west of prison expansion during the 80's and 90's.
That said, the prison industrial complex runs far more on racking up fines and filling beds with low level offenses than dealing with death-row stuff, but it's still a good racket.
The reason why it's a racket is because the whole U.S. evidence and prison system is mostly a racket. The protections afforded to us are minimal at best, and mostly locked behind wealth premiums. To the degree we do have protection it is because someone in the private sector makes money off of that protection, which is a functional, if contradictory, system. Once you get into the prison system, it requires a Herculean effort to escape, especially for people who are mostly there due to mental health issues. The U.S. has the largest prisoner per capita ratio in the world for a reason, and it's not because the system is working well for the majority of subjects, it's just works really well for those it is supposed to work well for, the wealthy, lawyers and cops, who while sometimes having opposing interests, are mostly on the same page from a 'functional system' aspect.
Edit: Again, you can 'echo' any amendment you like, but there is a lot more 'Aw gee isn't this new whiz-bang invention swell? Probably sure does execute folks safer and more humanely! ;D' when there was and is no evidence that that is the case in the history of executions in the U.S.
Companies want to make money and they'll appeal to the 8th amendment, but it usually isn't the amendment actually driving these changes, it is a 'modernizing' drive within prisons to 'keep with the times'.
I understand and agree with a lot of what you are saying. I'd also like to thank you for being candid and factual about the topic. It's a nice change.
I guess where that breaks down for me has to do with why they wait so long to execute in the first place, if not for some protections being present in general.
I guess it's not really a solvable or understandable problem from the perspective I have that it's all unjust regardless of what they do. Maybe waiting like that does serve a monetary purpose to some influence somewhere.
People here don't assume good faith, for good reason, as they rarely receive it, especially from people outside the forum. I don't mind taking a chance particularly if it is something I actually enjoy talking about.
It definitely does to the private prisons. That is what I found so interesting about the article you posted. Despite the fact that we have become more sure of our convictions (as exonerations are less likely and take longer) the length of the lived prison sentence has grown. There is clearly an additional financial factor at play here than simply a 'Well we have to satisfy the 6th amendment.' because usually that is based on a 'procedural' and 'reasonableness' standard (with those standards being set by the state), which was clearly being satisfied before, but now is not despite the improvement of certainty.
My general interest would be seeing if you cut the numbers from states like Ohio who have the chemical execution issue, if the numbers change drastically in any way, as that could complicate the analysis and then point more towards either a legal cause or financial cause. The large issue with any statistical data is that there are a variety of factors at play and any one of them could be the primary causal factor. My money would still be on a primarily financial factor (as all things being equal material concerns trump ideological concerns) but you never know until you really scrape the numbers.
Not to dog pile, but I can't emphasize enough how misguided this point is. Long drop hanging, firing squad, decapitation, and a handful of other traditional execution methods are all virtually painless. The thing about lethal injection is that it deliberately suppresses evidence of the victim suffering by paralyzing them, so there is no sign of them suffering even if they feel like there whole body is aflame. Other methods are much more transparent in this respect (except electric chair, which has the opposite problem of drowning pain responses in noise).