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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Executions are never the answer. We need to find better ways to deal with people who can't manage themselves in society. Especially with the goal of reintegration. It may not be possible with everyone, but execution is just giving up, and giving in to barbaric methods.
I worked with this population for years. People can change and redeem themselves. I learned at that job that we all really live in the grey, and that anyone is capable of bad actions when pushed beyond their threshold for rationality or are out of their mind on drugs.
I helped reintegrate someone who was guilty of a very heinous murder, and he arrived at the residential care facility in my catchment in shackles and a Hannibal Lector mask. Made all the other residents terrified of him..
But he soon became the most liked resident by residents and staff alike, and he helped out the facility in many ways, including cleaning and maintenance.
After 24 years in prison, he would say "I'm not going to screw up. I'm not going back." He may have still been a little antisocial and manipulative, but he wasn't a terror to behold.
In fact, most of my favorite clients were from the DOC. Clients who came from incarceration tended to handle the ridged rules and routine at the care facilities a lot better than those who were not previously incarcerated. Contrary to what a lot of people would assume, my DOC folks tended to offer more respect to care staff and authority figures. They also tended to have good senses of humor and I would often have some fun with them.
One of my favorite clients was a prolific bank robber in the 70s who was banned from his home state. He was one of the funniest people I ever met. Definitely the most contagious laugh that would bring you to tears. He had scars all over him; he was missing part of his ear and had scars on his eyelids from the same knife attack where the attacker tried to cut out his eyes; he still had buckshot in him; and he was stabbed in the chest by one ex wife, and stabbed in the back by another!
He was such a character and I genuinely miss working with him. He could be an asshole, but so can we all. He had a sordid past but he was a great person who enhanced the lives of those around him (usually..). He died shortly into the covid lockdowns.
Playing devil's advocate here, but what is the answer to a violent criminal that cannot be rehabilitated?
Two big issues with the death penalty aren't solved, and may never be solvable.
1 - We cannot know perfectly that a person is guilty in every case.
There is often evidence that exonerates suspects and criminals. Sometimes, we really do know without a doubt, but we don't necessarily have a process of "we know this person did it because there is no reasonable doubt" vs "we know this person did it with perfect certainty because this person admitted it proudly, ad nauseum, there were cameras, there was plenty of DNA and lots of witnesses. Their own mother testified against them."
This issue may not ever be perfectly solvable. This means we execute innocent people, too. You can look up famous cases where we executed innocent people. We can't know exactly how often we do this, but we are aware of doing it regularly.
2 - Our methods of execution are often inhumane and torturous. Some of them char the person being executed. Others paralyze them and put them in a state where their whole body is in excruciating pain but they cannot move or make a sound. There's a good John Oliver episode on this fact.
We might be able to improve in this area with better methods and technologies, but we'd need federal enforcement to ensure all states are using these.
Also, people who perform executions have no medical expertise, so they wouldn't necessarily be able to clearly tell we are torturing someone. If an execution fails, we have to revive the victim, who is probably traumatized and tortured, and we try again later.
This process seems inhumane and we definitely would rather get it right the first time, quickly and painlessly, than legally torture people on American soil.
I think we're a long way from it, in terms of not having any real efforts made towards rehabilitation, but those problems are solveable.
If it's going to happen, people shouldn't be executed because they're guilty of any particular individual crime, but because they've shown a pattern of irredeemable behaviour and an inability to be rehabilitated or even made into something of a productive member of society. At this point the criminal would be more expensive to support than almost any other citizen, requiring multiple people just to contain them and protect everyone else - assuming we had an effective rehabilitation system that successfully processed most criminals, their prison would just be for them. It becomes a matter of cutting our losses, we shouldn't have to collectively support someone who actively tries to harm us.
Nitrogen suffocation seems to be the way to go. The body determines it's suffocating by a build up of CO2, but ignores nitrogen as it already makes up 70% of the air. Thus you don't notice the lack of oxygen when suffocating with nitrogen, you go into blissful hypoxia before you die. Based on all available evidence this is probably the most painless way to die overall - it's what's used for assisted suicide. If someone were to be put to death, nitrogen would be the most humane way.
Ultimately though we shouldn't be killing people, we should be rehabilitating people. Far too many people want revenge, even people who weren't actually the victim, which suggests that some part of their motivation is actually finding some excuse to enjoy harming other people - "they're a criminal, they deserve it". That is abhorrent, and in that aspect they are little better than a guilty criminal.
I think I agree on all your points here. I'd add that society and a criminal who we repeatedly fail to rehabilitate would still likely benefit from avoiding the death penalty. The inmate can serve as a learning opportunity in rehab and criminality. I'm sure there are people who simply cannot be rehabilitated by any known means. As long as they remain imprisoned and not a threat to anyone, I think death is an unethical option, but for assisted suicide.
I think Nitrogen asphyxiation has a lot of problems. You can't absolve the terror a person goes through knowing they will die unwillingly. The process can take up to 15 minutes. I'd probably have a panic attack just watching or especially partaking.
People who ordinarily go through nitrogen asphyxiation have the advantage of not knowing they're dying, because it's usually by accident or negligence. An inmate can't possibly share this benefit, unless they're quite drugged during the process or mentally unfit for execution due to general unawareness. Inmates who get executed in this way live through the entire process fully aware they're being suffocated, even if Nitrogen suffocation is better than CO2 suffocation.
Also, I owe you a source for this last section that I'm about to provide, so you don't have to take my word for it. IIRC, if you do not get the nitrogen and oxygen ratios right, the person will experience some symptoms of sickness due to low blood oxygen and will survive barely. The process is a akin to waterboarding IIRC, and has a history, in at least one country, of being used to intentionally inflict that effect as a means of torture. Again, citation needed on my part, and perhaps someone can help me out here find the source.
The effects of hypoxia are widely understood, it's happened to pilots more than enough times. You get blissfully happy as oxygen levels go down, your brain starts slowing down and your speech might slow also. Then you just pass out and die peacefully. So, while you might have anxiety initially, it would likely go away as the effects started.
Sounds a bit like Deadpool lol. I think "getting the ratios just right" must involve messing with the air pressure somehow. If you have pure nitrogen circulating through an otherwise sealed chamber at atmospheric pressure then this won't be an issue.
The bigger issue would actually be protecting everyone else. Nitrogen is very hazardous, because it's stored in a cold liquid state and when it boils it violently expells the air in any space. I used to have to fill this big tank, put it in an elevator, press the button then step out and take the stairs because it was too risky riding the elevator with it. That's also the reason we don't use it for pigs, meanwhile CO2 is heavier than air so you can just have elevated walkways above open CO2 pits.
Said pilots are not being locked in a chamber where they will undergo execution. I'd wager most who are in bliss aren't even aware that they're very close to death. It seems probable their bliss is exclusively dependent on their ignorance of the present circumstances, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
My point isn't that nitro is worse than what we're doing now. It's that I don't think we know it's humane in every case. If the inmate is already suicidal or indifferent, it's probably how they'd want to go out. I just can't say that about the rest.
And I have no trouble believing that we can screw up getting 100% nitrogen saturation in a prisoner's containment. That would be a terrible thing to put someone through.
All these concerns are mitigated if we at least give the prisoner some choice in their exit, or especially if they are permitted life without parole as an alternative.
I'm not convinced Nitro is a silver bullet to this problem.
If anything, pilots are more likely to be aware of the effects of hypoxia, there are training courses for it. If the cabin depressurises above 10,000 feet, there isn't enough oxygen to breathe. It still catches them off guard.
Nitrogen suffocation is also the method used for assisted suicide in the handful of places that allow it. So it's not like it's completely untested for these purposes. While I haven't read the results of research done for this, I'm sure it has been extensive.
I don't think it's some sort of silver bullet - there isn't one. The solution is rehabilitation, which is hard, but we shouldn't be killing people just because the right way is harder. However, if we're going to kill people, then nitrogen suffocation is more humane than any other method.
Life in prison.
Why should everyone else pay to support the person who wants to hurt them?
I mean, assuming we had really good rehabilitation services instead of prisons, such that most people were successfully rehabilitated, and that this criminal was one of very few who couldn't be. Someone who had repeateadly refused any form of rehabilitation, or even any sort of productive work. We would basically need a whole prison with multiple staff just for one person. At some point, the cost of keeping them alive just isn't worth the trouble.
The bottom line is that any law that can be used to rightfully execute a guilty person can be abused to wrongfully execute an innocent. It isn't that expensive to house criminals, and you should be happy to pay for it on the off chance that you end up as one of those few innocent people wrongfully convicted.
It's only inexpensive to house criminals because we house so many of them, when we should be rehabilitating them and having a minimal long term prison population. However, that would also be leaving the worst of the worst criminals, people who cannot be rehabilitated, people who continually harm others. Sure, it's possible for a person to be convicted of one crime, get the death penalty and then later be exhonerated and proven innocent, but if someone has been convicted for 3 or more different serious offenses and failed multiple attempts at rehabilitation that worked for almost everyone else, that continually and sometimes successfully violently attacks the guards? They're clearly guilty.
At some point, at some extreme limit of the most deplorable a human can be, killing them would be better than keeping them.
But we can't even say anyone has got to that point, because we don't try and rehabilitate.
True as this is, reducing the length of sentences won't reduce the number. There'll always be people in prison serving a year or two, even in a perfect world of rehabilitation-focused incarceration.
And killing them remains barbaric, especially when our methods of execution are all as torturous as lethal injection and electrocution. We should be better than that.
There is no such thing. You have the resources of an entire state, a single human no longer poses a threat.
Someday, we may develop a technique to rehab even the worst of the worst.
With the systems we have in place today, I agree that we should never execute anyone, there's too much room for error and even a single wrongful execution is inexcusable. And we should be focused primarily on rehabilitation and reintegration.
That said, playing devil's advocate a bit, I'm not opposed in general principle to the death penalty provided that
Guilt can be proven with absolute certainty. I would even go to almost comically paranoid extremes on this, like if the suspect was off camera for even a second between committing the crime and execution the death penalty is off the table because we can't be 100% certain that they weren't somehow swapped for a body double in that second. This is of course a very difficult, maybe even impossible standard to meet, but there cannot be any doubt that the preson being executed is guilty. Any tiny inconsistency, mishandled piece of evidence, broken chain of custody, conflicting witness accounts, etc. and the death penalty is off the table.
The person is unable to be rehabilitated. This is probably beyond our current ability to determine with our current understanding of psychology and such, so again that puts the death penalty off the table for the foreseeable future. Maybe we'll reach a point where we can actually determine that, but we're not there yet, and possibly never will be.
They will continue to present a danger to others (whether in regular society or to others in prison.) I think the point of execution is that the person is likely to cause enough harm to others that they are unsafe to be allowed to continue living. Even if someone is determined to be guilty beyond any doubt and totally beyond rehabilitation, if they were to, for example, end up as a quadriplegic before they were executed, it would no longer matter that they're an incurable homicidal psychopath, if they can't act on it they're no longer a danger and so execution is no longer called for (at that point they may opt for assisted suicide, but that's their choice and really a separate conversation)
There must be a humane execution method. My current understanding tends to favor nitrogen asphyxiation, but I'm certainly no expert and there may be other options that may be as good or better.
As a final check, I think the judge, jury, prosecutor, etc, provided that they're still alive and able to, should have to be present to witness the execution and take part in it by flipping a switch or something. If they were willing to pass down that sentence they should be willing to see it through to its completion. If they have any misgivings or doubts about their verdict, it gives them a final chance to act on them, and it would make the consequences of their decision more "real" by taking an active part in the actual execution as it happens compared to making a decision in a courtroom that likely won't be carried out until years later. They each go into a private booth, flip their switch or don't, and if anyone doesn't, the sentence is commuted to life. It's never revealed who or how many of them chose to or not to flip their switch.
Killing someone ONLY should be used as a last resort to stop a current, and immediate threat. Never towards someone who has already been stopped and restrained.
Like I said, we aren't there yet, and may never get there, any hypothetical death penalty cases that would meet that standard would have to be decades if not centuries into the future with the benefit of all the scientific advances that come to us in that time. It's probably more likely that we'll have a 100% effective way to treat and rehabilitate people by then, but if we ever do reach a point where we have hit a complete dead end in psychology/neurology, in some hypothetical far-off, post-technological-singularity future where we can definitively say that we have exhausted every possible avenue for rehabilitation, then we can consider the death penalty.
And I disagree that it can only be applied to current and immediate threats, because people who have shown that they are likely to harm people again would then have to spend the rest of their lives restrained and/or in solitary confinement if they're unable to be rehabilitated, and arguably I think death may be a more humane sentence.
Regarding #1, “that video was generated by AI” is a broadly applicable objection to video evidence if “that could be a body double” would work.
I agree with you in principle, both that it would have to be an exceptional case and that the evidence would have to be overwhelming. Absolute certainty is tough though.
I wonder if there are alternatives that would work. For example, is it possible to have a case against somebody that does not rely on ANY human being acting in good faith? If you have to rely on some person’s word to build a case, whether it’s a witness or a cop or a priest, that puts it on shaky ground as far as near certainty.
I actually thought about mentioning AI or other tampering with the footage but didn't want to make my comment even more long-winded than it already was. But suffice it to say the requirements for that would be similarly cartoonishly paranoid with strict rules about how and where it could be stored, who could have access to it under what circumstances, probably going so far as to say that if it had ever been stored on a device that had been exposed to the Internet it couldn't be used as evidence for a death penalty.
It's probably a standard that could only be met by only one in a billion cases even if we retooled all of our surveillance systems, body cameras, etc. to try to meet it, and I'm not saying that we should try to because it would probably mean some egregious privacy violations, but if by some miracle the evidence manages to meet that standard then they can begin to consider the death penalty. It should be an incredibly tough, nearly impossible bar to meet.
I also very much appreciate your point of view, thank you for sharing.
Sometimes it is. Child molesters should be ran through a wood chipper.
Oops, I guess that wasn't the child molester, it was the person trying to help the kid and got incorrectly accused. Guess we should clean up the wood chipper again for the next one.
I didn't say wrongly accused child molesters.
Oh, you're right, we should only execute people when we're double secret sure with a pinky swear.
Like that one guy that several firefighters testified had to have set the fire that killed his family. Guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, that fire wouldn't have spread the way it did without accelerant.
FUCKING OOPS.
When a child has been sexually assaulted and they scrape the dudes DNA out of her you can be pretty goddamned sure he did it.
Why just 'her'? You know little boys can be raped too.... by both females and males... what about them?
And not every victim comes forward right away for many reasons, what about them?
What if they can't actually identify the attacker because they were inebriated for various reasons and a person is incorrectly accused, has no DNA tying them to the attack and the victim can't really say it was them?
Too many variables to indefinitely say kill all offenders of children when too many mistakes have been made before
Because it's just an example and I thought using "them" instead would make the sentence sound weird.
My point is we can kill the ones we know for sure did it. We can stop at imprisoning the rest.
But the problem with that is too much room for human error and biases, that's the reason why we don't already emoloy your idea which is not a new proposed idea.
Capital punishment has always been popular throughout our history, we are just far more evolved now to understand why capital punishment with impunity can go wrong...
Your idea also puts a ton of faith in the public/elected officials and governments not being corrupt and not using their power for personal gains... we know that is not a reality we can relay on and more often than not, people of power WILL abuse it... your proposal has so many ways to be abused..