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Can I ask what's the cutoff? How much money/how high of a position qualifies you for the electric chair?

Return 3/4 of what was stolen to get execution downgraded to life imprisonment that’s not getting away with it.

That said, my general opposition to the death penalty does influence me here.

If these fucks face a realistic prospect of getting their heads chopped off? Sure, let 'em roll those dice.

True, but they’re demands of a better world. There’s a difference between killing in a revolution and a 60 year old communist government executing an embezzler instead of giving her life in prison

The state ending someone's life for breaking its laws and then having people here who would normally condemn the use of capital punishment compare it to a revolution and call it justified just because the state in question claims to be socialist is just so uniquely Lemmy.

I dunno, reducing them to being not-billionaires and even not-millionaires would actually be a pretty just sentence IMO. I bet being reduced to a regular Joe would hurt some of them more than the death penalty

I think it's a valid question. I wouldn't say that the only reason for abolishing the death penalty is because we might make a mistake... that definitely factors into it, but there's more to it.

Ask yourself what purpose does it serve to put someone to death? They're already in jail/prison and no longer a threat to society. Deterrence? Is the death penalty any more of a deterrence than a life sentence?

The only purpose I can think of for the death penalty is that it's for "Revenge". It doesn't actually fix anything in of itself. It doesn't resolve disputes, it doesn't really solve anything.

I want to point out that this is already the standard for conviction. The finder of fact must find the accused to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt before convicting them. So from a legal perspective, everyone convicted of a crime already has been proven guilty to the highest possible standard. If there is any shred of doubt at all about the guilt of the accused, they're supposed to be acquitted. It's only possible in retrospect when new evidence emerges that exonerates the accused that it can be determined that the original guilty verdict was incorrect. You can't really "force" this evidence to emerge with any amount of policy changes. It just happens over time.

For example, witnesses lie. Maybe five years after the fact they feel bad about lying and retract their testimony. Maybe some of the investigators assigned to the case just made up some evidence to get the accused convicted in court because they just thought there was no way he could be innocent and they just needed to cook up the evidence to get them declared guilty, and they can only admit that when the statute of limitation passes. Or maybe, three years later, a convenience store manager deleting old footage happens upon a CCTV tape giving the accused an alibi. Or maybe still, the accused was actually framed and their framers only got caught ten years later doing some other crime, and it turned out that they forged the accused's signatures on those documents and used their computer to send those e-mails without their knowledge. I could go on.

So if your proposed standard is applied, it would not actually exclude anyone from execution because everyone who's been convicted has already been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

Then sentence more of them as necessary. Im all for sweeping changes but we're not getting them. Convincing America to kill someone seems way more likely to me.

Oh who cares, they get outraged when a day ends in y.

There wouldn't be any outrage outside of 100s of the wealthy donors. Liberals would completely be more outraged because of norms and civility. The entire point of "drain the swamp" was that most people hate oligarchs, the point of Republicans is to redirect this off into racist and unproductive channels, where nothing ever comes of this hate for corporate and wealthy overlords.

Or from blue state liberals because "we're better than them" or some shit.