Philoponus e-mails:
On this issue, we are on the same page--I think we should celebrate our agreements! In fact, I probably support a broader use of CP than you do. I think CP a condign punishment for things like aggravated sexual assault on a minor, aggravated assault with torture, etc.
I know people who are Amnesty International members. When they start on this stuff about wrongful executions, I stop them and demand a list of the people whom they think wrongfully executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Some facts please! They come up with NO credible cases. They talk about a somewhat mentally impaired killer executed in Texas and another in Florida, but these people admitted their killings and juries considered their impairment at trial. It is clear that in the cases they point to what they disagree with is law which allows CP rather than a flawed trial process. The verdicts were good verdicts. I personally see absolutely no reason to consider lower than normal IQ an excuse or mitigation for egregious crimes.
Some people are just opposed to CP whatever the facts and arguments. Fortunately they are minority in most US states. The argument that CP in the US is killing the wrongfully convicted is getting very hard to sustain. 30 years ago when I took my first course in criminalistics, it was a much more persuasive argument, but the advances in the last 30 years have been huge. The scientific evidence that can be extracted from a crime scene is amazing. O. J. Simpson was very lucky!
The average U.S. Death Row innate gets 14 years to appeal his sentence. Project Innocence helps prisoners with any sort of reasonable appeal, and appellate courts even in TX, VA and FL are very generous in considering credible appeals. The standard in these courts is really "above and beyond a resonable doubt" if there is any grounds for doubt. No human institution can be perfect. Nothing can guarantee that a wrongfully convicted person won't be executed, but I think this result is VERY unlikely in the US these days. When someone tells me no one deserves to be executed, I feel obliged to treat them to a graphic murder-by-murder tour of the careers of Bundy, Gacy, and Mike Ross. People need to know exactly what these murderers did to women and boys. This inevitably ends the debate--they have no stomach for the facts.
Clarity will be served if we distinguish two claims that the CP-opponent could be making:
1. Even if there were no actual or possible cases of a wrongfully convicted person being executed, CP would still be an unjust penalty and should be banned.
2. Because there is the possibility of wrongful convictions, CP should be banned.
Like you, I cannot fathom how any rational and morally percipient person could embrace (1). But I find (2) less objectionable, though I reject it as well. I think the conservative must simply accept the possibility of wrongful executions and then argue that this possibility does not by a long shot outweigh the gross injustice of allowing the most vicious murderers to live on in comfort at tax payer expense for years.
But I now want to point out that you seem to be contradicting something implied by what you were maintaining earlier. Earlier, you denied that there is a difference between being found guilty and being guilty, even when all the procedural rules in a trial have been scrupulously followed. That implies, however, that there cannot be a wrongful conviction. But above you speak as if there can be wrongful convictions for capital crimes, adding that this is very unlikely.
If you maintain against the CP-opponents that wrongful convictions are nowadays extremely rare, then by maintaining that you concede that wrongful convictions are possible (and not just in an anemic logical sense) and that therefore the property of being found guilty in a properly conducted trial of such-and-such charge is not identical to the property of being guilty of said charge.
As for the broadened use of CP mentioned in your opening paragraph, consider arson. A man deliberately and maliciously sets a forest ablaze. In the course of combating it, several firefighters lose their lives. In addition, countless animals are either killed or deprived of habitat. And there is property damage in the millions. Doesn't CP at some point become a condign punishment? I say yes. What rational objection could one have to that?
It is indeed a strange world. We in the West coddle the most vicious criminals. In the Islamic lands hands are cut off for theft. Both sides have lost their collective minds, though they are far, far worse. They stone to death the woman caught in adultery and we wring our hands over the execution of a scumbag like 'Tookie' Williams.
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