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Ogmius815 posted:Or, to put it less artfully, take common sense over reasoning. Isn't this the exact argument Posner was making that EW summed up last page?
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Jul 7, 2017 13:27
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Rygar201 posted:Isn't this the exact argument Posner was making that EW summed up last page? Hence Ogmius815 posted:Bam. Full circle. We probably should stop loving with the death penalty. Also life imprisonment. Therapy for every crime.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:35
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Dead Reckoning posted:The huge thing you're ignoring here is that the only way to legally determine if in fact someone has "rock solid DNA proof" is at trial. As long as exhaustion of appeals continues to be a thing that exists, (and it exists for good reason,) there will always be a point where the defendant has run out of proper venues to hear his case again. It's not. A judge can evaluate evidence on motion and determine if enough evidence has been presented to merit a further habeus hearing. I can attach a DNA report and an affadavit to a motion and the judge can consider that as evidence for the motion. And again, your posts really don't bother my argument at all because you have arrived at an absurd result - that the courts can permit the execution of a factually innocent person - and then stuck with that conclusion rather than re-evaluate your premises. That's precisely what I'm saying is a problem. Dead Reckoning posted:Also, I would counter that the defendant who suddenly uncovers slam dunk evidence that proves their innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt, but who has exhausted all their appeals, and who cannot convince the governor of their state with this same slam dunk evidence, is an edge case among edge cases and not worth opening the door to a flood of hopeless appeals that would almost certainly be filed in hopes of merely prolonging the defendants' life for the duration of the court proceedings and thereby place and unnecessary and undue burden on the courts. This occured. Governor Perry didn't read the clemency petition at all despite the fact that the nation's lead arson expert had determined that an uneducated idiot had investigated and declared on the basis of absolute nonsense science that a fire that caused deaths was an arson, and Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for an arson that wasn't an arson. Perry then covered it up by apppointing a loyalist to head the committee investigating it and had it buried. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 13:36
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Discendo Vox posted:I agree with dead reckoning here. My understanding is that's the high procedural costs of capital punishment cases is already because the entire exhaustion through bits of string pattern already occurs. As he states, the anti-death penalty assertion, which is a separate claim, is what's doing a lot of the work in counter arguments. The idea of giving people infinite claims anywhere is, um, not a good idea. If you define your premises as correct and your reasoning as correct then yes, the result is by definition correct. In practice, since you can do neither of those things, working premises with correct reasoning to absurd results is a generally accepted method to determine the premises were bad ones.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:44
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Rygar201 posted:Isn't this the exact argument Posner was making that EW summed up last page? Yeah, I was just throwing in my candidate for the flawed starting presumption. I've made this point before in this thread, but the American legal system rests on a number of relatively un-examinable premises (examples include the idea that judges reach decisions objectively and rationally after examining evidence, or the idea that poor people have meaningful access to a fair justice system, among others). Everyone knows on some level that these premises are flawed, but they're the system we have, so we work with what we have. edit: for some reason I have this on the brain right now so I'll just keep posting. look at the OJ Simpson trial. The central point of the OJ Simpson trial should not have surprised anybody: it turns out that the LAPD was racist as gently caress in the 1990's and it was impossible for any black person to get a fair trial in LA in the 90's. That is about the furthest thing from a surprise as possible, but it somehow still amazed everybody that the jury let Simpson go. The OJ Simpson case didn't prove that it's impossible for a rich person to be convicted; it proved that the system is so flawed that black people can't get fair trials, which is not something that should have needed proving. Cochran may have been a brilliant defense attorney, but it didn't take a flash of genius to figure out that at least one of the cops who arrested Simpson was probably racist as gently caress, this was the LAPD in the 90's, that's a bears-live-in-the-woods level assumption. The real lesson of the OJ Simpson case was that all the other black people Mark Furman had sent to jail didn't have access to a legal defense capable of proving that LA cops were racist. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 13:49
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Also, the fact anyone still debates this, at all, is strong evidence that the people defending Scalia have no loving idea what they're talking about. How do I know that? Because In re Davis was in 2009. Scalia lost. Yet the promised flood of bullshit pleadings that prevent executions through mertiless arguments has not come to pass. Not only was it a monstrous result, it was a wrong one. Yet people still refuse to accept that despite the eight years under this legal regime producing not a single example of the parade of horribles placed against recognizing the principle that the constitution forbids the execution of a factually innocent person.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:51
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evilweasel posted:Also, the fact anyone still debates this, at all, is strong evidence that the people defending Scalia have no loving idea what they're talking about. How do I know that? Because In re Davis was in 2009. Scalia lost. Yet the promised flood of bullshit pleadings that prevent executions through mertiless arguments has not come to pass. Not only was it a monstrous result, it was a wrong one. Yet people still refuse to accept that despite the eight years under this legal regime producing not a single example of the parade of horribles placed against recognizing the principle that the constitution forbids the execution of a factually innocent person. My understanding is that the infinite appeals process is a major cost driver of death penalties cases, though it's difficult to get clean data and interpretation because most of the larger cost reports are written by anti-death penalty groups. The Maryland cost report I first located was written by an anti-death penalty group, but they acknowledged that the main distinguishing driver of imprisonment costs was "few of those sentenced to death are actually executed". They don't go into the why of that, of course. evilweasel posted:If you define your premises as correct and your reasoning as correct then yes, the result is by definition correct. In practice, since you can do neither of those things, working premises with correct reasoning to absurd results is a generally accepted method to determine the premises were bad ones. Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you're proceeding rationally and fairly according to just principles, but still arrive at an absurd result, then one of your starting assumptions was faulty. I'd posit that the faulty assumption in the case of the death penalty is the assumption that a system of justice administered by human beings can be competent to administer such a penalty. The result may also not be absurd, especially if your method of evaluating absurdity does not also undergo scrutiny. Why is the outcome absurd? Again, I suspect in this case the driving force is the belief that, in an uncertain world, a legal system can avoid producing bad individual outcomes ever. The legal system kills people constantly- not just in executions, but through imprisonment, through costs, through outcomes...this is known. It is a cost of having a system of laws at all. The purpose of a legal system is to produce an ordered and final conclusion to societal conflict within a bounded system. It cannot produce perfect outcomes for all parties without infinite resources and perfect knowledge. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 15:01
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Human fallibility is no reason not to strive to refrain from executing people with credible claims of innocence though. Ending someone's life is qualitatively different from imprisoning them or assessing fines. You can award compensatory damages and release someone, but you can't reverse a death sentence.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:08
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Rygar201 posted:Human fallibility is no reason not to strive to refrain from executing people with credible claims of innocence though. Ending someone's life is qualitatively different from imprisoning them or assessing fines. You can award compensatory damages and release someone, but you can't reverse a death sentence. People die in prisons. People die because we fine them. Legal systems are equally culpable if the causal mechanism is more abstract. Harms do not become more just because they are not death. Nor, indeed, is death itself a special harm.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:21
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Discendo Vox posted:Nor, indeed, is death itself a special harm. Hard disagree on this premise, yo.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:34
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Discendo Vox posted:People die in prisons. People die because we fine them. Legal systems are equally culpable if the causal mechanism is more abstract. Harms do not become more just because they are not death. Nor, indeed, is death itself a special harm. Okay. I don't see how "We should limit appeals in capital cases" or "It's just to execute people with credible claims of innocence" follows from this. I feel like you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Harms occur and will always occur, therefore we shouldn't try to mitigate harms seems like a bad take.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:34
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Discendo Vox posted:People die in prisons. People die because we fine them. Legal systems are equally culpable if the causal mechanism is more abstract. Harms do not become more just because they are not death. Nor, indeed, is death itself a special harm. Graveposting is not allowed, Antonin.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:39
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Rygar201 posted:Okay. I don't see how "We should limit appeals in capital cases" or "It's just to execute people with credible claims of innocence" follows from this. I feel like you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'd be fine with expanding or altering the appeals requirements in these systems (though there are a bunch of wrinkles and it varies by state). In particular, moving the governor appeal to a separate deliberative body would be appealing. I'm also increasingly open to straight up opposition to the death penalty. It's the infinite appeals position, presented as quasi-separate from the death penalty debate, that bugs me. botany posted:Graveposting is not allowed, Antonin. Hey now, I'm not one tenth  enough to be Scalia posting from Smug Originalist Hell. Also Scalia doesn't do hyperextended causal ethical reasoning, that's like an entirely different fringe nutjob worldview. I work hard on my diehard formalist consequentialist schtick, don't disparage it!
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Jul 7, 2017 15:43
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I am definitely opposed to the death penalty, and fine with that discussion. Allowing the condemned to appeal their convictions and sentences is related, but not distinct from opposition though. If we must have capital punishment, we should strive to ensure the process is as just as possible.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:45
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Rygar201 posted:I am definitely opposed to the death penalty, and fine with that discussion. Allowing the condemned to appeal their convictions and sentences is related, but not distinct from opposition though. If we must have capital punishment, we should strive to ensure the process is as just as possible. I agree with you, but at this point you have to distinguish between procedural justice/fairness (which can countenance limits on appeal, as it does with any other activity, as is a fundamental purpose of justice systems) and moral justice, which from the anti-death penalty standpoint requires its abolishment.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:55
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Discendo Vox posted:The result may also not be absurd, especially if your method of evaluating absurdity does not also undergo scrutiny. Why is the outcome absurd? common sense! But because the idea that a factually innocent person has no recourse to prevent execution in a justice system is crazy. When you're reasoning from initial assumptions, and you get to a result, the result is only true as long as the reasoning is true and the assumptions are true. They are assumptions however. Once you have the result, if the result seems absurd, you must weigh if the result being correct or the postulates being incorrect is more likely. That's where common sense comes in: you must select one and you can't reason your way out of it. It is precisely that failure to grapple with the results of the reasoning and determine if they call the assumptions into doubt that is Scalia's problem here. Every other justice (except Thomas) was able to realize that Scalia's endpoint is monstrous and can't possibly be true, and that as a result the interests in finality must at some point give way to the ability to present evidence of actual innocence to a court. You can circumscribe it, limit it to cases where the prejudice to the defendant is severe enough (say, they're on death row), whatever. But at the end of the day there is no moral argument you can make for executing an innocent person, and opening this avenue for relief has produced no negative practical effects (and the potential negative practical effects were never significant enough to outweigh that you shouldn't execute innocent people), so I'm struggling to see the possible way you'd justify sticking with the conclusion. Discendo Vox posted:My understanding is that the infinite appeals process is a major cost driver of death penalties cases, though it's difficult to get clean data and interpretation because most of the larger cost reports are written by anti-death penalty groups. The Maryland cost report I first located was written by an anti-death penalty group, but they acknowledged that the main distinguishing driver of imprisonment costs was "few of those sentenced to death are actually executed". They don't go into the why of that, of course. The cost has always been high, well before 2009, because all of the appeals they get are actually used. It's not because they have the ability to file a habeas petition that can be summarily denied by a judge's clerk without the need for the government to file a response for failure to show enough evidence to raise a serious question of actual innocence. It's because of the appeals where the government needs to litigate it at every step of the way because we realize that the execution of an innocent person is constitutionally barred and morally monstrous.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:03
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Discendo Vox posted:I agree with you, but at this point you have to distinguish between procedural justice/fairness (which can countenance limits on appeal, as it does with any other activity, as is a fundamental purpose of justice systems) and moral justice, which from the anti-death penalty standpoint requires its abolishment. both pro and anti-death penalty people tend to agree that moral justice abhors the killing of someone who didn't commit a crime. that is, after all, the general justification for executing the guilty.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:04
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evilweasel posted:both pro and anti-death penalty people tend to agree that moral justice abhors the killing of someone who didn't commit a crime. that is, after all, the general justification for executing the guilty. Then again, Texas.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:05
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Discendo Vox posted:
This will sound more trivial an objection than it is, but is the objective of the legal system to produce order, or to produce justice? The answer is recursive, because a system that is not seen as just will not produce order (as we see in the response to the legal system's ongoing failure to ever convict a cop of doing anything to a black person: "a riot is the language of the unheard".) Even individual cases of injustice can produce systemic disorder if those cases are seized upon as totems by political movements. In order for a legal system to provide orderly resolution of conflict, it must be *seen as* fair and just. Ours, increasingly, isn't -- and often for good reason (see, e.g., examples as varied as Matt Taibbi's _Griftopia_ or the exoneration of the cop who shot Philando Castile, or to get back on topic, the thousands exonerated via DNA evidence.) Handwaving all those away as the necessary cost of the intent failure rate in having a system of justice doesn't really hold up. The disaster is too obvious and well documented. It's like shrugging at the Titanic because, hey, some ships are gonna sink sometimes, it's the cost of having a shipping industry.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:18
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EW, in what sense is the person in question innocent? In fact? How so? In law? How is this established? What does this take? The disposition of fact through legal finding is still something that has to occur. The purpose of legal systems is to create legal, final, facts from the uncertainty of reality. This is a system with costs and limits- in resources, in belief, and in the retention of its power to construct such facts. The justice system absolutely requires this in its evaluations. Before the final power of disposition of legal outcomes, all else must submit to the ultimate finding of legal fact or the system is for naught.. Asserting someone is "actually innocent" in the face of the legal outcome is immaterial in the absence of procedural failure. Death makes no difference in this part of the calculus. Your reasoning for justifying the absolute nature of your moral claim is just to assert it over and over again. Ought there not to be unjust death? Maybe, but this is beyond the power of the state to stop all unjust death, and changes that pursue its reduction in one way have costs in others. This is why direct attacks on the effectiveness of the death penalty are much stronger arguments.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:21
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For this discussion we should all be working within an agreed hypothetical framework. I suggest the following: Bathroom McGillicuddy has been tried and convicted for the murder of his wife. The week before his execution, the Facebook page "Free Bathroom" posts a video showing a POV account of the murder by a woman who identifies herself as Deadnight Robertson and shows her face as she bludgeons Bathroom's wife with the murder weapon, which had been discovered in the original investigation. The video gains wide media notoriety and is extremely convincing, showing no signs of alteration*. Crowdsourced investigation turns up significant circumstantial evidence for the Deadnight theory of the case. However, Bathroom has exhausted his appeals and is scheduled to be executed in six days. There, please continue your discussion. * I foresee this will become a huge problem for the justice system in future decades, and probably sooner rather than later. When flawless video evidence can be convincingly faked, how can reasonable doubt persist as a standard? mdemone fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 16:28
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This will sound more trivial an objection than it is, but is the objective of the legal system to produce order, or to produce justice? This is actually the central debate, in my eyes, and not trivial at all. I'm way further on the order side of the scale than others, for reasons linked to my consequentialism. An ordered system that is not completely just, nor perceived as just, can still produce better outcomes than a system without order, especially by its capacity for improvement. That's one of the strengths of a common law system. A truly, universally just system is impossible, and pursuing it can produce actual harms to order, and so to justice. This is especially true given the many circumstances in which true justice and true facts are unknowable, and there is profit in asserting that an ordered system is unjust based on limited information. In this case, I view the criticism in question to be misdirected- like responding to the Titanic by seeking to make hulls out of solid diamond. Restart bussing programs, end elected judges, massively regulate firearms, give final appeal to an ombudsman. Don't assert an unproven claim of innocence as a grounds to do away with the essential role of the law as final. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 16:35
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hobbesmaster posted:Then again, Texas. It takes balls to execute an innocent man.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:36
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I think you are exaggerating our arguments Vox. No one is suggesting a system without order, and no one wants to end the "role of law as final." The argument, as far as I can tell, is that permitting condemned prisoners to file appeals is not an unreasonable burden on the justice system.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:38
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Rygar201 posted:I think you are exaggerating our arguments Vox. The objection is to using unproven not-actually-factual assertions to assert an infinite claims process, based on a moral assertion of factuality outside the legal sense-making system. When Scalia talks about "factual" innocence, it's not actually factual innocence in the legal sense, which in that context is the kind that matters. This has then gotten spun interest a broader moral assertion that creates a epistemological problem for law as a whole. Again, though, DR already went into it. ...if someon gets me a red text av for all this, can it please be of Javert and not Scalia? I hate that smug disingenuous gently caress and this is one of like 2 cases where I side with him against others.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:50
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The issue is that Scalia was wrong though? Capital cases and executions have continued despite the "excessive" appeals in the years since these opinions were written, as far as I know.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:51
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Rygar201 posted:The issue is that Scalia was wrong though? Capital cases have continued despite the "excessive" appeals in the years since these opinions were written, as far as I know. They have, but as with other elements of the capital cases system, activists intentionally have driven up costs using this appeal (as they have elsewhere) to make a disingenuous cost of death penalty argument, Grover Norquist style. The resources that go into the process, including really detached indirect ones, don't go elsewhere. And an incorrect set of beliefs about Scalia's statement, the role of legal vs moral fact claims, and the purposes of law, proliferates, harming the credibility of th ordered legal system in a manner that harms both its stability and its more effective reform.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:57
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Discendo Vox posted:
I would buy the idea that we need to cut off appeals and re-adjudication "at some point" if there weren't such a profound difference in the exoneration rate between death penalty cases and other cases. It isn't that death row inmates get too many appeals, it's that nobody else is getting enough. There are a lot of innocent people getting convicted in traffic court. I believe the answer lies in circumscribing the powers of the system, so that the error rate is less consequential. Abolish the death penalty; consider abolishing the concept of punitive justice (as opposed to rehabilitative). I mean, it's not like our system is even particularly good at providing order. What has the drug war achieved? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 19:06
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Discendo Vox posted:EW, in what sense is the person in question innocent? In fact? How so? In law? How is this established? What does this take? The disposition of fact through legal finding is still something that has to occur. The purpose of legal systems is to create legal, final, facts from the uncertainty of reality. I've addressed this, as has the Supreme Court. They are factually innocent in the sense that they did not commit the crime. The court is determining if there is sufficient evidence that the prisoner is factually innocent in this case based on evidence presented with a habeas petition, which must be sufficently convincing to require the government to respond, which then must fail to be convincing enough to hold a hearing, at which point the judge determines if the evidence is compelling enough to require a new trial. The parade of horribles you rely on does not exist.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:16
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Discendo Vox posted:And an incorrect set of beliefs about Scalia's statement name one
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Jul 7, 2017 19:17
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Javid posted:The amount of appeals a death row inmate should get is infinity. There is literally no amount of the court's precious time that is too much to consume making ABSOLUTELY GODDAMNED SURE that the state isn't about to kill an innocent person. VitalSigns posted:This door was opened in 1994 and all the things you're chicken-littling about didn't happen, so maybe consider that courts are run by actual human beings with the ability to exercise judgment and not by broomsticks animated by a magical force operating according to simplistic relentless logic with the ironic consequence of drowning us all in endless appeals evilweasel posted:Also, the fact anyone still debates this, at all, is strong evidence that the people defending Scalia have no loving idea what they're talking about. How do I know that? Because In re Davis was in 2009. Scalia lost. Yet the promised flood of bullshit pleadings that prevent executions through mertiless arguments has not come to pass. Not only was it a monstrous result, it was a wrong one. Yet people still refuse to accept that despite the eight years under this legal regime producing not a single example of the parade of horribles placed against recognizing the principle that the constitution forbids the execution of a factually innocent person. Also, you haven't answered my question. Are there any number of fruitless and vexatious hearings after which you would feel it acceptable to deny a death row inmate further access to the courts? Nevvy Z posted:We aren't all this comfortable saying "it's just one executed innocent. Edge case!" Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 19:20
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Dead Reckoning posted:Nothing is ever a problem until it becomes a problem. Subprime lending and the structure of the banking system weren’t problems until whoops, haha, the economy blew up. The law should be consistent in order to head off abuses before they occur, not trying to play whack-a-mole by constantly shifting in response to crisis, outrage or disaster. Worse, trying to paper over inconsistencies by relying on human judgement instead of formal rules is just another way of being a hypocrite in search of emotionally satisfying solutions, and opens the door to abuse when humans inevitably substitute bias, stereotype, and special pleading for sound judgement. this is a stupid argument unless you argue that somehow none of the scores of anti-death penalty lawyers who would happily throw as much sand into the gears of executions as is legally permissible noticed this decision if it was going to be a problem, it would have become one. it's been eight years. it's not a problem. it was never going to be a problem and arguments it would become one were always wrong but with the benefit of eight years of facts they are now not just wrong, they're frivilous Dead Reckoning posted:Also, you haven't answered my question. Are there any number of fruitless and vexatious hearings after which you would feel it acceptable to deny a death row inmate further access to the courts? if you asked that question i ignored it because it's a stupid question. you don't need to set a hearing for a fruitless and vexatious habeas petition.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:26
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Dead Reckoning posted:Why not? We have a government that operates with limited knowledge and resources, which relies on flawed humans to implement its directions. Any modern nation state worthy of the term is going to have the power to dispense death, whether by needle, bullet, or simply by deciding who gets to eat. If you can’t live with the idea of the state causing someone to die who didn’t “deserve” it (however you chose to define that) through error or imperfection, then maybe it’s time for you to take a look at anarcho-libertarianism.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:31
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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Now I'm wondering if, statistically speaking, the lack of public funding for legal aid in civil courts (traffic, magistrate's, small claims, etc) does more overall societal harm than errors in death penalty cases. I mean, each death penalty case gone wrong is a massive disaster, but there's a lot of error correction in that system, and there are only so many deaths penalty cases. Imagine how many wrongful evictions there must be every year nationally. How many improper mortgage foreclosures.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:33
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evilweasel posted:I've addressed this, as has the Supreme Court. They are factually innocent in the sense that they did not commit the crime. How do you know they didn't commit the crime? They were already convicted in this scenario. evilweasel posted:The court is determining if there is sufficient evidence that the prisoner is factually innocent in this case based on evidence presented with a habeas petition, which must be sufficently convincing to require the government to respond, which then must fail to be convincing enough to hold a hearing, at which point the judge determines if the evidence is compelling enough to require a new trial. You're asking the court to make a legal determination that reverses a legal determination they'd already made in the opposite direction, based on a non-legal assertion of fact, with infinite tries. This is the thing that the law is supposed to stop from happening. Again, Dead Reckoning posted:The huge thing you're ignoring here is that the only way to legally determine if in fact someone has "rock solid DNA proof" is at trial. As long as exhaustion of appeals continues to be a thing that exists, (and it exists for good reason,) there will always be a point where the defendant has run out of proper venues to hear his case again. The parade of horribles is having this argument about Scalia's quote again every three months in the SCOTUS thread.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:37
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Discendo Vox posted:How do you know they didn't commit the crime? They were already convicted in this scenario. You are confusing factual innocence with how you know factual innocence, a stupid semantic derail. Discendo Vox posted:You're asking the court to make a legal determination that reverses a legal determination they'd already made in the opposite direction, based on a non-legal assertion of fact, with infinite tries. This is the thing that the law is supposed to stop from happening. Again, This is nonsense, and there's no reason the law would want to stop that from happening.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:57
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evilweasel posted:You are confusing factual innocence with how you know factual innocence, a stupid semantic derail. The difference between asserted fact and legal fact is the entire reason the legal system exists. The law exists to create epistemic, semiotic, descriptive, and, ultimately, ethical, certainty bounded by a social system.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:09
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Discendo Vox posted:The difference between asserted fact and legal fact is the entire reason the legal system exists. The law exists to create epistemic, legal, and descriptive certainty bounded by a social system. yes, how nice, and recognized by the fact i differentiated between actual factual innocence and the procedure by which the claim may be made there is no uncertainty whatsoever in the language i was using so this is a stupid semantic derail
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Jul 7, 2017 20:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This will sound more trivial an objection than it is, but is the objective of the legal system to produce order, or to produce justice? If the police obtain bulletproof evidence that someone is a thief, but are unable to introduce that evidence at trial because it was obtained illegally/improperly, it is entirely appropriate that the thief go free, even though this is not the just outcome. Justice demands that the thief be punished, the stolen property recovered, and the victims made whole. But we accept this injustice, because it avoids the greater injustices that would occur if we tore down the system that keeps tainted evidence from being introduced at trial. DV made what I think might be the best summary of my views: Discendo Vox posted:An ordered system that is not completely just, nor perceived as just, can still produce better outcomes than a system without order, especially by its capacity for improvement. That's one of the strengths of a common law system. A truly, universally just system is impossible, and pursuing it can produce actual harms to order, and so to justice. This is especially true given the many circumstances in which true justice and true facts are unknowable, and there is profit in asserting that an ordered system is unjust based on limited information. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I would buy the idea that we need to cut off appeals and re-adjudication "at some point" if there weren't such a profound difference in the exoneration rate between death penalty cases and other cases. It isn't that death row inmates get too many appeals, it's that nobody else is getting enough. There are a lot of innocent people getting convicted in traffic court. Rygar201 posted:Human fallibility is no reason not to strive to refrain from executing people with credible claims of innocence though. Ending someone's life is qualitatively different from imprisoning them or assessing fines. You can award compensatory damages and release someone, but you can't reverse a death sentence. To my mind, the state has already done a pretty thorough job of taking everything he was and everything he could have been. We can't give back lost youth, missed birthdays, and forclosed opportunities.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:10
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evilweasel posted:yes, how nice, and recognized by the fact i differentiated between actual factual innocence and the procedure by which the claim may be made Since you're drawing this distinction, if a convicted person is factually innocent, but unable to prove it to the satisfaction of any court, do you think it is still unconstitutional and morally offensive to punish them anyway?
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Jul 7, 2017 20:12
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