And when do you think people decide an eye witness is credible? How long did it take to decide the eye witnesses in other cases were wrong… DNA evidence found years later. What if there isn’t any?
It’s frustratingly challenging to define “credible” in this context. Witnesses are indeed very valuable, but it is far from simple and they must be considered as pieces of a larger puzzle.
It’s fascinating, and there’s been some pretty good research on the topic (some of which is referenced in the below):
https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
Generally, if you have a bunch of different people who all witnessed a crime in a public space, and things like video footage of it taking place, you can be certain of who did it.
There are in fact cases where a criminal’s guilt is know with certainty. This is not the majority of cases, but it definitely occurs.
Anyway, I digress. This thread is for making fun of Nazis being imbeciles.
https://twitter.com/2dAmMuslim/status/870393210106896384
You mean like robbing a bank full of eye witnesses… that sort of certainty?
Look I get what your trying to say, but we’re never as certain as people really think we are. If multiple people pointing to the same person in a public place can get it wrong, it’s just hard to go with we know for certain as a real… thing, and it’s not like we can change the law to be so specific that is says if one batshit neo nazis slashes the throat of two guys in a train, execute him because we have enough footage but in this other bank case, everyone says it but we don’t believe them because…
Surprisingly, that’s not correct. There are plenty of examples of crimes committed with lots of eye-witnesses and the wrong guy gets fingered later. It’s one thing to say “I saw a crime” and quite another to say with certainty in a police line up days later “Yes, that’s the one guy, the guy I’d never seen before in my life and only saw briefly while committing a crime. I’m sure that’s him.”
Witnesses get that stuff wrong all the time. Not out of malice, but just because human memory is a very imperfect thing.
If you want to make a certainty argument, how about you try “Caught red handed by the authorities who witnessed the entire crime and immediately apprehended him.”
And the video footage somehow gets it wrong too.
Or cases where an eye witness isn’t just identifying some person they don’t know, but actually KNOWS THE PERSON who is committing the crime.
Seriously folks, it is actually possible to know things with certainty.
Or, you know, dropped a taser by their inert body, luckily caught on film to expose the frame up.
In cases like that, yeah. But the problem is that in this country (and every other country as far as I know), in actual practice the death penalty is applied extremely unevenly, always falling on poor people, ethnic minority people, developmentally disabled people etc. Upper middle class people and richer pretty much NEVER get a death sentence. I wonder why that is?
In my younger years I used to be pro death penalty. I understand that it “feels right” to have a murderer executed. Who doesn’t cheer when “Buffalo Bill” gets his due in The Silence of the Lambs? Or when Meryl Streep shoots Kevin Bacon’s character in The River Wild? But that’s fiction, where the audience knows who is guilty and who isn’t. And notice that even in fiction, it’s not like they apprehend Bacon’s character and put him on trial, and 10 years later strap him to a gurney and inject him with lethal drugs.
These two statements are contradictory. Most of the developed democracies (all but the US and Japan) do not have death penalty, yet can you do a fact check on how many people take justice by their own hands in, say Canada or the EU (no capital punishment) versus the US (with capital punishment)?.
Which is to say, the notion that death penalty has any deterrence value, either in criminals or victims taking justice by their own hands, is a myth unsupported by any statistical evidence or expert support, specially when you look further away from the US and look at crime rates and evolution on other similar countries.
So death penalty for when we 100% know they did it, and only for those specific cases that “deserve” the death penalty, no misuse of the thing, no silly 3 strikes you’re out rule, no “Shouldn’t have given a ride to your friend that day, lol”, no “Shouldn’t have been Black while doing [x]”.
I can approve of that impossible to achieve in practice goal…
I have three problems with the death penalty.
The first is that completely ignores the aspect of rehabilitation which I think should be part of any form of punishment. Even a person with a life sentence can see some sort of rehabilitation, even if they never leave the confines of prison, and can be a benefit. (Also, we want to reduce recidivism).
The second is that it gives the state the too much power and as we have seen, juries have an easier time handing out the death penalty to citizens that aren’t white or aren’t rich, even when the evidence is limited or non existent. Hell, judges can be too.
The third is that death row is expansive because you can’t reverse a mistake if the person is dead. Either you have to give them a lot of time to appeal (which is expansive) or risk making a decision that is final. It’s a no win situation if you want to moral and cost conscious because there is always a chance you are wrong.
And when you stop and think about it, this a country in which Donald Trump is president, it’s scary how easy it is too make bad decisions.
This is the main issue, in my opinion, other than purely ethical issues. The problem is that many people don’t consider rehabilitation/reinsertion to be one of the main functions of the penal system (they see it more as a purely punitive/protective system).
While I think the punitive aspect is unavoidable and necessary (although I think it’s mostly executed at the court, with the penal system moving from punishment into rehabilitation), I do not believe the protective function is/should be a major aspect of a penal system (given recidivism rates when prison systems are -somewhat- properly managed are pretty low and there are other more effective ways to lower crime). I see policing and lawmaking having a bigger burden in regards to protection (punishing policing is another perversion of a system not being used correctly -or in a socially useful manner-).
Honestly, I’ve never looked at data from outside the US. Hmmm.
Those glasses! Sheesh. You’d think an alpha male would have better fashion sense.
Hey, Oregon, while that white nationalist thing is on your mind, you may want to dig deeper…
“Operation ‘White Christmas,’ as the year-old investigation is code-named, so far has resulted in the arrests of 54 individuals, mostly in the Portland area, leading to 11 criminal cases in state court and another 43 in federal court.”
Operation White Christmas is such a great name. I like this kind of humor. We once had an anti-corruption operation here codenamed Pokemon (because you Gotta Catch 'Em All).