Thread

Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections

47 points · 139 comments · techolic

comrade1234 · 1790835654 · focus · HN ↗
The state shouldn't be able to take your life outside of war. I've had this strict belief since junior high, maybe because I was raised catholic. I don't understand how anyone can see otherwise. Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
1. ajkjk · 1790837756 · focus · HN ↗
  Is your belief based in something? You say "shouldn't be able to..." but, like, why not? To convince anyone else of it you'd have to agree on the framework in which states are and aren't allowed to do things.
  I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
  Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
  (No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
  1. rented_mule · 1790841210 · focus · HN ↗
    > Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.
    What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.
    Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.
    If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...
    ajkjk · 1790879577 · focus · HN ↗
    you will be glad to know my weight against killing someone innocent is very high. personally i think the only defensible version of capital punishment uses it only in the case where there is literally no doubt about the guilt, like, many unbiased people saw it happen or there's a recording or they credibly confess or stuff like that. it boggles my mind that it is used outside of this. Feels like people say "beyond the shadow of a doubt" and then somehow don't mean it? Everyone is detective-story pilled like they think a watertight explanation of a thing is the same thing as eliminating doubt, and that's just not at all true.
    I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.
    but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.

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