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How the fuck did those stupid pieces of shit mess this up so bad?

you work in the system, surely you of all people should understand this.

Umm, nope. Most of the Fed Dept of Justice doesn't deal with personal crimes. Not high enough on the priority list. Thats stuff normally left for the locals.

I understand that, but it's all part of the same system of judicial law

State and Federal are two different areas. State Law comes first. Looks to me like this thing never made it past the State.

Whats the poke for?

You guys have hit the nail on the head. I'm inclined to agree with Ian - not because I think the failure is of capital punishment of itself; but rather because "official" guilt or innocence, and resultant sentencing, is decided on by fallible humans.

Playing catch up mikey...

Trying like hell.

Okay, I have heard a few times lately - not just in this thread - that we should be executing people "only when we're certain".There's so much wrong with this that I am going to address it. This isn't aimed at anybody in particular, by the way.

First, it's retarded on the face of it. Right now we operate on the basis of "guilty beyond reasonable doubt". Just stop and think for a moment... are you really going to move us to a system where we are going to have two levels of guilt? "Very probably guilty" and "Definitely guilty"? How do you tell a jury that "Well you can decide that he's very probably guilty, or that he's absolutely definitely guilty"?

And how the hell do you turn around and say that you're going to send a man to prison for life when you aren't absolutely sure he did it?! You're essentially saying "Well we're not certain, so we won't kill you... but we're pretty sure, so we are going to lock you up forever."

It's retarded.

Second, there's no such thing as "absolutely sure". Confessions? People confess to things they didn't do every day, for a dozen different reasons. Police found him standing over the body? Well what if he just walked up and found it moments after the killer left? I must have seen that in a dozen movies. Eyewitnesses saw him do it? Eyewitness testimony is the single most unreliable type of evidence that there is.

And here's the real rub. Even if there's a mountain of evidence, absolutely undeniable stuff... the dirty little secret is, policemen lie to get convictions. I mentioned in another post, one of the most famous cases in UK legal history was a bunch of terrorists arrested 30 odd years ago. Forensic evidence found traces of the explosives on their hands. They confessed to the crime. It was as certain a case as ever there was, and the lot of them spent 16 years in jail. There is no doubt whatsoever that if we had still used the death penalty in this country, they all would have hanged.

And guess what? Innocent, the lot of them. The "explosives" on their hands was a chemical off the back of a new deck of playing cards. Whups. And the confessions? The police got them to sign a statement and then just changed it to say what they wanted it to say. And I don't mean minor re-interpretations, I mean asking "Did you blow the building up?" and then changing the answer literally from "no" to "yes".

Definitely guilty? It's a fantasy. There's no such thing. If you believe in the death penalty only in cases where they are definitely guilty, then you don't believe in it at all, ever.

^--- David Milgar folks, David Milgar.

Well, I'm still open to the "sentenced to dangerous medical testing" option as an alternative.

I just don't care for the concept of tax dollars (that could be spent on rehabilitation of non-violent criminals, or national health care, or education programs) being spent because there's a slim chance someone didn't murder 20 children, when there is a mountain of evidence suggesting they did.

If something like this technology is expanded, and refined, then I'd say even trials become extraneous.

Tsukiyumi wrote:I just don't care for the concept of tax dollars (that could be spent on rehabilitation of non-violent criminals, or national health care, or education programs) being spent because there's a slim chance someone didn't murder 20 children, when there is a mountain of evidence suggesting they did.

If money is your objection, life in prison is cheaper than execution. You should be all for abolishing the death penalty.

GrahamKennedy wrote:

Tsukiyumi wrote:I just don't care for the concept of tax dollars (that could be spent on rehabilitation of non-violent criminals, or national health care, or education programs) being spent because there's a slim chance someone didn't murder 20 children, when there is a mountain of evidence suggesting they did.

If money is your objection, life in prison is cheaper than execution. You should be all for abolishing the death penalty.

Cheaper than current methods, yes. Plus, they get the slave-wage labor; here in Texas it's 12 cents an hour.

That fMRI technology could literally change the whole system, though.

Tsukiyumi wrote:
Cheaper than current methods, yes. Plus, they get the slave-wage labor; here in Texas it's 12 cents an hour.

That fMRI technology could literally change the whole system, though.

Short of hiring a guy to do it with a .22 pistol your not going to get much better and depending on how much of a tax increase your willing to shoulder to pay out the inevitable disability pensions for PTSD, you may not even want that.

We went over this in the thread about the human feces who beat their daughter to death for not saying "please": hemp rope is cheap, reliable, reusable, and doesn't damage the organs.

You could always set it on a timer, if you can't find someone willing to personally end the life of a murdering scumbag.

Any thoughts on the fMRI tech?