Jury's rule.Follow

So. If an innocent person is accidentally executed, does that not fall under your rule as "Okie dokie"?


This seems like it would be a compelling argument to either a 3 year old child, or someone who spoke very little English.

Ok, but here's the problem:

Everything after the "10%" is a mistake of the justice system which requires someone other than the justice system to fix it. If you want an appeal you have to get it yourself. For your case to even be considered for being overturned by DNA evidence might take a small miracle.

You do understand what reasonable doubt is, right? Tell me something, how do you think people are wrongly convicted in cases where reasonable doubt exists? Does it not seem infinitely more likely to you that the court just didn't apply reasonable doubt?

People are let off all the time because of LACK OF EVIDENCE, but DNA evidence is not lack of evidence; it's evidence of innocence. Does it not then seem a little ****** up to you that people are being sentenced to death when not only must there have been a lack of evidence that they were guilty, but there was evidence that they were not guilty? The idea that you would try to justify it makes me hope you're just playing devil's advocate for sport.

I mean hell, I know some really conservative folks, but even most of them would chalk this one up as governmental/societal incompetence.

How very neocolonialist of you.

Between being brown and being trained in psych/soc, I tend to get a kick out of people's insides being shown in these perverse little ways. We all have our stereotypes. Equating people of differing cultures to children is an oldie but a goodie.

Well, to clarify that point, I put the relevant post from gbaji through a translator - to Greek; it seemed appropriate - and then back to English. Let's see if it makes more sense now:




Yes. Yes, I think that makes more sense.

Precisely as I am all adversely running in the deliberately persons from the street and their murder. See how that work?

/expressive arm waving

Innocent people aren't accidently executed. They may be mistakenly, wrongfully, deliberately, or maliciously executed, but never accidently.

Has he ever actually argued a topic or is it always just subverting to a side topic and start a fight over definitions and terms?

I'm not comforted.

Excuse me? Appeals aren't part of the justice system? Did I miss a memo or something?

Everything after the 10% is part of the process. It's a sorting system. You start with the broadest set of cases that eliminate a set (the innocent in this case), and then pass the remainder down to the next sorting set. Each one gets progressively more accurate. That's the nature of this methodology. It's why we use it in our justice system. It works. Very well.



You're arguing apples and oranges. Reasonable doubt is a concept applied to a single case. We're talking about the statistical probability of an innocent man being executed. Those are radically different things. You may as well argue that it's wrong to play the guitar because I don't adequately understand the laws of gravitation. They're really that irrelevant.

Reasonable doubt is one component of one layer of the sorting process that separates a person who is innocent of a crime from one who is guilty. There are many other components as well especially when we add the sentence in (death versus life in prison for example). Arguing that the entire process is flawed because of "reasonable doubt" is absurd, especially when you haven't made anything remotely like an argument to say *why* one would counter the other.



You are assuming that those who are sitting on death row are there because there was a lack of evidence to convict them, but they got convicted anyway, and maybe if they're lucky DNA will come along and provide evidence of innocence. You are then trying to imply that since some people (14 to be exact) have been able to use DNA to provide this "evidence of innocence" that this means that everyone else's cases are exactly the same and if we only had DNA evidence, we could free them.

First off, your understanding of our legal system is horribly flawed. Some people do get off because of a lack of evidence and others are convicted because the available evidence is sufficient for a jury to find them guilty of the crime. Not because there wasn't sufficient evidence to prove their innocence. There was not a lack of evidence in this case, not in the legal system. There was sufficient evidence to convict them. Sometimes on re-examination of the trial or the evidence presented, a conviction is overturned. In fact, this happens nearly 10 times as often for death row convictions due to reasons that have nothing to do with DNA, then have occured as a result of DNA.

And that's *also* part of the system. Those convicted have the right to those re-examinations. Because sometimes the evidence does not tell an accurate story of what happened. Sometimes it's misinterpreted by the examiners. Sometimes, as you say, there's evidence that could have countered the existing evidence, but it is not found or presented during the trial. This does not mean that the evidence was lacking, nor does it mean that the process is flawed. The process is as accurate as it can possibly be.


Look. There are some valid arguments against the use of a death penalty. The rate of inaccuracy among death penalty cases isn't one of them. At least not all by itself. Because all decisions made by people have the potential to be wrong. All of them. Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. If we refuse to sentence someone for a crime purely because there's a chance that person might be innocent, then we'd never convict anyone of any crime and our entire legal system would collapse. So, just as we accept that we need to use cars even though we can't ever make them 100% safe, we need our justice system even if it's not 100% accurate.

Inaccuracy alone is *not* a valid argument against a death penalty. As I pointed out earlier, you could take the position that a life sentence provides a greater chance of an innocent person's conviction being overturned before they die. However, as I also pointed out earlier, you'd need to calculate the average number of years that takes, figure out the likelyhood of it happening in the first place, figure out the average lifespan of someone serving a life sentence, and factor in the amount of energy spent looking into a life sentence conviction versus a death sentence conviction in terms of finding that missing evidence that might overturn it.


You haven't even scratched the surface of the issue. It's far more complex then just declaring that "we can't be 100% sure" and calling it a day.



Despite the amount of attention wrong convictions get, you'd be hard pressed to name another social/legal system in use in our nation that is more accurate then our legal system. I don't call that governmental/societal incompetance. I call that people building the best system they can to do something that is by its nature always going to be controversial but necessary.

The irony is simply delicious.

OJ FTW !!! {couldnt resist}

...double entendre anyone ?

The system as is doesn't support the death penalty: with of all these checks and rechecks of evidence and appeals and DNA, there is just no deterring factor inherent with the death penalty itself. It's too cumbersome. Person kills 5 people and gets the death penalty, one can almost guarantee he'll stay alive for a good 20-30 years because we have to make sure that we don't give the needle to someone who doesn't deserve it.

So we either save time and effort and $ and knock out the death penalty, or we save time and effort and $ and knock out the appeals portion of the process, allowing for speedy executions. We can't do the latter for what I would hope are obvious reasons, so what does that leave out?

Hmm....













To be perfectly honest, I do wish that the death penalty was an effective deterrent and that we could guarantee that no innocents were executed, and that the guilty should be made to suffer as they made others suffer. Vengeful? Yes, certainly. But would you give pause about doing something heinous to others if you were assured that, if caught, the same thing would happen to you?

Oh well. All we have is this bloated and cumbersome legal system, so I guess we have to just accept it and move on.