Dungeons and Dragons players of death row

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/magazine/dungeons-dragons-death-row.html

by reaperducer • 3 years ago

61 52 3 years ago

This is a heartbreaking story. I love playing D&D, and I can only imagine how important it is to these people in a setting like this.

I hope the United States joins the rest of the western world and bans capital punishment soon--preferably yesterday.

ThrowAway1922A• 3 years ago

Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.

Bjartr• 3 years ago

Is there more to a death sentence than revenge?

joefife• 3 years ago

The rest of the civilised world manages just fine.

Loughla• 3 years ago

I'm going to step outside the political fight about whether or not the state should be able to kill people. I don't want to get into that. So, whether or not capital punishment should exists depends mostly on your theory of incarceration.

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy a wrong inside the person committing the crime, via rehabilitation, capital punishment serves no purpose. If prison exists as a holding cell (ha) until individuals within the system are rehabilitated and provided with supports to reintegrate into society, killing them serves zero purpose.

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy wrongs by punishing the person who committed the crime and allowing victims legal means of retribution/revenge, then capital punishment is absolutely necessary for some crimes.

I'm not honestly sure where I fall on that scale. I believe we (the US) is failing in our duty to individuals who are in prison, via piss-poor rehabilitation services. But I also believe some crimes deserve the death penalty.

Not sure what to do with that.

resolutebat• 3 years ago

Some of the countries that do have death penalty, like India and Japan, reserve the death penalty for "the worst of the worst" (intentional mass murder etc). Neither of the guys profiled here qualify, and it's particularly shocking that Ford was sent to death row purely on circumstantial evidence.

cl0ckt0wer• 3 years ago

Even if you think that the crime deserves it, the justice system isn't perfect. How many innocent people are executed in pursuit of "justice"?

viraptor• 3 years ago

It's not just the government. Do you trust every single link in that chain? The prosecutor, jury, judge, every lab worker, consulted experts, witnesses, forensic knowledge at that point in time, ... Every single piece of this puzzle can fail in a way that others will be happy to follow.

simonh2• 3 years ago

I have several reasons for opposing it.

One is that being an irreversible punishment, it precludes any possibility of remediating injustices. There have been many cases where it seems highly likely or even proven that executed prisoners were innocent.

The second is that particularly in the US it has become highly politicised. The possibility that condemned inmates might be found innocent, and the damage that does to the credibility of the system, has lead to the system doing whatever it can to obstruct and prevent investigations that might exonerate condemned prisoners, regardless of the strength of any evidence.

So for me it's not so much that the punishment is bad, it's that it seems to be extremely hard to set up a process around it that is fair, and the US in particular has failed to do so.

hsuduebc2• 3 years ago

I have same opinion but I still want it to be abandoned. Price of even one life ended vlby mistake or corruptio is too big price to pay.

meany• 3 years ago

Lots of good comments. For me the data on wrongly convicted inmates is a strong argument against the death penalty.

“ Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent.”

https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty....

We will never know how many innocent people have been executed, but even one is more than I am comfortable with.

causi• 3 years ago

For me an acceptable false positive rate would be somewhere around one in a thousand. The actual false positive rate is one in twenty-five or greater, despite the justice system spending more money ($1.26 million) per executed prisoner than it spends per life sentence prisoner. Since we are incapable of meeting a decent standard of surety I believe the death penalty should be abolished.

andyjohnson0• 3 years ago

Some crimes deserve no less.

If you believe in deserved individual punishment then wouldn't incarceration for life be a harsher punishment than execution? The imprisoned person experiences the personal consequnces day after day after day until the eventually die. Whereas the executed person experiences literally nothing at all. They may have lost the experience of living the rest of their life, but they're not even aware of that.

(fwiw I'm anti death penalty for ethical as well as peactical reasons, but i live in a country that is unlikely to ever reinstate it.)

cmiller1• 3 years ago

This is a weird idea, what someone "deserves" is a concept entirely made up in your head. We can talk about hard data, statistics about various punishments and their effects on factors such as crime deterrence, but there's simply no reasonable discussion to be had about what someone "deserves". I could tell you that I don't believe anyone deserves to be killed, regardless of their actions, and that is one hundred percent true to my internal morality, and that I think it's immoral to kill people to sate your violent sense of justice, but that doesn't advance this discussion in any way either.

DrThunder• 3 years ago

Tell that to their victims. The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that, there are crimes that people commit where you can never trust them to be safe around people again. In that case, capital punishment is perfectly justified in my mind. The idea that keeping them in prison for life is somehow more humane is silly. The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing, and destroy their society (you're starting to see this in big US cities as well). So, I think I'll pass on this idea that the rest of the western world has it figured out.

simonh2• 3 years ago

Do you think that all or most the crimes condemned prisoners in the US are currently convicted of actually rise to the level where you agree that it's appropriate?

The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing...

There is extensive evidence that the severity of punishment has very little to no effect on crime rates. It's simply not something criminals generally consider when actually committing crimes.

notaustinpowers• 3 years ago

How much of the increase in violent crimes is not due to a leniency of capital punishment, but due to no effort in actual rehabilitation due to city/state/federal cost-cutting measures?

Privatizing prison builds an economic model that incentivizes creating repeat offenders. Withholding or making rehabilitation unattainable for the majority benefits the prison, but offers zero benefit for America as a society.

HelloMcFly2• 3 years ago

The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that...

For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted.

I could perhaps support capital punishment if we had a higher level of guilt we could establish in our legal system reserved only where the evidence is entirely(!) unequivocal for particularly heinous crimes. I don't know exactly what that means, and is probably just another bad idea.

postexitus• 3 years ago

This is the same argument as there may be valid reasons to curbing free speech. Once you start going down that route, there is no end. You say death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst and only if we are 100% sure they committed the crime, the next one in line would say it may be suitable for more and when we are 90% sure of the crime. How come it is different from Sharia law, which demands a hand for theft and eye for infidelity - some can say those are also justified. All punishment that's irreversible and violates one's body should be banned.

On your second argument - if death penalty had the very least effect of turning people away from crime, USA would have much better crime stats than "rest of the western world". Most criminals operating at that level (murder, rape etc.) operate on the assumption that they will never be caught.

darkerside• 3 years ago

I'd say that extinguishing the sense of hope in a reformed human being is also a downside, but that's because I have a shred of empathy.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing, and destroy their society

LMAO

umvi• 3 years ago

Some types of criminals (mafiosi, gang leaders, etc) can and do continue to run their criminal enterprises from within prison. This is a big problem in organized crime infested countries. You can't keep running your mafia if you are dead.

pavel_lishin• 3 years ago

Is the US one of those countries?

crazygecko3• 3 years ago

and yet, how is death sentence any worse than life in prison? if it were me, I'd just want a quick exit rather than rotting in a cage for decades

sambapa• 3 years ago

You can always become a matematician in prison and solve one of millennium problems. That's one thing that you can't do if you're dead.

ModernMech• 3 years ago

Because the criminal justice system gets things wrong, and we can't undo the death penalty.

TotempaaltJ3• 3 years ago

That's a choice you might make for yourself, rather than a choice the state makes for you. There's a big difference.

tb_technical• 3 years ago

Many prisons don't allow dice. And some don't allow DnD books ("too stimulating"). This leads to many interesting and remarkable adaptations to play. As an example, I heard from a guy that they rolled a d20 by drawing paper lots with the numbers 1 through 20 written on them. He also memorized the entire PHB. Cool dude.

Dungeons and Dragons players of death row

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