Death-penalty analysis reveals extent of wrongful convictions

http://www.nature.com/news/death-penalty-analysis-reveals-extent-of-wrongful-convictions-1.15114

by gautamnarula • 12 years ago

13 13 12 years ago

From the article: "At least one in 25 people on death row in the United States would be exonerated if given enough time...That number still underestimates the rate of false convictions, Gross says, because many innocent people never manage to prove their innocence."

Abstract of the study available here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111

Edit: Full paper here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111.full...

papasmrf• 12 years ago

My own particular belief is that the death penalty as it is currently implemented is an abomination. But I also believe that there are just some crimes committed that must be punished by death. I have often wondered why the death penalty shouldn't only be imposed in cases where there is a 100% moral certainty that the accused committed the crime, ie, caught at the scene of the crime, captured on videotape, etc. Other than these types of cases, we really should be thinking about not allowing the death penalty anymore.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

Exactly

It's one thing to put someone in death row for one conviction (with a possible error rate), another, would be to put someone for multiple convictions (and not from the same event)

Unless there's a direct evidence (filming, or something similar) no evidence (testimony, DNA, etc) should be enough to put someone in death row.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

My 2 cents... The death penalty is wrong on both moral reasons. The moral reason is clear - you can never be 100% sure that you got the right person, and you don't have the opportunity to back out of a bad decision afterwards. The economic reason is that it's just too expensive anyway. You wind up having to do a tremendous amount of extra work to get the conviction (which may not have been correct) and then have to deal with years (decades?) of appeals and imprisonment. Just toss them in jail.

apta• 12 years ago

It's not always wrong. Never being 100% certain is incorrect. There are cases where you are sure; and in such cases, it should be a viable punishment. Otherwise, you're right, it is not something you can back out of.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

Are we ever 100% sure though, when the possibility exists that the prosecution is corrupt and the confession could be coming from someone that is mentally ill?

And stepping aside from morality, if it costs 10X[0] the cost of a life prison sentence to kill someone, isn't it really better to just put them away for life with no chance of parole?

[0] 10X is a made up #, but it's certainly a large multiple of non-capital punishment cases.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

Well, never being 100% certain - about anything involving the world and not a pure tautology - is always correct. As they say on Less Wrong, "zero and one are not probabilities". When you say you're 90% certain, you mean if you answered 10 independent questions of that difficulty, you'd tend to get about one of them wrong. When you say you're 99% certain, you raise that to 100 independent questions. When you say you're 100% certain, that's not just a few more questions, or a lot more questions; if your assessment is well calibrated, you're claiming you could answer infinite such questions and never be wrong. Can you do that? Even stepping (infinitely far) back to 99.999% certain, that's a lot of questions (100,000) to get only one wrong. Consider the following anecdote (by way of illustration and to drive intuitions, not as any sort of proof of course): http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27

Having said that, we do not in any sense need to be 100% confident and it's kind of a weird distraction here. Yes, with life-in-prison we have the ability to "fix a mistake" in a sense, but 1) people don't get back the time they already spent in jail obviously, and 2) we often don't do that: remember that the death penalty is so much more expensive in large part because we allow appeals that we don't allow with life-in-prison; in any case where one of those appeals would have demonstrated innocense, we're foregoing fixing our mistake so the hypothetical ability means nothing.

Having said all of that, I oppose the death penalty. It's a needless shift of power toward the already powerful government, without really any gain. Studies repeatedly show it has little deterrent effect over life (or even just a significant chunk of time) in prison. Another study suggests it may do bad things to juries and make them more likely to wrongfully convict when the death penalty is an option. It's super expensive compared with just keeping people incarcerated (which is expensive compared to sending them to college, but that's another matter...). And it doesn't do good things to us - forgiveness is much better than vengeance once we've already dealt with deterrance. And from a Utilitarian perspective (again, once we've already factored in deterrance) harm is still harm and is - first order - bad, even when it's to "bad people".

regoldste• 12 years ago

I think your moral arguments are sound, and I tend to agree, but I would just add that you should probably explicitly recognize the (implicit, I think?) premise that there is a meaningful moral distinction between the death penalty and other punishments.

If you can't draw such a distinction, then your argument proves too much. This is so because your points re:uncertainty of guilt and intractability of punishment don't just apply to capital cases, but to all convictions and punishments, which are entered on the same standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If you believe it's morally unconscionable to convict and sentence with less than 100% certainty, and to impose punishments you can't back out of, then how can any conviction achieved under this imperfect standard ever be considered moral?

Maybe your answer is that they can't be considered moral and we should limit convictions/sentences to cases where we have 100% certainty. But assuming you want some kind of functional criminal justice system for the punishment and incapacitation (oh, and the fictional "rehabilitation") of criminals, then I think you must accept the imperfect system, and distinguish the death penalty from lesser sentences.

This is a distinction you can sensibly draw. My point is just that it's logically important to explicitly do so. (Sorry if this is a tedious, semantic point!)

So how would you draw the distinction? If your concern is with avoiding very bad decisions that are intractable, would you draw that moral distinction to include not only the death penalty but also extremely long (eg, 30+ year) prison sentences?

mathattack3• 12 years ago

There are two ideas.

One thought is that you can back out of a mistake on a very long prison case. You can't back out of the mistake once someone is dead. So let's say you're 99.9% sure someone molested a bunch of kids. You can sign them up for life in prison on those odds. But you shouldn't do it for life, because there's a chance that you're wrong. Please don't ask what the right % is, as I don't know that #. But I do accept that we can never be 100% of any crime. (Is the prosecutor corrupt? Was the suspect mentally ill and not really confessing?) But that doesn't mean we don't punish crime at all. It means we need to have a method of redressing mistakes, which we lose in capital punishment cases.

There's a separate economic argument that just says it's not economic to go through the hassle of it, but this is not a moral arguement.

dang• 12 years ago

This was covered yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663845

protomyth• 12 years ago

When you look at government and see how many things they do wrong, it seems to be consistent to not allow the death penalty and instead have true life-without-parole. I have no moral issue with the thought of giving a child rapist-murder the death penalty[1], but I think the risk of being wrong is just too high to support a death penalty. Plus, it seems to be a lot cheaper just to skip it and keep the person in prison for the rest of their life.

So, cheaper and allows for an apology in error.

1) I feel bad for feral dogs that need to be put down, monsters not so much.

gabriel34• 12 years ago

The interesting thing about death and imprisonment for life sentences is that legally society is basically saying these people are beyond recovery and not worth having among us. In practice, though, society is demanding punishment and exerting vengeance.

Where I live there are (in theory, of course) three sides to every penal sentence:

  Punishment
  Example
  Rehabilitation

Sentencing to death is admitting the convicted is beyond rehabilitation or that he will do more good to the society as an example than as a productive, rehabilitated member.

The punishment part I can't see as anything but thirst for vengeance from the society and, perhaps, atonement for the convicted.

P.S.: This thirst for vengeance, our collective need to have someone pay is, rationally , the source of these false convictions

trendoid• 12 years ago

Lack of free will invalidates any form of extreme torture or death penalty. People think that the perpetrator should have known better and hence "deserves" the punishment. This is nonsense since we now know from neuroscience that "we" are not authors of our own thoughts.

There is no hard evidence that shows that capital punishment acts as a deterrent for future crimes, there is some contradictory data though[1][2].

Interesting study which found out that instead of acting as a deterrent, pickpockets were picking pockets during the hanging of a pickpocket![3]

[1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-fbi-preliminary-crim... [2]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... [3]http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.short

Death-penalty analysis reveals extent of wrongful convictions

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