Capital punishment

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Nebraska has become the latest state to repeal the death penalty. Unlike most states, it has a single legislature, and after passing the repeal bill 32-15 (after previous votes were 30-16 and 30-13; apparently all bills in Nebraska need to be voted on three times before they are passed), the Governor vetoed the bill, and the legislature barely overrode the veto, 30-19. Interestingly, it was a coalition of Republican legislatures that led the charge, despite the GOP governor's vehement opposition (he tweeted today in response to the override vote "My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families.")

[Tyrhael]

"My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families."

I'm confused about this statement: those sentenced to death are done so after their capture and conviction. As ones convicted would have already been apprehended, surely they would no longer pose any danger to law enforcement and Nebraska families, as they would be locked up in prison? Because of that, I don't see how the governor is saying that capital punishment is important for protecting them. Is the argument supposed to be that fear of being sentenced to death would be more likely to dissuade criminals from doing heinous things to police and families, whereas the maximum possible sentencing "only" being life imprisonment would be less persuasive? I assume that those who Nebraska would previously have sentenced to death would now likely get life imprisonment or a lengthy term in prison with the hopes of rehabilitation, so it's not the case that they would be out on the streets any time soon as a potential threat to the safety of law enforcement and families. What, then, does the governor mean?

Would anyone mind explaining what they think he's trying to say, and if my previous paragraph relies on flawed assumptions?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Is the argument supposed to be that fear of being sentenced to death would be more likely to dissuade criminals from doing heinous things to police and families, whereas the maximum possible sentencing "only" being life imprisonment would be less persuasive?

Yes, I assume so. To the best of my knowledge, there is no data that supports this argument, but it is still consistently made.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Virginia is poised to end capital punishment.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watc ... c-step?amp

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[Voronwë the Faithful]

I split off the unrelated osgiliation from this thread

[Voronwë the Faithful]

With Death Penalty Abolition, Virginia Becomes a Test Case For Progressive Reform

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[N.E. Brigand]

From the New York Times:

"4 Years After an Execution, a Different Man’s DNA Is Found on the Murder Weapon: Lawyers’ request to conduct additional DNA testing before Ledell Lee was executed had been denied. ... 'My dying words will always be, as it has been, "I am an innocent man,"' he told the BBC in an interview published on April 19, 2017 — the day before officials in Arkansas administered the lethal injection."

At the time of the execution, the spokesman for Arkansas's governor Asa Hutchison said after the execution that the "governor knows the right thing was done tonight: justice was carried out." And on a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court turned away Lee's request for a stay. Hutchison this week said that he was just doing his job and that it was the jury not him who had found Lee guilty. Hutchison also noted the new evidence is "inconclusive."

He's right about the DNA testing. It pretty clearly shows that some other unknown person's blood was on the weapon, but it doesn't necessarily exonerate Lee. (Although the Times reports that it "has long been established that Mr. Lee’s fingerprints did not match any of those at the scene.") But suppose it did. How would Hutchison now go about undoing his decision of four years ago?

[Beorhtnoth]

I believe a fundamental measure of how civilized is a country must be whether or not it has capital punishment. The taking of a human life is difficult to accept, but outside the category of self defence (and the parameters of that are debatable) there appears little justification for willfully ending a human existence.

[Inanna]

I believe a fundamental measure of how civilized is a country must be whether or not it has capital punishment. The taking of a human life is difficult to accept, but outside the category of self defence (and the parameters of that are debatable) there appears little justification for willfully ending a human existence.

I agree.

[Túrin Turambar]

The Japanese Government has confirmed that it has carried out three executions, the first since 2019. Japan and the United States are the two most developed democracies which use capital punishment, and I've always been fascinated by the differences in how the death penalty is treated in those countries (and internationally). Capital punishment is relatively uncontroversial in Japan, it attracts little attention from either the domestic or foreign media, and the Government is famously reticent in revealing any details about it. A classic example is that the Japanese Government never reveals execution dates in advance, even to condemned prisoners. The prisoner is told on the day of the execution, and their family and the general public is only told after the sentence has been carried out. Some of Japan's death row prisoners are suing the government to change this practice, although I don't like their chances of success. It is notoriously difficult to win against the State in Japanese courts - conviction rates in criminal trials exceed 99%.

There's an interesting discussion to be had on the differences between Confucian and Western countries - another example is the treatment of the Royal Family in the media in the U.K. and Japan. I think that the U.S., like other western liberal democracies, doesn't have the cultural background to do capital punishment 'properly', and I suspect it may sooner or later abandon it for this reason.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I debated whether to put this here or in the Supreme Court thread, because it is unusual for this court to make any decisions that even potentially make it harder to put someone to death, but ultimately I decided it should go here.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Sunsilver]

One person (AFTLOECO) commented: "Veterinary medicine won't even approve for animal euthanasia because it is torturous. This was inhumane."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The State Public Defender’s office and several civil rights groups and individuals today filed an original writ petition in the Supreme Court — Office of the State Public Defender v. Bonta — claiming “[e]xtensive empirical evidence demonstrates that California’s capital punishment scheme is administered in a racially discriminatory manner and violates the equal protection provisions of the state Constitution.” They ask the court to declare the scheme to be unconstitutional as applied and to “bar[ ] the prosecution, imposition, or execution of sentences of death throughout the State of California.” (News release here.)

The petition summarizes its evidence this way: “Black defendants are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than all other defendants. Latino defendants are up to 6.2 times more likely to be sentenced to death than all other defendants. And defendants of all races are up to 8.8 times more likely to be condemned when at least one of the victims is White.”