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[Death Penalty] thread about policies not morality: the florida why? edition.
Jebus314
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Registered User regular
First things first. This is not a thread about whether or not the death penalty is legal/moral/whatever. The assumption for this debate, that I hope you will make, is that the death penalty is legal and if handled carefully can be considered a satisfactory conclusion to some cases. This is a thread about whether or not certain policies further or hamper the goal of making the death penalty a fair and judicial process. Feel free to throw out your own specific examples for discussion, but I wanted to bring this up first:
As of June 14th, I believe Florida has signed into law a bill called the Timely Justice Act of 2013. There are some nice things about this bill, like these things:
and
Which according to the This American Life podcast where I got this news, means that there will be some extra cash on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars devoted to paying for more appropriate attorneys for people on death row. As well as some common sense things like not letting terrible attorneys continue to represent people.
However the reason for the bill, and the most disturbing part of this situation, is this:
That's right, it is now the law that once a death penalty trial has concluded in florida, there is only 6-7 months before the inmate must be executed. Regardless of the status of any appeals. To put this in a little perspective, this a graph of the average time from conviction to execution for the US death penalty cases. Spoilered for huge, and because I don't know how to shrink images from another website.
So in general the appeals process takes 70-180 months to fully run it's course. But I'm sure they could totes squeez that into 6 months if they wanted too.
Also, let's consider Florida's history with the death penalty. According to this probably super biased, but most likely accurate, paper that I found; since 1970, 24 out of 98 death row cases have been exonerated. So a little over 1/4 of all convicted death penalty inmates were proven to be innocent through appeals courts. That's a staggeringly high failure rate for a death penalty. Indeed, according to this NY Times article, about some report that I am to lazy to look up, says:
Now these errors did not result in the convicted person being found guilty, but did often lead to them receiving a lesser sentence. Still this a huge amount of uncertainty for my tastes. So out of curiousity, does anyone think this is a good idea?
As of June 14th, I believe Florida has signed into law a bill called the Timely Justice Act of 2013. There are some nice things about this bill, like these things:
requiring funds used to compensate court-appointed attorneys who represent a person convicted and sentenced to death in clemency proceedings to be paid by the Justice Administrative Commission rather than the Department of Corrections;
and
Requiring attorneys who contract with the capital collateral regional counsel to meet certain criteria; creating s. 27.7045, F.S.; prohibiting an attorney from representing a person charged with a capital offense in specified proceedings for 5 years if in two separate instances a court, in a capital postconviction proceeding, determined that the attorney provided constitutionally deficient representation and relief was granted;
Which according to the This American Life podcast where I got this news, means that there will be some extra cash on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars devoted to paying for more appropriate attorneys for people on death row. As well as some common sense things like not letting terrible attorneys continue to represent people.
However the reason for the bill, and the most disturbing part of this situation, is this:
requiring the Governor to issue a warrant within 30 days of receiving the clerk’s letter of certification in all cases where the executive clemency process has concluded directing the warden to execute the sentence within 180 days
That's right, it is now the law that once a death penalty trial has concluded in florida, there is only 6-7 months before the inmate must be executed. Regardless of the status of any appeals. To put this in a little perspective, this a graph of the average time from conviction to execution for the US death penalty cases. Spoilered for huge, and because I don't know how to shrink images from another website.
So in general the appeals process takes 70-180 months to fully run it's course. But I'm sure they could totes squeez that into 6 months if they wanted too.
Also, let's consider Florida's history with the death penalty. According to this probably super biased, but most likely accurate, paper that I found; since 1970, 24 out of 98 death row cases have been exonerated. So a little over 1/4 of all convicted death penalty inmates were proven to be innocent through appeals courts. That's a staggeringly high failure rate for a death penalty. Indeed, according to this NY Times article, about some report that I am to lazy to look up, says:
The rate of error found in appeals in death penalty cases ranged from 100 percent in three states -- Kentucky, Maryland and Tennessee -- and 91 percent in Mississippi, to 18 percent in Virginia, by far the lowest of any of the 34 states with the death penalty, raising questions about whether Virginia's court system is unusually fair or works to make it hard to detect errors.
In fact, 24 of the 26 states with the death penalty where there have been fully completed appeals had an error rate of 52 percent or higher, the report said.
Now these errors did not result in the convicted person being found guilty, but did often lead to them receiving a lesser sentence. Still this a huge amount of uncertainty for my tastes. So out of curiousity, does anyone think this is a good idea?
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Jebus314 on
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It's one of those things I'm not opposed to in theory where necessity warrants but in practice and in modern society, I am opposed to it in almost all situations.
I really think we need to reconstitute the national moratorium on the death penalty, because not only is it an incredible waste of money, but it's also provably discriminatory. Oh, and innocent people keep getting executed too. It doesn't really have any deterrent effect either.
I'll see if I can dig up a paper I did on this a while back that analyzed it from a purely practical perspective.
I agree with this, and am not sure what I am supposed to discuss within this thread. How to do the death penalty better: don't do it.
The death penalty only happens after mandatory appeals, so those appeals are part of the death penalty.
A failure of the death penalty happens if an innocent person makes it through all of the appeals, and is still put to death.
The case labelled "The Bitch-smack heard round the world"
So at the least we have the immediate state and federal appeals concluded and the "Executive Clemency Process" also done.
For better or worse it seems to be saying that if you don't have an active appeal or clemency petition going your execution has to be scheduled within six months.
I was always in favor of the death penalty in a very "lets put in an express lane!" sort of way. Not until I got out of the house and researched on my own, outside of my parents Fox News-esque echo chamber, did I change my mind.
Basically, if there is a non-zero chance that a person being executed could be innocent, they cannot be killed by the state. And, since we have a discriminatory justice system and a fair chance for corruption or incompetence, the chance someone is innocent will always be non-zero.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
My view on the death penalty has basically evolved "we could use it if we can work out all the structural problems it has" to "we will never work out all the structural problems it has."
Plus, the number of cases where it would be a legitimately valid response (no mental issues, rehabilitation impossible/dangerous, etc) are so rare that they barely even function as an argument.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The Florida Supreme court allows 17 year old teen girls taking self pics and people caught peeing in the woods on the side of the highway to be put on the sex offenders list for the rest of their life.
Expect nothing good or rational out of them.
Or would you have grounds to press charges (should an executed person later be found innocent) on the grounds that reducing the waiting time to that short a period was negligent when it comes to properly administering the death penalty? Especially as doesn't the Governor also has to authorise it (so he'd be on the hook for both signing off the bill and then actually ordering it to be carried out)? Given the metrics presented earlier, should be fairly easy to show that this was the result of a callous disregard for human life and completely against currently accepted practice, guidelines and processes.
"I followed all the lawful procedures properly" is usually a pretty sound defense
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat