Trump Reinstates Federal Executions

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

It's a pretty loaded thought experiment.

"Should guilty people that evade punishment be punished outside the law?"

"unfortunately we don't have a perfect legal system, so i would say yes"

[Yukaphile]

I agree. Only if and when it's failed, however. That's what Batman is all about.

At the same time, some crimes are so underreported and underpunished, it's hard not to give in to emotionalism. That's where I disconnect the most from the modern world. We're never going to have perfect justice, and it's foolish to even try.

[Riedquat]

I agree. Only if and when it's failed, however. That's what Batman is all about.

At the same time, some crimes are so underreported and underpunished, it's hard not to give in to emotionalism. That's where I disconnect the most from the modern world. We're never going to have perfect justice, and it's foolish to even try.

And would we tolerate Batman for real? There will be more mistakes made with that sort of vigilateism than the legal system will make. It's better than no alternative, i.e. if you live in a truly wild, no law and order world, but law and order has to have fallen pretty far before it seems like a good idea.

I don't have a problem with emotionalism - as I've said elsewhere to pretend you can make decisions based on purely non-emotional criteria is complete nonsense, but it has to be well-thought-through emotionalism, considering how you'd feel in all sorts of plausible circumstances (which still makes me say eff off to the modern world, but hey).

[Mecha82]

I agree. Only if and when it's failed, however. That's what Batman is all about.

It's just that Batman doesn't kill. Yes his golden age version did but after that he has had strict "no killing"-policy. He solves crimes (he is detective after all) and then he brings criminals to Arkham or to police.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I think Section 31 is a better basis for speculation than Batman.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

If such a person is locked up then they shouldn't be a danger to the people around them or society as a whole (although that raises the whole question about violence in prisons).

I don't necessarily mean danger in terms of the violence they might personally commit. I'm thinking of offenses closer to treason, domestic terrorism, a cult leader in the vein of Charles Manson, a domestic Hitler, etc. Someone like Anders Breivik, whose guarantee of continued survival could serve as inspiration to whackjobs everywhere (and might have been part of the plan from the beginning). Like I said, I don't know exactly what such a person would look like, it's just possible that they might exist.

Putting this into consideration, the only measure I can think of would involve actually expediting death row, not to mention putting more people on it.

This is one of my issues. I try to be too pedantic, give too many examples, and obfuscate my own point, which is my bad. I'm trying to argue for the opposite of this.

Amnesty international classifies the three different forms of capital punishment abolition as total abolitionism, abolitionist for ordinary crimes only, and abolitionist in practice. Some think capital punishment is intrinsically wrong (total abolitionism), and while I can respect that viewpoint, I'm not sure I can agree because it's conceivable to me that there might be a situation where it would be the correct call. I do think that there are multiple issues that make it highly problematic as practiced, and so the bar should be raised high enough to effectively abolish it (i.e. the second and third categories of abolitionism).

I agree. Only if and when it's failed, however. That's what Batman is all about.

At the same time, some crimes are so underreported and underpunished, it's hard not to give in to emotionalism. That's where I disconnect the most from the modern world. We're never going to have perfect justice, and it's foolish to even try.

Sounds more like Charles Bronson in Death Wish to me.

There's a lot of issues with that. One of them is that even if some person with superhuman judgment could perfectly calculate cause-and-effect and enact real justice (if vigilante justice isn't considered a contradiction in terms), there would still be thousands of regular, imperfect people running around making hell for everyone.

I agree with Riedquat that there's no way to fully eliminate emotionalism. The majority of people could probably be turned into pro-death penalty advocates if the worst happened to them. But that's why due process and the justice system, flawed as they might be, are essential for civilization.

[Yukaphile]

+Riedquat THE LEGAL SYSTEM IS NOT PERFECT. People can unintentionally shield those guilty of horrible crimes, or it could fail all on its own. Take children trying to find their fathers, who they never knew. That's one thing. But imagine learning that person had assaulted their mother and that's how they were born? But they don't report them even though they literally learn the person got married later and had kids? That's where it becomes a matter of libertarianism versus society's need for so-called "justice." This man basically escaped the law his whole life, and might even "seem" regretful and treat his wife well, but that's where society's need to make sure these crimes are punished come in. Justice is never gonna be about something clinical and objective, it's always going to have a human element of revenge to it. The most you can do is temper it, thus it's safe to say that this child of his unwittingly shielded a man who got away with it. Some people might claim, "Well, it's his/her choice, and we shouldn't force that on them." No, in a world of true impartial justice, not the kind we claim today, it would be your social obligation to report them and enforce justice on him, because when that happens, as a society, we all damaged. Which is why I laugh when people discuss "impartial justice." There is no such thing, you can't remove human feeling from it at all. Or take people who were wrongly executed, and then years later, the real culprit was found. See, the legal system can fail, and if a man was tried through the courts and found not guilty when there were witnesses and so on and so forth and it was just a bureaucratic fuckup, then I won't begrudge somebody wanting to kill him. Kill him, of course. Not torture. I think there should be limits even to this. You seem to want to trust authority, but authority is not 100% precise or infallible. They are going to make mistakes. So you need to balance that for the human need for justice, to see these crimes avenged. I think that's deeply important for us if we ever wanna move forward.

[Admiral X]

That line of thinking is what led to lynch mobs. We should always strive for impartiality and objectiveness in justice. To do otherwise is to invite anarchy.

[Yukaphile]

No, what fueled lynch mobs was racism, plain and simple. Unless you mean if a pedophile was acquitted from the legal system, in which case, sorry, I'm NOT going to feel guilty for him. Torture is going too far, but even then, I won't feel sorry.

[Admiral X]

Black people weren't the only ones to get lynched. Plenty of people got lynched because the mob felt the court "got it wrong." It never occurs to them that the court actually got it right, because they made their minds up ahead of time.