[lbo-talk] Judgment error: [was:Dean: hang 'em high!

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

> As human beings -- including jurors, witnesses, judges, prosecutors, 
> detectives, defense attorneys, expert witnesses, etc. -- cannot avoid 
> making errors, even in a hypothetically perfect society, there can 
> and will be miscarriages of justice, including cases of individuals 
> who had been convicted of murder but who turn out to be innocent 
> later.  Death penalties, once carried out, are irreversible, but 
> other sentences -- including life imprisonment without parole -- can 
> be ended or commuted to lesser sentences.  The abolition of death 
> penalty may be thought of as an insurance policy -- you insure 
> against the possibility of killing innocents by mistake, the 
> inevitable cost of insurance being the necessity to deprive the truly 
> guilty of the right to be responsible for their crimes and punished 
> accordingly.
> -- 
> Yoshie

So if I understand your argument correctly, we should abstain from
killing when the possibility of judgment error exist.  So how would that
work in a situation when the spouses have a euthanasia agreement, and
one of them cecomes incurably incapacitated.  What should the other one
do in such a situation?  There is a possibility of error about the
incapacitated person's condition (i.e. he or she may recover), so your
argument suggests that the other person should not carry out the
euthanasia agreement.  But that is not only a serious breech of trust,
but there is a possibility that the incapacitaed person may syffer for a
long period of time.  

The possibility of error does not prevent us from doing other
irreversible things, if we proceed with reasonable caution.  In fact,
most things we do are irreversible.  I see no reason why death penalty
should be exempt from it.

Wojtek