In Illinois, the formerly pro-death conservative then Governor Ryan, later himself convicted of Racketeering and tax fraud, instituted a moratorium on the death penalty when the number of exonerations came to equal the number of recent executions (about eight, if I recall), strongly suggesting that perhaps as many as half of those executed in Illinois were actually innocent. The death penalty was subsequently abolished after the sentences of those on death row were commented by Ryan. I don't think there is any reason to believe that Illinois was any worse about executing the innocent than Texas, Florida,Virginia, or any of the high volume death states.
One reason for the possibly unusually high ratio of wrongful death penalties and executions that scholars have suggested us that capital cases are high profile cases, often atrocious, where there is a lot of public pressure to make someone pay and where there is political advantage for prosecutors and elected judges in imposing and upholding death sentences even where the evidence is thin or in some cases fabricated, or exonerating evidence is excluded or buried. Anecdotally speaking, stories of the exonerated tend to support these explanations.
As Shane implicitly acknowledges, a standard of proof beyond any possible doubt is impossible to attain. I don't know why someone would take the procedural roundabout of calling for such a standard rather than just holding out of substantive abolition.
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 5, 2012, at 11:19 AM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
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> On Oct 5, 2012, at 8:09 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>> ...Retributionists would argue that the only purpose of punishment is retribution to satisfy justice, not to achieve any other practical end (such as future crime prevention.)...As to the claim of too many innocent victims -
>> I do not think we have any reliable numbers is, so we will never know
>> for sure. I happen to believe that in most cases the persons
>> condemned to die are guilty as charged...
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> Wojtek doesn't know if there are "too many innocent victims," though he believes that "most" of the victims are not indeed innocent. But since he explicitly admits that *some* (although not "too many") of the victims are indeed innocent, then he and the rest of the
> "justice"-favoring "retributionists" must be in favor of the death penalty for those who have deliberately taken innocent life--the arresting police, the executioners, the judges, the prosecuting attorneys, and even the jurors (though, I think, in "most" cases the jurors can claim such extenuating circumstances as having been deceived by cops, prosecutors, et. al.).
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> While I agree that it is regrettable for a Breivik to escape being drawn and quartered and disemboweled, I believe the killing of even one innocent by the "justice" system is too high a price to pay for such fullness of real justice. And so I have a utilitarian "platonic" (ie., by definition unrealizable in the material world) ideal of capital punishment: (a) guilt must be proven beyond any possible doubt, (b) the crime must be motivated by a rational risk/benefit calculation and therefore subject to dissuasion (mainly profit-motivated crimes like employing hired arsonists or murderers, but also state-administered extrajudicial killings like those in which Obama glories).
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> Shane Mage
> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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