Under penalty of perjury, a witness told the FBI back in 2016 that they had “personally witnessed” President Donald Trump threaten to “disappear” a girl and have her entire family killed, according to a document released by the Justice Department on Friday.Released as part of the DOJ’s publication o...
In guessing you get to decide who is an elite.
Look, I’m all for enforcing our laws and punishing elites and I happen to believe that billionaires shouldn’t even exist, but frankly on the three main claimed benefits of the death penalty - deterrence, cost and incapacitation - the evidence is nonexistence or in outright opposition, and would be met with proper life without parole without running afoul of the Blackstone dilemma.
Me? No. We supposedly decide laws through democratic means.
I’d say individuals with a net worth of a billion dollars, or who are the President of the US, are a good start though.
I’m pretty sure we couldn’t agree on a universal definition that wouldn’t be subject to error or interpretation, and after we’ve killed an innocent person and likely created a martyr and a drive to retribution by some segment of the population, we can’t really back out of that mess.
There’s a perfectly workable solution that aligns with the imperfections and uncertainties of justice, and conveniently also achieves the same or better metrics as evidenced by countless studies on the topic. Seems like an easy decision.
However that won’t satisfy retributive blood lust, or make anyone feel like a tough guy when advocating for it, so the death penalty persists where those things are important.
I’m sure the victims of these people appreciate your enlightened views.
Well, that understandable drive for retribution - which blinds us to principles of equality and justice - is exactly why we don’t let victims administer justice or mete out punishments.
“The law, in its infinite wisdom, prohibits both poor and rich alike from sleeping under bridges”.
I think you’re making my point.
France was talking about systemic inequality, and he’s right: Systems claim to be fair and equal but they still make systematic errors. So why would we add an irreversible punishment, plus a vague ‘elite’ category that invites political targeting and misclassification?
Because we’re only discussing applying it to those most likely to be able to tip the scales of justice in their favor. That’s exactly the point.
Again… To do that, you need to classify everyone accordingly as elite or not, which is subject to systematic error. Which is why we should just choose not to do it, since the death penalty is irreversible, and killing an innocent person runs counter to the way in which a liberal democracy chooses the values that structure its justice system - that is, that we prefer to run the risk that a guilty person go free to avoid, as much as possible, that an innocent person suffers.
If you prefer a justice system built on different fundamental values, maybe you prefer China, Russia or Saudi Arabia.