Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.

Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.

What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is?

If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.

Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite.

The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws.

When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people").

Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted.

The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else.

If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more").

Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner.

If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.

Like many "criminal-friendly" aspects of criminal law, the opposition to the death penalty goes beyond compassion for the guilty; it is motivated by a desire to protect the other innocent from abuse of power, and principled belief that forcibly ending a life is unacceptable because no person is capable and trustworthy to accurately and fairly determining which cases deserve it, and drawing a bright line to separates the kind of criminal people who would kill unnecessarily from the civilized people who would not, and sitting comfortably on our side without engendering doubts.

That's a very good point!

I might counter-argue that at some point there's no doubt and being permanently removed from the pool of people who are alive might be OK.

What I mean is that if someone is attempting to murder me and I manage to kill them first that it was a justifiable homicide and that I shouldn't be punished in any way. That's in the law and it even makes sense to a great many people even if they're not lawyers, and even if they don't know the finer points of the law. In that situation there is no doubt, or perhaps no reasonable doubt and the law does effectively judge people to be competent to make precisely that decision.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that she actually wielded vast power due to her position. In many ways she was far, far more powerful than a judge or a prosecutor. A judge can't just unilaterally accuse someone of a worse crime just because, nor can a prosecutor reasonably trump charges up too much without getting called out for bad behavior. But it seems that this lady did precisely that, totally perverting justice.

If an accountant cooks the books it might be professional misconduct (and criminal!) and people might lose their jobs and all of that is terrible. But that accountant can't somehow make all the employees of the company go to jail by doing something wrong.

The power that this lady had and the extent to which she abused it is simply breathtaking.

I just want to weigh in that I am really glad that none of those falsely convicted by this faked evidence were sentenced to death. At least those falsely imprisoned by the "evidence" this scum planted can be set free, even though they lost years of their lives.

And that is the argument of why there should not be a death penalty, even for people who you are really sure that they really deserve it. It's a form of humility: To admit that there can be wrongs in the legal system, and so to be very sure not to do anything completely irreversible.

That's why people argue that the death penalty is unacceptable in any case whatsoever: the system has to be able to admit that sometimes it is wrong.

By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.

Do we actually think that a human life is priceless, or is that just something that we say that we think to make ourselves feel good about ourselves?

We regularly put a price on human life in civil cases, and that price always seems to be finite and fairly low.

Which is a truly disparaging fact, while a human life may not be priceless, putting a value on it draws a very interesting ethical line in the sand. I agree with you, but I would say the life of any human should be worth a hell of a lot and the idea of taking one should be met with the utmost seriousness and avoided at all costs.

The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.

I can't disagree with any of that.

Related blog post: http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html

By the way, very insightful discussion here!

If taking a life is savage, how much more savage is it to systematically, wrongly deny people their freedom for the sake of promotions?

Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it's savage and barbaric and the opposite of civilized.

Denying people their freedom through a fair court system is also kind-of barbaric since violence or the threat thereof is what holds the system together. But it's supposed to be "justice" in that there's a fair trial and the hope is that guilty people are properly denied their freedom and innocent ones are not. Obviously there are false positives and false negatives but everyone is supposed to act in good faith to ensure that there aren't systematic biases.

This person introduced a systematic bias which has wrongly denied people their freedom. If she had kidnapped ~600 Americans for 1.5 years she'd be called a terrorist. That's precisely what some Iranian folks who did that to American embassy workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

How is this so vastly different?

On kind of a tangent to the actual topic of the article being discussed, but I saw you mention how you think slavery has been abolished worldwide. I'd like to correct that thinking and let you know that slavery is still a very active thing, with millions of slaves around the globe, and people being captured even in the USA as sex slaves to be sold around the globe. The nearest count I know is at least 27 million people still exist as slaves.

http://enditmovement.com/

Thanks for the link. I figured it still happened some but not to the extent that you're referring to.

I think mostly what I meant is that it's theoretically (I think) illegal worldwide. There are plenty of places where it still happens through corruption or lax law enforcement.

I am a bit disappointed that the website linked to rolls child labor in with slavery and such because it weakens the number. I don't LIKE child labor but there are still places so poor that the only alternative to children working is starvation. And they don't break the 27 million number down. So it's hard to tell if the child labor portion is 1% or 80% of the full 27 million.

Again just to be clear I'm not in favor of child labor across the board. But if the alternative to a child working is starvation then I see no reason to make a law to stop him or her from working. Getting charities together to give the families food so that the kids can stop working? Great! But just passing a law and supposing/hoping that it will solve the problem? I don't know that it's the right thing to do.

I guess part of the problem is that I have no idea how many kids are working to eat and stay alive by their parents conscious choice vs how many are effectively slave laborers being exploited.

And perhaps more to the point, the 13th Amendment explicitly leaves slavery on the table for those convicted of a crime:

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Does this mean that plainly barbaric things may be justifiably used as punishments? Does this perhaps suggest the possibility that "killing a man", and "killing a man after convicting him of a crime" are morally distinct? Or does this mean that a serious revamp of how we view and run our justice system is long overdue?

There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).