aratuk

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Crime and Punishment
  Nobody deserves death. Neither the shooter, nor his victims. It doesn't rehabilitate, it doesn't protect society any better than a full life sentence, all it does is provide for bloodthirsty revenge -- which diminishes the perpetrator. In other cases it also risks an irrevocable miscarriage of justice. (I'll grant that this one looks totally cut and dried.) Moreover, I'm strongly opposed to the death penalty under ALL circumstances, because I think it's a terrible mistake to give the State the power to inflict death on its subjects. (I'm always astounded when I run across libertarians who support the judicial death...
• Charlie Stross commented on Crime and Punishment
  As far as I am concerned it is neither punishment nor deterrent -- it is removal from society of an element too dangerous to allow to exist. Except there are other, more humane ways to do the same thing. Ways that don't turn prison service personnel into killers (there is, I believe, some history of PTSD among folks who attend or participate in executions) and that don't hand over the power of life and death to the state. Moreover, you're implicitly applying botched Bayesian reasoning to the killer's probability of striking again. Humans aren't deterministic automata who repeat the same...
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on Crime and Punishment
  Nobody deserves death. I may disagree with that. But one of the big problems I have with executions -- which I think is a big problem in every other aspect of the "justice system," just not as final -- is that if the judge, the prosecutor, or the jury are wrong, they don't have to worry about any sort of punishment. I know the reasons for that. But... power without cost corrupts....
• Moderator Alan commented on Crime and Punishment
  By the opposite token if I threaten someone with a weapon; can't the police execute me without trial? Ah, the Judge Dredd option. And the answer is that if you allow the police to execute members of the public just because they want to, then you're in a very bad place indeed. What? You think that wouldn't happen? You think that there wouldn't be occasions when a corrupt policeman carries out an execution of a monster's rival, and then gasp lies about the dead person? You think there wouldn't be cases where the dead person isn't even a rival mobster,...
• Moderator Alan commented on Crime and Punishment
  So you don't want the police to have the legal ability to execute without trial? Thank goodness for that - I thought from what you said that you wanted it....