More context:
- Be an advanced, developed nation
- Maintain the death penalty
Pick one.
- Be an advanced, developed nation
The south is not remotely an advanced, developed nation.
It’s like if you took Brussels, then glued the worst bits of Somalia to it.
We had to fight a war to get them to stop keeping black people as pets, and they just kept doing it anyway.
Hitler wrote of the south specifically as an inspiration for German genetic policies (Jim Crow) in Mein Kampf. Black GIs came home from killing nazis to be lynched from trees.
Capital punishment is a state level policy. The USA has almost 400 million people and has never been a monolith of culture, thought, beliefs, or values. Missouri is a shit state with shit policies.
- The US federal government has the authority to, at any time, outlaw state-sanctioned murder across the country
eithervia Supreme Court rulingor via constitutional amendmentand tell states to kick rocks. It chooses not to do this.I don’t care that an amendment is “hard”;if it’s possible to do but it fails to do this, then it’s the federal government’s fault. The votes ofabout 355 legislators and the signature of Joe Biden5 SCOTUS justices could end this today; it’s the stroke of a pen, and they simply don’t do it. - This case went before the SCOTUS requesting an emergency block, where it was voted against 6–3. The SCOTUS had the power to trivially prevent this and decided not to.
- The majority of US states (27) as well as the federal government have state-sanctioned murder on the books as a legal criminal punishment. 12 states and the federal government have carried it out in the last 10 years.
- This is incidental to your overall point, but the current US population is ~337 million; “almost” 400 million is doing so much lifting there.
Edit: I accidentally became so sleep-deprived that I forgot a constitutional amendment has a separate proposal and ratification process. The SCOTUS method would 100% work, though, and it hasn’t yet been banned at the federal level which is a simple majority of Congress and a presidential signature, so they do overall endorse it.
You think the federal government can, with enough votes, create a Constitutional amendment? Back to government class with you:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_00000507/
The votes of about 355 legislators and the signature of Joe Biden could end this today; it’s the stroke of a pen, and they simply don’t do it.
And 269 of those legislators are Republicans, most of which are uncaring sociopathic individuals who were voted in by a party of spiteful, hateful, racist voters.
The best way to change that situation is to vote. Don’t bitch about it. Vote.
This case went before the SCOTUS requesting an emergency block, where it was voted against 6–3. The SCOTUS had the power to trivially prevent this and decided not to.
Wow… 6-3, I wonder where I’ve heard that split before? Oh, right, it’s the same SCOTUS split that has been going on ever since Trump put three immoral and corruptible judges unto the Supreme Court, voted in by Republicans in the Senate, who were in turn, voted in by Republicans.
The best way to change that situation is to vote. Don’t bitch about it. Vote.
The majority of US states (27) as well as the federal government have state-sanctioned murder on the books as a legal criminal punishment. 12 states and the federal government have carried it out in the last 10 years.
And most of those states are red states… you know, the states filled to the brim with Republicans.
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
No.
Death > imprisonment
You can’t suffer while dead, and you certainly can’t be a prison pimped slave worker while dead. There’s also no way to profit from an execution so far as I can tell.
Some people need to be gotten rid of instead of being made to suffer on my dime. This is especially true depending on your views on free will. It’s triple true when you consider how much crime is just a result of unnatural financial pressures that none of us evolved to deal with.
That is frankly a disgusting point of view. Death and non-rehabilitory imprisonment are both wrong but not because it “costs money”.
This is clearly from an incredibly privileged person, because if you understood how minoritized people are treated by the legal system you wouldn’t be arguing for more executions.
And the huge list of people executed by the state despite it being reasonably likely they’re actually innocent is… cheaper (it’s not), and therefore acceptable?
Absolutely not. I’ve been bullied into a false conviction myself. The reason why is that they absolutely do not give a single fuck about the people they’re ruining. Even the slightest bit of interest in being right from the court system and police would be a massive improvement for everyone. If suggest training if the problem was stupidity, but it’s malice. They know what the fuck they’re doing.
There’s also no way to profit from an execution so far as I can tell.
there absolutely is, with legal injections whoever sells them makes money, you save money as a prison by not having to house these people, and while you can’t exploit them for labor, there is never really a guarantee that you can. It’s a little more nuanced than this, for example solitary confinement generally makes it pretty hard to make money off of people. Death row is often a multi year process, taking many many thousands of dollars of human upkeep to keep it going.
technically you could go a step futher and say there’s a broader economic benefit to killing them as you can use it as some sort of social driving pressure. Stalinist USSR for example.
Call me radical, but I don’t think any government should be killing people.
There are a lot of governments in the world that agree with you. Not the US government, not at all.
show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.
However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim awfully often. Really makes you think, right?
You are deflecting from the issue here. Legitimate violence, whatever you and I understand for “legitimate” is not the issue, since I guess we can recognize that violence is gradual. We are talking death penalty and it’s derivations in the US judicial system. There are a lot of states that won’t just systematically kill their citizens and citizens from other countries. A type of zealot entitlement is needed by their governments to keep doing it in cases like this.
well yeah, war is a human constant, there is no fixed way to dispute arbitrary claims such as “land rights” and “dibs” on ownership of things outside of war. I mean sure there’s legal agreements, but if you don’t agree, it’s null and void, now nothing matters anymore. I guess you could simply play rock paper scissors for dibs but i don’t imagine that’s going to be very popular.
This is even a constant within evolutionary biology and the animal kingdom at large. Modern predators are only so deadly because it was advantageous to reproduction.
If the prisons are focused on rehabilitation and reintegration instead of just keeping people locked up and treating them like they’re not human? Yes. Do I believe prisons in the US are like that? No.
Reading about it I am not completly convinced that he is innocent, but I think that there is 100% plausible reason to doubt that he is guilty. This should defintly be enough to stop an execution.
Edit: Maybe read the whole statement before getting a rage fit? I said he shouldn’t have been killed. I am also not moderate and (according to US standards) I am apparently not white as a muslim turkish person.
Reading about it I am not completly convinced that he is innocent
After the reams and reams of verifiable miscarriages of justice against Black people, after 160 years of carceral slavery being the law of the land, after 50+ years of the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately affecting Black people, you still trust the settler’s ‘court of law’???
That’d be laughable if it wasn’t so damn typical.
I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.
“Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.
I’m ashamed to admit that specifically with regard to police brutality, I was in the “they must have had a reason” camp (without looking any further into it) for many more years than I had any excuse to be. Rodney King put a crack in that, but I was still pretty young then, and surrounded by my own privilege. It was many years later before I realized that sort of shit and worse was happening constantly.
“Not completely convinced of his innocence” even in the face of DNA evidence invalidates everything else they said. Like, you do not get to couch white moderate “oooooh, I don’t know” bullshit when the DNA already exonerated mans. Fuck outta here.
No. You opened with white moderate, frankly blatantly-supremacist bullshit in service of the “legal” system, you can fuck right off, peckerwood. It’s super-cute how you settlers keep ignoring my ‘no’ to try and make me accept supremacist thought, btw. Even more shameful that you’re apparently not even white and doing that; do you realize whose shoes you lick?
Every single possible person from the screw on his prison row all the way up to the FAMILY OF THE VICTIMS were out here saying “well I don’t think he did it”, the DNA said he didn’t do it, and waterbearers like you will still sit there, fixing your face the whole time to play the “well, he was no angel” card why on Allah’s green creation would any self-respecting Black person continue listening to your fuckery after an opener like “wellllllll I am not completly convinced that he is innocent, buuuuuuuuuuut…”???
You. Cape. For. Dead. Black folk. Get the fuck out of my inbox. Get the fuck out of it twice for not even fuckin being from here and thinking you have a right to opine on innocent dead Black men, or run defense for the crackers who murdered them. Piece of shit.
It doesn’t matter if he did it or not, honestly. If the state can’t be 10000% certain the person they are about to murder is guilty of a heinous crime then it shouldn’t be possible to fucking murder them.
This isnt about innocence. This is about the state denying this Black Muslim man due process and constitutional protections.
And on that note, its impossible to prove guilt in these cases, which is why the death penalty needs to be abolished. Are you comfortable with the idea of bring executed for a crime because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Because I’m sure fucking not.
Maybe you should have read my whole statement before writing this wall of text?
I’m agreeing with your conclusion but not with your reasoning.
You reason that since it looks like he might be innocent, he shouldn’t have been executed. Extrapolating from this yields that you also believe that if you felt he was definitely guilty, he should have been executed.
I’m saying that because this uncertainty exists at all as a concept the death penalty should be abolished. Its impossible to prove someone’s guilt 100% in these cases, therefore the death penalty is immoral. Not just in this case but in every case.
That’s fine with a sentence of a couple years. But for how hard we’ve seen it become to commute a sentence, we need to be 100% sure for the death penalty.
I basically said that it is not okay, maybe you should have read the second sentence as well. But even with a “sentence of a couple years”, guilt has to be profen, not innocence. If there is plausible doubt of guilt, there shouldn’t be a guilty sentence.
The cruelty truly is the point.
Marcellus Williams was charged with the murder of Felicia Gayle. Prosecutors based evidence mainly on alleged confessions Williams had made, including one alleged by a jailhouse snitch.
In August 2001, Williams was sentenced to death. On appeal, he raised several issues, including claims of errors in evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, and victim impact testimony. He also challenged the use of his prior criminal history and alleged improper prosecutorial comments during closing arguments.
The death sentence was controversial, as DNA evidence had been claimed to prove his innocence, and the family of Gayle repeatedly stating they did not want Williams executed.
Despite pleas from the public and the family of Gayle stating they were opposed to the execution, on September 24, 2024, 55-year-old Williams was executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT.
So, even the family of the victim was against it. An innocent man died while the real criminal is out there.
