Just Death Penalty
January 6, 2006 § 7 Comments
John Doe is convicted of murder. He is executed for that murder. He was also found guilty of other crimes, but that specific murder conviction is what led to his execution. He would not have been executed if it wasn’t for that murder conviction. It may have been theoretically just for him to be executed for his other crimes, but we are morally certain that the competent authority (let’s say the people, the Congress/jury, and the President/prosecutor) would not have executed him for those other crimes (and in fact did not execute him for those other crimes).
It is later found out that he was not guilty of that murder. The prosecutor argues that his execution was not a mistake. It was still morally just because the perp theoretically (and lets say actually) deserved to die for those other crimes.
Is the prosecutor right? Of the three possible moral categories (just, unjust, honest mistake), which one does this actual execution which actually took place belong in, objectively?
Clearly it was a mistake, at best, as a moral matter.
Zippy Catholic 
At one point, I thought JWT included some integrity of purpose; i.e. that the war is actually being fought for the reasons being proferred.When I looked for it it wasn’t there, though if the threat isn’t defined, it begs the question on how one can define “reasonable possibility of success.”
Ah, but in order for the threat to be <>certain<> we have to know what it is, and it has to be the reason we (the competent authority, in our case the President, Congress, and the public in the ordinary political process) actually went to war. So I think what you are looking for is in the “certainty” criteria. The certainty criteria is not the straw-man usually proferred: we don’t have to be apodictically sure, we just have to be certain in the ordinary sense. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is not a bad standard in that regard for any life and death situation. But irrespective of the standard, if we turn out to be wrong we can’t legitimately say that we were right.
I actually served on a jury in New York City, where the D.A. was putting a man on trial charged with possession of an illegal hand gun. The gun was found in a closet, in a canvas bag, inside a baggy. The apartment was not leased to the defendant. The bag could not be shown to belong to the defendant. One witness against the defendant was literally a crack whore, who was an intermittant resident in the apartment, and the second and only other witness (other than cops) was a relatively elderly and decrepit drug addict with an arrest record for armed robbery. The gun yielded no evidence against anybody. A shirt that it had been wrapped up in inside the baggy could not be traced to anybody.It was clear to us jurors that the defendant was not an Eagle Scout and was undoubtedly guilty of *something*. It was also clear to us that he was being tried on trumped up charges. We could have convicted him just to get him off the street. We did not. I think we did the right thing.
<>I think we did the right thing.<>I think you did too.Funny thing, as many times as I have been summoned for jury duty, I never actually get chosen. Go figure.
I also served on the jury of a murder trial in the Bronx. In the end, they dropped the charges against the defendant, who was already doing life for another murder. The only witness in this one was the man’s son, who in the end refused to testify against him. The defendant was a drug wholesaler who took out somebody who had crossed him with a shotgun on the police firing range. Waste of time, that one.
It was both unjust (materially, not formally, assuming the trial was conducted with all due integrity), <>and<> a mistake.And the reason you never get picked for juries is that you’re too picky. I can just see you interrogating counsel during <>voir dire<>.
Yeah, I was being a little ironic in my comment. I never get selected, and it is pretty clear why I never get selected.