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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have suspected for a while that the appeals process for death row prisoners has been greatly drawn out. I told a lawyer acquaintance about this one day when he ranted about the death penalty for a while, but he confessed that he has no knowledge of its being lengthened or not.

Well, I finally have a piece of evidence: John Brown commenced his deadly raid on October 16, 1859. He was convicted on November 2, 1859, after a week of deliberation. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Not even two full months of a prison stay.

So now my question is: when did this change? If it took a long time to make death row appeals take decades, what were the critical points in the fight?

The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. I’d start there.

On your advice, I poked around on the death penalty wikipedia page and found something I've been wondering about for a while: volunteers for the death penalty! I wondered if it was possible, never knew it had actually already been done by multiple people.

Something curious about that, too, though: the first execution after the reinstatement was Gary Gilmore, and it was a year after he was convicted. But the other examples on that volunteer page take close to a decade to get executed, if they ever get executed at all. That's for people that have waived their right to appeal and are just trying to get a speedy execution. My new thinking is that the legal system is like some old processor that used to be speedy but is now limping from decades of use. Of course, lawyers figuring out the best ways to game the system probably also contribute to death row appeals processes taking forever.

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