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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Life imprisonment is partially reversible.

With what odds will an innocent person sentenced to life imprisonment actually get their sentence partially reversed? Or...here's a more quantitative approach.

Take a typical time to live on death row of maybe 10 years (all the appeals, etc). What fraction of people sentence to life imprisonment get their sentences reversed in year 11-99? I'd hazard a guess it's quite low, but not sure where to find the numbers.

(Actually I suspect it might be high if your dataset overlaps the period when DNA testing was introduced - mainly cause a backlog of cases was created that could only be addressed after a technological advance.)

"Happens X times and is not reversible in Y% of them" is equivalent to "happens Z times and is not reversible at all", for appropriate values of X, Y, and Z.

Or in other words, if this was really your argument, you would be happy with the death penalty if it was only applied in a number of cases equivalent to (number of cases where people get life imprisonment) * (percentage chance of being able to reverse those before the person dies in jail).

No, the reason I personally am opposed to death penalty, and legalised euthanasia for that matter, is that I don’t want to give the state any additional ways or possible covers to murder people

An inconvenient person is framed for a crime -> quickly trialled, sentenced to death and executed -> public finds out the accusation is made up -> "oops, justice system error, sorry but it happens sometimes unfortunately"

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