I recognize that they’ve done a LOT of harm, but death is a harsh punishment under almost any circumstances. The death penalty seems like one of those ideological issues where people fall on one side or the other, and they pretty much stay on that side.
My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.
I'm sort of ambivalent about the death penalty, and I'm more than skeptical about punishment-based behavior mitigation in general.
That said, whatever the severity of penalty you assign to direct forms of (mass) murder ought to apply to the indirect forms when they're scaled up far enough.
Like, that capital represents the real possibility of avoiding starvation for a certain percent of the population (many of them children).
Similarly, I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them. They knew full well what the impact of their behavior was going to be and thought, "fuck 'em. Let 'em die". That's just as bad if not worse than a troubled teen picking up an assault rifle.
> I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s mostly poor people who are executed in the US. One reason is, we don’t punish rich people crimes with the same severity. If you look at the list of capital crimes in e.g. California, most of them involve specific circumstances around single murders. It’s not hard to imagine white collar crimes which cause an order of magnitude more damage to society.
Whether these crimes need to be punished with the death penalty is a different question I think you and I would not agree on, but I would concede if it meant stricter punishments for white collar criminals. The Sacklers are far more evil than most of the men sitting on death row now.
If you’re rich, you can afford to confer with attorneys before, and afford pretty good defense attorneys afterwards. They also typically are major contributors to the community in some way (taxes, as an employer, etc.).
Poorer folks learn ‘the law’ from TV or their cousins or whatever, and often just get a public defender with an excessive case load. They typically don’t clean up well, and won’t come across well to a jury.
Who do you think the prosecutor is going to throw the book at to pad their resume?
I don’t doubt that wealthy people have access to better council, but my point is that (as far as I know) in the US, white collar crimes are literally not capital crimes. It’s not a matter of wealthy people being charged with capital crimes and escaping with great legal defense. White collar crimes are simply not treated with the same severity as directly murdering one person, even if the outcome was the same or even orders of magnitude worse.
There is also the fact that if you’re richer, you can probably afford to solve whatever problem you have without actually murdering someone. Especially not murdering them yourself.
Because you can hire lawyers. Or can afford friends in low places. Or have power and influence to get what you want through threats. And aren’t desperate enough (usually) either to consider it a good cost/risk trade off.
But not always, rich people can be crazy too. Or actually, I mean ‘eccentric’. Crazy is when someone is poor.
If you’re criminally inclined, getting more money is always ‘worthwhile’ though, especially since it’s rare anyone can look at it and say it should be punished the same as literal murder.
In banning the death penalty for rape, the US Supreme Court explicitly... in black letter text... left open the possibility of executing major drug traffickers. We should use that door more often.
Singapore is certainly an appealing model to a certain segment of the population. They have mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers. However, what most people don’t want to talk about is the robust social safety net that Singapore also has. In Singapore the police can arrest homeless people for sleeping on the streets. But they also have ample housing available for them. In San Francisco, there literally is no place for a homeless person but the streets. The waitlist can take months or years.
After decades of propaganda, far right media has convinced a large part of the American public that social welfare programs don’t work. Of course they did this after first defunding those social programs. So of course the only option left is punishment.
But if anything, the US “war on drugs” has only proven that punishment alone isn’t enough. Thankfully people are starting to wake up to that fact.
The problems with prohibition are well documented. There's a good reason we re-legalized alcohol, and we suffer those same problems with the current prohibitions (the creation of a multibillion-dollar organized crime market).
I think it's important that we define exactly what it is that we're trying to mitigate / accomplish with drug laws in general. If it's the reduction of harm, then we're going about it completely wrong.
The overwhelming majority of overdoses are from opioids [1] and yet we treat lsd, mdma, cocaine, and a whole slew of psychedelics exactly the same as heroin. There's evidence [2] that suggests that prescription opioids drive abuse behavior.
It's known that fentanyl adulteration drives a significant portion of OD deaths [3] even if it's hard to get good numbers on how many of these ODs are adulterated compounds vs just fentanyl because of how the numbers are reported. If we legalized everything but opioids, a significant portion of these ODs could be easily avoided.
The DEA has failed it's mandate, and it's time to disband them, end the prohibition, and focus on harm reduction techniques rather than incarceration. We could also spend a little more time reigning in "legitimate" organizations like Purdue Pharma, who cause unarguable harm in the guise of medicine.
It is harsh and meant to be, a message to all opponents and general population about strength of regime. All dictatorships do it regularly, iran, saudi arabia, russia etc.
Naw, the death penalty is much harsher penalty (seeing as how almost all death row inmates use every means possible to avoid it). Particularly so for white collar people who never thought they would be tied to a tree and shot 10 times in the heart. Just the thought of that happening can deter a lot of people, and even if it doesn't, it's what she deserves.
It’s always bad people who want to feel good who do these exercises imo to signal how “pure” they are to defend rapists, killers, corrupt fraudsters, etc.
I recently had a discussion with my partner about this and it was quite insightful as we fall on different ends of this spectrum. I do like the Scandinavian model of all life is precious and reforming criminals rather than punishing them. But she’s from india and the moral calculus is very different.
There are people who commit incredibly atrocious crimes, and then get away with a slap in the wrist. India _has_ the death penalty but it is very rarely enforces it. And according to her, the existence of it keeps people at least a little bit in check, as if they do something massively bad (killing swaths of people for example) they could face real punishment. Cause people with money can get away/live in comfort in prison quite successfully.
Also, poverty is so prevalent that there are plenty of people for whom prison would be a step up in comfort and living conditions from where they are.
As you’ve so eloquently put, we didn’t change each other’s positions but at least I understand much better now how some parts of the world could justify it.
My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.