On the death penalty

[Artaxerxes II]

Many of you will likely support the death penalty because it's euphoric to see some bad guy get what they deserve, such as murderers with a pathological penchant for sadism getting executed. But is this the case in most cases involving the death penalty? Does it make sense for MAPs to support it, even for treason?

In my opinion, in terms of what benefits MAPs, I say that it would be better for us to be abolitionists, and I'll shortly explain why.

• First, capital punishment/death penalty can and will be used to have the government kill people, especially political dissidents. And as seen from the recent rulings in Florida and Idaho, state courts there can now prescribe the death penalty for statutory rape for cases involving minors below a particular age. While those state laws are yet to be challenged by the SCOTUS, I think the death penalty puts a bad precedent for us.
  
  Second, Most arguments for the death penalty effectively boil down to appeals to emotion (e.g., What about how the victim feels?!). While there is place for punitive and reformative justice for crimes, it can't be denied that it's questionable if capital punishment does anything at all to curb crime. I guess it would make more sense for treason since you don't want secrets to be spilled out any further, but that would unnecessarily change the discussion, so I won't discuss this point further. Moving on...
  
  Advocating for the abolishment of capital punishment/death penalty is a safe position, especially in Europe where Belarus is the only country in that continent that still maintains the death penalty for certain crimes. Plus, it's already divisive enough in the USA that you'll likely find support for such an opinion just as much you'll find hate for it.

Overall, I think that the abolition of the death penalty should, at the very least, be part of our strategy for leal reform and part of the pro-MAP rights political platform. My only worry for the abolitionist position is that it may replace one unjust punishment for another. In this case, "statutory rape" (illicit sex solely due to an age gap or one of the partners being a minor) may be punished in other ways like chemical castration, already a violation of human rights that is still practiced in some countries. As such, any position should be gamed out to check for any pitfalls. Because even if I favour doing away with the death penalty, I wouldn't want the punishment for the same crime be replaced with chemical castration, solitary confinement, or another horrendous abuse.

What do you guys think?

[Artaxerxes II]

I used to be neutral for the death penalty, but only in the case of multiple murders. I've always thought it overused in the US. The US and East Asian nations (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and notionally South Korea) are the only developed democracies to still use it. Abolition probably didn't even occur to the committee as we took it for granted.

These kinds of issues are kind of thorny, though, because they're only really adjacent to being MAP. I agree that the Florida (and Idaho) law is bad, but when I read through it, it was much more limited in scope than I first expected. Not that I'd support it for anything else than "rape and murder of a child" (and even then extremely reluctantly).

I'm not sure as a community if it's something we could get consensus on. I think we could agree to "no cruel or unusual punishments for sex crimes" (ie no death penalty, no castration for "mere" sex crimes). If we can agree on the sex offender registry, I think we can definitely agree on that. But I'm not sure where people would come down for terrorist attacks or school shootings. Tens of elementary school children being gunned down is probably quite emotive for a lot of MAPs. Although the perpetrators often commit suicide in such cases, in cases where they don't, some may think the death penalty is justified.

I am interested in hearing from others, though. Is this something worth considering or is it excessive "mission creep"?

It's probably a mission creep if the abolitionist cause extends to all crimes rather than the ones affecting MAPs. But I think the issue is worth considering, and even moreso given the slippery slope of the death penalty. After all, if having differing opinions is grounds for capital punishment, we should definitely be opposed to that.

I would've thought that getting on abolition would be a good idea given that it's less murky than, say, free speech where censorship is bad for MAPs, but I don't think many would mind if hate speech laws were changed so that we are included as part the protected groups, making that issue more complicated. Still, we can all agree that the expansion of the police state would be detrimental to us, so while the abolition of the SOR is within the consensus, I think that doing away with the death penalty in the USA (or at least limiting to cases involving murder or treason) should be within this group's scope too, don't you think?

[BLueRibbon]

For me, it's hard to criticize an MAP even if they made a terrible mistake. I know that MAPs are constantly subjected to The Push, and that even very decent MAPs could be turned into monsters by the awful abuse to which they are subjected.

I support moderate punishments even for the 'worst of the worst', MAP or not, because I cannot accurately judge the convict to be anything more than a victim of a society weighted against them.

We never know what's been done to a 'criminal'. Might their experience mitigate or even justify their actions? Maybe.

[John_Doe]

I might be reading too much into this (framing the issue in terms of what benefits MAPs, and as MAPs, for the sake of conversation doesn't necessarily mean that you only support or oppose capital punishment on that basis) but I think it's a mistake to approach this from the standpoint of what benefits MAPs alone without considering what's ultimately just or moral or even has net positive results (and is required for the same or better results) and that would give anyone a reason to oppose or support it.

BLueRibbon,

For me, it's hard to criticize an MAP even if they made a terrible mistake.

I can appreciate not reducing them to their mistakes and respecting the emotional turmoil that drives some of human behavior but I think that compassion for victims requires critiquing them.

I know that MAPs are constantly subjected to The Push, and that even very decent MAPs could be turned into monsters by the awful abuse to which they are subjected.

I support moderate punishments even for the 'worst of the worst', MAP or not, because I cannot accurately judge the convict to be anything more than a victim of a society weighted against them.

We never know what's been done to a 'criminal'.

I've always admired the 'unconditional' love and compassion that some tribal-minded people (for lack of a better term) have for most of their own (e.g. the way that many pro-black people will support the most hardened, destructive black convicts or criminally-minded people out of a sense that they belong to the same community, 'we're all in the same boat,' 'we need to have each other's backs,' etc.) but wished that it was on a more universalistic basis (i.e. instead of supporting you because we're both gay, we're both MAPs, we're both women, etc. and society is out to get us so who else will look out for us, let's love each other without condition because suffering itself is inherently bad, as sentient beings we are all in the same boat and equally deserving of happiness, etc.). I don't really understand (i.e. can't relate to) centering your identity around who you're attracted to or even the hardship and discrimination you've experienced in life or by average members of a society (on one hand my experience of pain and happiness does, in some sense, define me in my mind but I can't really build a sense of community around the shared experience of certain 'hardships,' i.e. specific stressors, and not just a basic capacity for pain which is what allows me to relate to people who suffer from experiences I might not have a personal reference for. Other people who suffer from body dysphoria and unrequited attraction, social anxiety, on occasion depression or panic attacks; although the latter hasn't been an issue for me in a long time, 'misophonia,' mid-life despair/grief, anxiety around loved ones dying and financial insecurity, etc. etc. don't necessarily have my back or care about my suffering simply because they share similar experiences, we don't necessarily share the same values or ideas and they might not care about my suffering. There are pedosexuals who are against the pro-pedo cause and teleiophiles who are sympathetic to it. In theory, pan-hedonists who justify hedonism as a moral realist stance under epistemic solipsism should be my tribe but how we relate to each other in practice might be another matter).

I'm willing to consider that pain can be so overwhelming and unbearable that it breaks someone to the point of making rational agency practically meaningless/impossible but I'm not really convinced that everyone who commits crime is acting out of desperation and pain.

It's also not lost on me that everyone who supports prison reformation, prison abolition or compassion for prisoners (which is a little different than just 'prisoner's rights' depending on what that might involve) will probably resent and mistreat people for lesser crimes than those the people they're advocating for have committed (if it's even a question of resentment or retribution to begin) but compassion for prisoners is a noble ideal.

Might their experience mitigate or even justify their actions? Maybe.

I can't really agree with this. Nothing excuses not seriously considering the suffering or happiness of others which is what would constitute a moral 'crime,' in my view. Even if someone is in so much pain that we cannot realistically view them as a rational agent, that can't be justified. I'm going to resist the urge to get into the idea of choices being 'understandable' vs. 'justifiable' because I've already spent a lot of time on this and I plan on eventually chore-responding to another thread (it will be a chore because I'm wasting/have wasted time and just feel compelled to since I planned to).

[FairBlueLove]

We never know what's been done to a 'criminal'. Might their experience mitigate or even justify their actions? Maybe.

I don't believe free will exists at all, thus experience, and everything in our life, since before conception, justifies our actions. Dangerous criminals should be dealt with only with respect to the danger they can cause in the future. Any kind of state-sanctioned punishment, especially one intended to make the criminal suffer, is a medieval concept we should grow out of.

[John_Doe]

We never know what's been done to a 'criminal'. Might their experience mitigate or even justify their actions? Maybe.

I don't believe free will exists at all, thus experience, and everything in our life, since before conception, justifies our actions. Dangerous criminals should be dealt with only with respect to the danger they can cause in the future. Any kind of state-sanctioned punishment, especially one intended to make the criminal suffer, is a medieval concept we should grow out of.

I don't know if you're speaking 'poetically' but my understanding is that 'justification' implies choice. We are justified in making a choice when there's a reason to adopt a belief or value (we can talk about the reason why lightening strikes someone but a 'reason to' implies choice, lightening isn't justified or anti-justified in striking someone because there's no moral agency there). If free will is an illusion, and that doesn't seem unlikely to me, then I don't think it would make sense to say that anything is 'justified' (I still think it would be meaningful to say that happiness and suffering are inherently good and bad and an evaluation of happiness/suffering as inherently good/bad would be correct, and we necessarily have to live our lives as though we have free will so I would still casually talk about 'the moral justification for this or that,' but 'morality' as we tend to understand it wouldn't really exist).

[FairBlueLove]

If free will is an illusion, and that doesn't seem unlikely to me, then I don't think it would make sense to say that anything is 'justified' (I still think it would be meaningful to say that happiness and suffering are inherently good and bad and an evaluation of happiness/suffering as inherently good/bad would be correct, and we necessarily have to live our lives as though we have free will so I would still casually talk about 'the moral justification for this or that,' but 'morality' as we tend to understand it wouldn't really exist).

I agree with you. Therefore yes, I was speaking "poetically" when referring to justification.

[Not Forever]

I might be saying something foolish, but in my view emotional appeals are caused by the death penalty itself. That is, if my daughter’s murderer does not receive the death penalty while someone else’s daughter’s murderer does, then it feels as though my daughter had less value.

And this, in my reasoning, should lead to pressure to demand the death penalty. If such a punishment exists—a punishment that is in some way “symbolic”—people are driven to obtain it, almost as if they were winning a prize.

I occasionally see something similar in my country, where the push is instead for life imprisonment: there is a constant effort to portray the crime in the worst possible terms, to ignore mitigating circumstances and any psychological problems the perpetrator may have had. Anything short of the maximum sentence is treated as an insult, with a strong focus on the language used in jurisprudence—if it is not as harsh as many emotionally driven people demand, it is seen as an insult to the victim.

I would expect a similar phenomenon with regard to the death penalty.

For me, this is a justification for abolishing the death penalty: it is driven by emotion. Just as I would limit life imprisonment to cases of genuine danger—such as a serial killer with an explicit intent to kill again, or cases involving terrorism or the mafia, and so on, all situations in which removal from society is necessary.

The rest is just bad-taste sadism, in my opinion.

Honestly, as for the rest, I don’t think the death penalty is really all that euphoric. I mean… speaking as a sadist, as someone to whom this might even potentially “appeal”. But it’s really just the epilogue of a true-crime episode. I’m skeptical about it: it might work within a film or a TV show, but has anyone actually experienced genuine euphoria from something like this? I’m asking. Maybe I’m just too apathetic to get caught up in crime news.

[Learning to undeny]

And this, in my reasoning, should lead to pressure to demand the death penalty. If such a punishment exists—a punishment that is in some way “symbolic”—people are driven to obtain it, almost as if they were winning a prize.

The death penalty should be reserved for dictators and war criminals (Mussolini is the prototypical case; technically speaking, it is not truly a death penalty). In those cases, the symbolism might actually have a positive political effect, and you don't even need to pass a law in order to execute them. But apply the death penalty to "normal" criminals, even serial murderers, and it becomes dangerous.

[Scorchingwilde]

And this, in my reasoning, should lead to pressure to demand the death penalty. If such a punishment exists—a punishment that is in some way “symbolic”—people are driven to obtain it, almost as if they were winning a prize.

The death penalty should be reserved for dictators and war criminals (Mussolini is the prototypical case; technically speaking, it is not truly a death penalty). In those cases, the symbolism might actually have a positive political effect, and you don't even need to pass a law in order to execute them. But apply the death penalty to "normal" criminals, even serial murderers, and it becomes dangerous.

I used to feel similarly, but recently I've become more staunchly anti-death penalty. I'd like to recommend a leftist youtuber's video if you'll consider it, Jacob Geller's Fantasies of Nuremberg for my general perspective. It's not until near the end that he shares his emotional experience and thoughts about the delivery of the death penalty, but I found it profound myself.