Retired Justice Stevens Wants to Amend the Constitution

[smileyeagle1021]

Perhaps I should have phrased it better, how many of those 66% were proven innocent and how many were proven to have enough doubt to reduce the sentence to life in prison but not enough to completely exonerate them?
Either way, I'm not arguing that mistakes have been made in the past, and not arguing that we shouldn't do everything we can to make damned sure those we condemn as guilty really are guilty, but it would be useful to know exactly what type of errors are being made.

[Hyena Dandy]

I don't have any knowledge of a time that someone had their sentence reduced to Life in Prison due to new evidence. Is that something one hears about commonly?

[crashhelmet]

The only cases I'm aware of where a sentence was reduced from the Death Penalty to Life in Prison have been cases like Charles Manson. California got rid of the Death Penalty in 1972, which automatically commuted his sentence. When they reinstated the death penalty, his sentence was not re-elevated.

[s_stabeler]

not usually on appeal, but it does happen occasionally when a Governor grants clemency.

[smileyeagle1021]

A thought that has popped into my head, and I know it is a complete straw man argument, and I don't actually really mean it to be taken seriously... just an interesting thought.
Isn't it interesting that we can prove beyond any doubt that global warming is real and caused by man, based on weather records and ice cores, yet we can't determine beyond any doubt who it was that committed a crime.

[TheHuckster]

A thought that has popped into my head, and I know it is a complete straw man argument, and I don't actually really mean it to be taken seriously... just an interesting thought.
Isn't it interesting that we can prove beyond any doubt that global warming is real and caused by man, based on weather records and ice cores, yet we can't determine beyond any doubt who it was that committed a crime.

Thanks to developments in DNA testing, that's becoming less of an issue. Although one thing I'll just point out is usually there's only a few dozen or so investigators trying to solve a crime. There's an army of scientists spread throughout the world investigating climate change.

[s_stabeler]

A thought that has popped into my head, and I know it is a complete straw man argument, and I don't actually really mean it to be taken seriously... just an interesting thought.
Isn't it interesting that we can prove beyond any doubt that global warming is real and caused by man, based on weather records and ice cores, yet we can't determine beyond any doubt who it was that committed a crime.

key word: beyond any doubt. that includes various unreasonable doubts- including the possibility that everyone involved got paid off by some secretive agency to make sure somebody died.

Also, we can't prove 100% for certain that global warming is real and caused by man- no scientist will ever say something is 100% certain. What we can say is that global warming fits the evidence the best.

[HYHYBT]

Also, DNA doesn't, by itself, say all that much.

[smileyeagle1021]

Also, we can't prove 100% for certain that global warming is real and caused by man- no scientist will ever say something is 100% certain. What we can say is that global warming fits the evidence the best.

Perhaps I should have put prove in quotes... but there is a dedicated group of people who say we have "proven" beyond any doubt that climate change is caused by man... and there seems to be an overlap in the venn diagram of that group and the group who believes that it is impossible to determine beyond any doubt who committed a crime.
As I said, I know it is a straw man argument, but an interesting observation.

[Hyena Dandy]

Calling that a Strawman is polite to strawman arguments. That's a non-sequitor and a false-equivalence. But since you insist on making it, I might as well respond to it.

The idea of anthropogenic climate change is a consensus reached by hundreds of people who have dedicated their lives to studying the subject, many of them dedicated to studying specifically that subject, exploring as many paths of inquiry as they like, most of whom are motivated to come to an alternate conclusion. The guy who can conclusively show that we aren't the cause of this? He'd be set for life. There are groups that try to fund studies that they hope will find that it's not anthropogenic.

A guilty verdict is reached by 12 people, for whom knowledge of the subject in general is considered a problem, and knowledge of the subject in specific that they're being asked to consider outright disqualifies them, only being allowed to consider things that they are being told, by people whose jobs and prestige rest on those 12 people agreeing with them, not on the truth being discovered.

If we discover that climate change is not anthropogenic, we can cancel our projects on it and send the money somewhere else.

If we discover that someone is innocent, then we have no way, at the moment, to un-kill them.

It's not an interesting observation, it's a damn foolish one.

[s_stabeler]

there's also the fact that people tend to talk about climate change being proven beyond all doubt because it might well be the only way to get action actually taken on climate change- and if action is not taken, then people alive today will suffer the consequences.

as said though, dealing with climate change is reversible ( while NOT dealing with it is increasingly irreversible- it takes 100 years for carbon dioxide to leave the atmosphere, so every year that more and more pollutants are pumped into the atmosphere, the longer it will take to recover.) while killing someone is not. IF it ever became possible to reverse killing somebody, then I would have no objections to the death penalty.