From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Wed Jul 31 2002 - 06:14:44 MDT
On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 03:00:19AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Emlyn O'regan wrote:
>
> >Say that it is as bad to let a convicted murderer kill again as it is to
> >execute an innocent man. You would execute 52,000 people to save 821.
> >Therefore, no more than 821 of the 52,000 must be innocent, or else you are
> >in the wrong (by your own maths). Are you confident that the legal system
> >is
> >98.5% correct about murderers?
>
> It is actually much worse to kill the innocent than to possibly
> let a real muderer loose without rehabilitation imo. But then
> I do not believe in the death penalty. It is a barbaric
> throwback with no real merit.
Coming at this a bit late -- the UK has a legal system derived from the
same roots as the US system, so it's probably fair to extrapolate from
the UK to the US. Over the past decade, a criminal review body has been
subjecting evidence relating to previous murder convictions to DNA
testing in an attempt to reduce the proportion of contentious decisions.
The false positive error rate in capital convictions between 1945 and
1964 (when capital punishment in the UK was suspended) appears to have
been a steady 10%. Thus, roughly 10% of those executed in the UK over
that period were innocents convicted in error.
Since 1970, the recidivism rate for murderers released after a life
sentence was served ran at roughly 1.5%.
So, it seems logical that if the UK had retained the death penalty, it
would have executed ten times as many innocents as would have been saved
from murderers.
(If we accept that the British and American judicial systems are comparable
in efficiency, then this is a very strong case that capital punishment is
worse than useless as a means of protecting the public from recidivist
murderers.)
-- Charlie
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