From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 11:53:14 MDT
Charlie Stross wrote
> (Note that in the UK, the clear up and conviction rate for murder
> is somewhere over 90% -- it's the one crime that the police throw an
> anything-it-takes budget at.)
Lucky you; I don't know what the rate in the U.S. is, but it can't
be anything like that.
> Your question is extremely unclear, but I _think_ what you're asking
> is, "are released murderers more or less likely to commit an act of
> murder than members of the general public". [Yes it was, thanks for
> the much simpler rewording.] And the answer to that is
> "less likely", at least under the regime in force in the UK. (There's no
> such thing, short of an overturned conviction, as a lifer who's "free";
> they may be out on license, but they're subject to monitoring by the
> probation service for the rest of their life, and can be recalled to
> prison if there are any reasons to be concerned about them. They're also
> well-known to the police, and they're the one category of people who
> definitely understand the full consequences of being convicted of murder,
> i.e. by definition they're under no illusions about being able to get away
> with the crime and evade punishment.)
Do you think that all your statements here are invariant with
respect to ideology? (You evidently have a way of getting me
to phrase questions in the most obscure way possible.) In other
words, would that summary be equally agreeable to Tories and
Labor (or Liberal, whatever)?
People convicted of murder in the U.S. are often perfectly free
after serving their sentence. Furthermore, they can easily move
to the other side of the continent. Maybe it's just easier for
police in the UK to keep an eye on them.
You had originally written 7/31/02 5:15 am
> 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.
Probably not. A lot of information you provided seems to make the
situations quite different.
> 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.
That's quite telling. I hope that this doesn't mean *exonerated* for
the crimes (found innocent), but that's the way it's looking. I would
think that this DNA evidence definitely proves the innocence of the
convicted (and executed) party.
> 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.
Indeed, we always have to take the expected recidivism rate if we're
trying to minimize injustice. One hears constantly in the US of so-and-so's
just having been caught for some terrible crime, and then it turns out
that he's had a very long criminal history.
> (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.)
The "protection" you speak of here is mitigated by several factors.
For one, the wrongly accused is hardly protected by serving a long time
in prison (and then, in the UK, being monitored for life). So that's
a factor that can't be strictly laid at the feet of capital punishment.
Second, I'd bring back the good old electric chair as a part
of the deterrence factor. Maybe I've seen too many old
Hollywood movies, but it's reassuring to imagine one hoodlum
saying to the other, "we can't kill 'em, or we'll fry!".
"Yeah, what, you wanna get the hot seat?" I would also hope
that electrocution doesn't impair cryonic suspension, because
I've always thought that the proper course: just because
rehabilitation is beyond our ability now doesn't mean it
always will be.
Lee
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