How to never execute an innocent person
[Here is something I wrote in May, 2001 and posted to an interesting service called "Abuzz," a discussion forum site hosted by the New York Times. A discussion and some additional links to other sites ensued. Here is a link to the article and discussion (registration required); here is the item itself. I've made a couple of edits for clarity.]

I submit that the only way to be absolutely sure of never executing an innocent person is to never execute anyone. I think this is a compelling (even the most compelling) argument for abolishing the death penalty.

To try to focus whatever discussion happens here, I would like to offer some definitions and comments:

--"Innocent" means truly innocent, not merely what a jury declares. I have great respect for the jury system, but it can not be infallible.

--Absolutely sure means just that. DNA testing illustrates the problem: death sentences are being overturned because new techniques disprove or strongly counter jury findings. Other technologies will come along that will give us additional power to judge guilt or innocence. I submit that each such new technology will reveal a nonzero percentage of death row inmates to be innocent.

--I concede that many death row inmates are in fact guilty. I concede moreover that if my own family or friends were their victims, I would be sorely tempted to wish for these criminals' deaths. I would have to force myself to remember that any death penalty system will be fallible and will therefore execute some innocent people.

--I consider other arguments against the death penalty to have some merit, but to be less compelling than this one. For instance, racial or other demographic disparities in death sentences are troubling, but are not in and of themselves evidence of injustice: the disparities *may* reflect [real differences in] serious criminality, which will have causes that should be addressed. At any rate, I argue that this is a separate issue, to be taken up in other discussions.

--I concede that some cases will be so "obvious" as to not be possible to overturn with any new evidence: e.g., multiple eyewitnesses and/or uncontroverted video recordings demonstrate a person's guilt. Despite the examples, I do not concede that it is possible to systematically define these cases clearly in advance; eyewitnesses can be suborned or mistaken, videos can be misleading.

--Executing innocent people may not bother everyone if the proportion can be reduced to some low percentage. For such people, first imagine yourself as an (extremely unlucky) innocent person about to be executed; then state how low the percentage needs to be for the death penalty to be acceptable to you, and state how you would go about ascertaining that proportion.

--I don't consider this argument to have some kind of pacifist corollary implying that governments should never engage in war. A nation may be faced with self-defense needs, defined narrowly or broadly, that require military action and the prospect of killing innocent civilians. I do not think this applies to criminals; an alternative of long or lifetime incarceration exists that has no corollary in wartime affairs.

Some counterarguments have put a price tag -- or, rather, a "death tag"-- on my continued conviction that the death penalty is wrong. By comparing county murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, one statistically sophisticated (although apparently unrefereed) study* estimates that about 18 lives were saved per execution in the 1990s (with a 95% confidence interval from 8 to 28 lives per execution). I hope I'll have time to discuss this and other rational arguments about the death penalty in the next week or so.

=====
*"Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Post-moratorium Panel Data," Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin, Joanna M. Shepherd, January 2002. (Acrobat file, 87kb). Numerous discussions with other experts in the field make it unlikely serious statistical or methodological errors happened, but the article is currently listed as "in submission" on Mr. Dezhbakhsh's university web page. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:43:00 PM -- |    

 

Best blog headline of 2003: first nomination
Chad Orzel ("Uncertain Principles") may have peaked too soon with When They Came for Me, I Said, "Hey! You Forgot the Jordanians!" I especially like how it will go "whoosh" right over a lot of heads, so here's a little background. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:17:00 AM -- |    

 

Fundamentals of fundamentalism
Aziz Poonawalla makes a point worth repeating:

There ARE violent Christians - most notably the abortion doctor murderers, but also fringe groups such as the KKK and most militias and white-supremacy groups, for whom Christianity is an integral part and motive for their terrorism. But no one (myself included) includes these in the definition of "fundamentalism" when it is applied to Christianity.

For clarity, let's call these two types "A" and "B". [...]

But if you hold Islam as a faith accountable for the actions of its type B minority, then it is hypocrisy not to do the same for Christianity (which has plenty of type B examples to go around, without any need for invoking the Crusades). And likewise if you use the words of type A muslims to suggest a predisposition towards type B, likewise hypocrisy.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:24:00 AM -- |    

 

My name is Thomas, and I am a blogger
...or is it "recovering blogger"? Or "relapsing"?

18.75 %

My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

On re-examining the test, I think my likely maximum might be about 50%, i.e., about 8 out of 16 "yes". I've been interested in the .PHP, RSS, etc. stuff and getting my own software, for example, but Prodigy/Yahoo doesn't really support that stuff unless you pay for a business-type account. May ask around about it, though. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:25:00 AM -- |    

 

On Iraq
Continuing in "book review-why was I out" mode, a book that was partly responsible for my blogging hiatus was The Threatening Storm, by Ken Pollack. The subtitle is "The case for invading Iraq." To my discomfiture, he makes the case very well. In a nutshell: the one thing worse than a big war now is a bigger one later. Pollack is persuasive that that prospect is highly likely, should Hussein acquire nuclear weapons. To consider that a grave danger warranting military action is not to demand "absolute security" a la million moms marching, as Jim Henley charges somewhat unfairly. It's grounded in a particular analysis of a particular unchecked dictator and his regime and the resources within his reach. There is a particular real danger there, and one that the United States has the power to do something about. It's true that may encourage others to accelerate their weapons programs. So I waver about the war. But I don't see how anyone can be very sure either way.

I meant to stay brief on this. So I'll not try to reconcile the position I've come to with my prior posts on the subject too much. It can't be done completely: I've changed my mind to a large degree. There has been a reasonably good faith effort to engage the United Nations, to wait the thing out, to give Hussein every chance to end his weapons programs. Even the German intelligence agency estimates Iraq will have nuclear weapons within a few years (so I don't quite understand that government's militant pacifism on the subject -- although there seems to be some discord between Schroeder and Fischer on the subject recently).

I continue to agree with war skeptics on this: for our own sake and the sake of our standing in the world, I think it would be best that the case be clear, that a "smoking gun" be revealed. Best, but not absolutely necessary: I accept that Iraq is a big place, and American military and intelligence organizations are not omnipotent in finding something an absolute dictator does not want found. If the Bush people are as certain as they claim, a "smoking gun" should be doable, perhaps as a final card that reveals some "assets and methods" or whatever the intelligence phrase is. If it's not doable, then that should be explained, and the continued push towards war should be explained as well. That could be done. American voters are grownups (generally speaking). We can handle the truth.

=====
Update: I tend to use this blog as a personal link library to articles. A well-written counterargument by Mearsheimer and Walt, not directly addressing Pollack but taking up many of his arguments, appears in the latest "Foreign Policy." Thanks to Peter Praschl of Le Sofa Blogger for the link.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:30:00 AM -- |    

 

What I did on my Christmas vacation...
...from blogging and the whole "little green footballs" business, see below. Some of the comments made me briefly reconsider the wisdom of the comment utility. Who the hell is "zulubaby"? No, I don't really want to know. Thanks to those who were supportive or at least made a good faith effort to understand my point of view.

So what have I been up to? Over the period of about a week last year, I cleaned up my home office, cleaned up the downstairs storage room, and threw out about 6 garbage bags full of useless trash. It felt great. Entropy has resumed a bit in the office, must do something about that. But basically, great progress on the home front. The main thing was, I finally unpacked boxes of books that had been languishing in storage since we moved a couple of years ago. It's like getting back a part of yourself. And now I've got a ton of stuff to read, I sometimes buy books "speculatively" and then find something else more immediately interesting.

Lots of Christmas presents, mainly for Maddie, of course. The big hits were more Angelina Ballerina paraphernalia (tiny armchair, stroller, baby brother), some Brio wooden train stuff, and an indoor/outdoor tent to "hide" from us in with her best pal Meloney from next door. Plenty of books, too; most notably "The Red Balloon" from Maddie's Oma and a classic by Chris Van Allsburg, "Jumanji," from next door

I enjoyed and am enjoying a couple of great DVD series courtesy of HBO. First, "Band of Brothers", the Spielberg/Hanks production of the Stephen Ambrose history of the Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.* Well worth your time if you haven't seen it yet; I won't be against a second look sometime. The first episode, "Currahee", named after a notorious mountain the soldiers had to run up at the Georgia facility where they trained, seems like a slow start, but it's good history, and bears fruit in later episodes. The acting, writing, and directing (by different directors) were generally quite good (especially Wahlberg and the guy who played Winters), and even casting David Schwimmer as the reviled, insecure, ineffectual (American) captain Sobel was something of a stroke of cruel genius by the producers. The real stars, of course, were the real soldiers, who were interviewed without attribution prior to the first episodes, and whose names were revealed in the final episode, a straightforward thing to do, but a throat-catching effect all the same by the time you've seen a glimpse of what they went through. The company fought on D-Day, in the ensuing Normandy hedgerow campaign, in Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, in Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, and on into Germany (where they liberated a concentration camp).

The other series, of course, is the justly celebrated "The Sopranos". I'm about to finish the first season. Wow. Darkly funny, great acting, from sidekicks like Louie or cousin Moltisano to wife Carmela or Tony's mother. And good acting needs and gets some very good writing here, some very acute stuff, I think. I'm obviously years behind the curve on this, but if you're like me and too cheap to buy cable, you've saved some bucks you should go ahead and splurge on renting this show for a few nights. Interestingly, my wife really loves it, too; it's a relatively rare treat for both of us to unreservedly enjoy the same movie or TV show, so that shows something or other about the show, too. Or about us.

I've also got a fair bit of reading in; plowed through Band of Brothers in double time after watching the series; a fine book, subject, and author. I also got through The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, after a fast start. It's a kind of Burmese-Indian "Buddenbrooks", a story of an extended family's rise and fall as history and their own personalities interact; it's also simply a fascinating look at how British colonialism worked, and its effect, intended or not, of pitting one people against the other economically and, via the Indian regiments, militarily. The book seems strongest early on; the description of the teak forestry, with elephants, camps, and monsoon torrents bearing huge logs down mountainsides is riveting. I may be insufficiently sensitive, but one thing that bothered me is that the book somehow fails to make the case that colonialism was so very bad for the protagonists, who mainly flourish, prosper, and drive (lovingly described) classic cars and motorboats through the Indian, Burmese and Malaysian countrysides. This wouldn't be a big criticism, except that the issue of colonialism is the main and frequent concern of several of the book's heroes. Yet characters like the Indian soldier Arjun, who joins a World War II mutiny against the British, seem to fail to articulate their grievance adequately even to themselves or to the reader.

I was completely bowled over, on the other hand, by Paradise Alley, by Kenneth Baker. It's an incredible account of the New York draft riots of 1863, through the eyes of several fictitious characters depicted in episodes from that riot, conducted principally by Irish immigrants against blacks and police, and put down by a Union regiment, many themselves Irish, sent north from the ruins of Gettysburg. There are also chapters where protagonists recall the Great Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, which drove so many Irish to this country. It makes clear what a mind-shaking holocaust that was for its survivors. It's not an excuse or an explanation for what happened in 1863, but it's certainly necessary background. The way New York firemen were essentially gangs and political action clubs with a veneer of public service was also new to me; to judge from the book, fire companies were sometimes more interested in competing with eachother than in putting out fires. I can't do the book justice here; it succeeds both as history and as a novel that is a testament to the forgotten poor and working class people of that time. I suppose one difference with "Glass Palace" is that it is more focused and less epic. Another, of course, may be that it's about my part of the world and not somewhere else. So don't overlook "The Glass Palace" on my account.


=====
*Someday I'll learn how the American military numbers things; I'm sure I've never heard of a "39th" or "98th" Airborne Division, or anything but the 82nd and 101st. And I'm willing to bet a small sum there weren't 505 other parachute infantry regiments. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 AM -- |