I see the desire for justice, whichever way it leans, as a flawed remainder left over from the fact that we were originally created in the image of God. God is absolutely and perfectly just. Once upon a time man also had a perfect sense of justice. Now our sense of that is flawed, but it still grates on most of us and inflames us when we see injustices. To me this is an additional bit of proof of the existence of our Christian God and of our relationship to Him as described in the Bible.

Then when we can work out our different perceptions and leanings of how justice is to be carried out (as the two sides have sort of done here), maybe we can collectively get a little closer to the perfect sense of justice that God originally imparted to us.

Good discussion Cheryl, NJ Lawyer, et al. Thanks.

P.S. I just finished reading the recently published book by Mickey Sherman, How Can You Defend Those People? He offers the interesting perspective of a criminal defense attorney on the way our legal system works. It is a good read for the non-professional like myself. His views served to broaden my perspective anyway.

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I don’t think we need to second-guess juries, and refuse to carry out punishments, unless there’s good reason (another person confesses, new evidence shows up, a pattern of framing by the arresting officers, etc.). I was living in Illinois when all death penalties were commuted, and believe me it made a lot of people angry! It’s one thing to say let’s look at these cases again, but it was political posturing of the worst sort to suddenly decide not to execute anyone, no matter how heinous the crime or how damning the evidence.

And yes, I definitely think that “probably” isn’t good enough for a conviction. I’m simply thinking of the cases where throwing out one piece of evidence is considered enough to throw out the whole case–the glove in O.J. Simpson’s trial, for instance. Now, I think I was the only person in America who didn’t watch that trial (I did see the verdict live), but I understand that O.J. puffed out his hand to make it seem not to fit. But even if somehow the glove was thrown out as evidence, that shouldn’t have overcome all the other evidence. That’s the sort of thing I’m thinking of–disputing one piece of evidence and leading a jury to believe that all the evidence has been thereby tainted even though, in fact, the rest of the evidence says, “We’ve got our man.” (O.J. is legally innocent, but, speaking as a lay person, I’d say he’s “probably” guilty. That’s what I meant.)

Thanks for the clarification on vigilante justice. If I’d thought it through, I’d have known that, but obviously I didn’t really think it through.

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Second, Austrian law is governed by the traditions of Roman civil law and the Napoleonic Code not the Anglo common law. Given the vastly different legal system I doubt any of us here include the lawyers amongst us could accurately assess the 15 year sentence and its origin. As we are well aware, common law allows for the piling on of indictments which serves to increase the sentence. This is true in conservative jurisdictions as well as English speaking districts Llama and others would term socialist and socially liberal, ie my own jurisdiction. Canadian law even has a clause which allows the courts to assign the label “persistent or dangerous offender” and thus lock him up and throw away the key. Not what one would expect in a so-called “liberal” jurisdiction.

The false assumption made here is the legal system is reflective of the social culture. Legal systems and sentencing reflect tradition, legal history, and political compromise. Whether Austria is socially liberal or conservative is a matter of debate as is its role in the sentencing guidelines of Austria.

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I don’t believe juries “accept it as OK to send people to jail even if they’re innocent.” I’ll grant you back in the day in certain race cases that did happen, but by and large, I do not believe that about juries today. My experience is that people are very careful about the decision to convict.

Since I’m not the only one who “took offense” at your willingness to execute ten innocents, I will conclude that it is the way you structured your original sentence in light of your subsequent words –”but I DO NOT believe it’s OK to execute the innocent.” You explained to Victoria that you meant innocents who have been convicted. They did have their due process, so I think I know what you mean now. I think your original comment needed to be rephrased, because what Victoria quoted back to you, if you reread it, there is no element of due process in that statement. On its face you were saying you would execute ten innocents. You never said after a proper conviction. That’s what’s scaring everybody!

It is not vigilante justice to defend yourself in your home. Vigilante justice is when a group of people bypass due process and take matters into their own hands. They are not defending themselves. They are being judge, jury and executioner.

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If we were taking ten people off the street and executing them, you’d be right. We’re not. We’re talking about people from death row, who have already been found guilty. They aren’t guilty; I’ll grant that. But perfect justice cannot be found on this earth. Is it justice NOT to execute the 490? No, it’s not. Since the best we can do as imperfect human beings is have a trial and find people guilty, and we are required to execute the guilty, then I would say we have no choice here–we refuse to obey God by refusing to execute the guilty.

What is YOUR answer to this? Do you believe that God gave capital punishment as the appropriate punishment for murder? Do you believe it’s humanly possible to know 100% that every person who is convicted this year is guilty of the crime for which he was convicted? It seems to me we CANNOT have perfection here–we either execute the guilty (knowing, and saddened by the knowledge, that we may sometimes be executing someone who was found guilty but who in fact was innocent) or we refuse to execute the guilty, which to me is worse: It disobeys God, and it despises proper punishment, meaning more innocent people will be murdered.

I don’t think there’s a good answer here. But I would like to hear your answer.

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YOU WRITE:…. “Have I answered this clearly enough? You know me, you know that I stand in the way of mercy, and in favor of biblical justice. I find it horrific that justice probably will not be done here.”

If this is how you truly feel, then how could you believe that “Me? I’d rather see ten innocent people executed each year than see 500 guilty people not get execution.”

The two above statements are in direct conflict with one another. There is no mercy in those who die for crimes they have not committed.

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Legally in American society there is little place for vigilante justice. It is still allowed (in some communities) in the case of someone who breaks into one’s own home. It’s generally illegal (but I’d argue NOT immoral) to kill someone caught in the act of raping or murdering one’s wife or daughter.

Now, in the story at question here, fellow prisoners are not in the kind of relationship to the man’s wife and children wherein vigilante justice is morally permissible. They’d basically be killing in cold blood. If they did kill him, and I were on the jury trying them, I’d have to find them guilty of some level of murder. But I would be finding them guilty reluctantly, because they would be doing what the state neglected to do. The death penalty has not been granted to individual citizens, but to the state and sometimes to the victim’s family (in the case of appropriate vigilante justice). So the fellow prisoners would be wrong to kill him–but the state is wrong (perhaps equally wrong) NOT to.

Does that make sense? That I don’t condone his fellow prisoners killing him, but I think that the state, in abdicating its authority, has opened itself up to vigilante justice?

I lived for a long time in Chicago, where it is illegal for law-abiding citizens to own guns. Yet parts of the city were dangerous enough that a responsible citizen might very well own a gun–an illegal gun. The state cannot have it both ways: It cannot refuse to do its duty (whether the duty is protecting its citizens or punishing law breakers) and also insist that the citizens not protect themselves. The Bible tells fathers not to provoke their children to wrath; I’d argue that the state can also provoke its citizens to wrath, or to taking justice into their own hands. That is bad for everyone involved.

Have I answered this clearly enough? You know me, you know that I stand in the way of mercy, and in favor of biblical justice. I find it horrific that justice probably will not be done here.

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I admit ignorance of the process of exoneration…am going only by stuff I’ve read that might be inaccurate. Namely, the sort of thing being that we have eyewitness testimony of many kinds, the person arrested at the scene, etc., etc., but much of the evidence isn’t even brought forward in the trial because the DNA evidence is all the “proof” that’s needed. Later the DNA evidence is called into question (maybe some of it’s lost, I don’t know, and what is left seems to point to someone else, maybe an unidentified accomplice); there is no longer “proof” of his guilt and he is “exonerated.” At any rate, no one ever questioned his guilt, it was beyond doubt, but legally he is no longer guilty. It’s that sort of thing where I’d say, OK, he was already convicted of an earlier murder; he probably did this one as well, and I won’t be up in arms about his “false conviction.” From something I read some time back, most “exonerations” are of this sort, technical get-out-of-jail-free cards on someone everyone knows to be guilty, and the evidence is overwhelming, but at the time of retrial decades later the witnesses are dead and the evidence has been lost or corrupted. I cannot defend this point, however–I’m not an expert, have never studied it, and am basing my memory of this information on one (lengthy) article I read years ago, in a source I’ve forgotten. But it did say the vast majority of overturned sentences are of this sort.

But as I’ve said all along, these are two different questions: (1) Is our standard of justice high enough, and (2) should we execute people known to be guilty of murder. To the first, I’d say an ignorant “I don’t know.” To the second, I’d say a clear yes. In my experience, many who use number one as a reason not to execute would, in fact, argue against execution no matter what. It’s not really a reason to them, but an excuse. So I’d say fix the system, but don’t make that an excuse not to execute people who’ve been clearly proven to be guilty. (I’d have no objection, for instance, to some oversight that double-checked evidence and only OK’d execution of those with clear, undeniable guilt.) But we do live in a fallen world, and as much as we’d like to have 100% certainty that no person is ever punished unfairly, we cannot have that. I think insisting on 100% certainty that no one is ever convicted unjustly before we’ll execute anyone is making excuses not to punish murderers with the justice God demands. (Also, BTW, I can’t help but think that if we are overly careful about justice, to the point, say, where we only convict 50% of actual murderers who are tried, the end result is more murderers going free, more people murdered. So while we must not convict the innocent, we also must not let the guilty go free. But I didn’t choose law because I don’t want to be “responsible” for such issues.)

And, NJ Lawyer, your last paragraph tells me you have misunderstood me. I don’t think that we should let the slim possibility of error keep us from justice (executing murderers), but I DO NOT believe it’s OK to execute the innocent. But if there is a high percentage of innocent people in jail today (which I doubt, but let’s say for the sake of argument that that is the case) might it not be true that a possible reason is that juries accept it as OK to send people to jail even if they’re innocent? In other words, would we see fewer false convictions if juries saw life in prison as a punishment as harsh as execution, as I do?

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I too was shocked when I read the post (34) I waited to see how others might respond. This sort of thinking on the part of ANYONE, and especially a juror, or anyone for that matter is terrifying, and cause for alarm. I’ve never heard anyone express themselves to believe this way.

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Frank and Scroopy have added to my original concerns. Your responsive post to me shocks me a bit, and inasmuch as you are not trained in the legal profession, I can only hope that you have misspoken. In your post to me, this stood out:

“but I also tend to think that most people who are exonerated of this crime are PROBABLY guilty of murder, of this person or of someone else. For the truly innocent, I have sympathy.”

I certainly believe you mean the last sentence. I have capped the word “probably” because I want to remind you that this is not the standard in our country for guilt or the imposition of a sentence. We find people guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” (not beyond all doubt) and we impose a sentence for that crime, not for what someone “probably” did. Now I know we all think that if someone did this, odds are he did that, but that doesn’t wash in a courtroom. We do require proof. And we do require due process.

I won’t get into the debate regarding life imprisonment being cruel and unusual punishment. That is pretty much defied by the instant fact pattern. Provided the due process requirements are met, I have no problem with the death penalty being lawfully carried out and reasonably swiftly as well. This was C.J. Rehnquist’s view which was why the rules were changed that all the issues be raised together rather than piecemeal to keep the process going once it gets to the Supremes. I agree with him.

Like Scroopy, this bothered me when you said: “Me? I’d rather see ten innocent people executed each year than see 500 guilty people not get execution.”

I’d rather see NO innocent people executed each year, and I think that is the understood goal of our justice system. If 500 rot in jail a little longer in the interests of due process, so be it. Unlike you, I’d rather NOT be executed if I’m not guilty, because hey, you never know…recently two lawyers came forward when their client died. They knew he was guilty and that an innocent man was rotting in jail for the crime he’d done. They didn’t want to break privilege. So, I wouldn’t give up my life so easily.

I am at a loss to understand you on this one. You have surprised me, mainly because I don’t think you thought this through enough.

If you do get on a death penalty jury, please make sure you tell the defense attorney your views, because he’ll get you kicked off for cause, and I think, rightfully so. Please reread your posts and those in response to them. There’s something fundamentally wrong with your thinking on this one.

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