You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.

The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.

Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong by Brandon Garrett (2011)

"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/books?share=book-10

Amazing book on how this happens.

why? Say someone is murdered, and it doesn't take much forensics to determine that they were attacked, restrained while alive, then shot in the back of the head execution style.

Or maybe it's even more blatent. police find a note from the day before that says "im going to kill you" then they end up dead.

Would you construe that the commission of those murders was premeditated? almost certainly yes, ergo whoever it gets pinned on, innocent or not will get premeditation applied, it doesn't take much extra here.

Sodium Thiopental could be used to weed out the criminals from innocent, but its use is often considered a violation of the 5th amendment. That's a key phrase equivalent for, "Oh! Oh!, they can prove my guilt with that, regardless of the amount of money and power I have." As such, both the criminals and the innocent will inevitably be sent down the river or the grave while ideologues continue to engage in political debates related to the drug's legality or usage in a criminal setting.

I'm confused. Are you saying we shouldn't put resourced towards saving the criminals or catching them? After all, as you said, it is only a small % of total deaths.

Either way, it sounds like you have a very low opionion of the search for justice in society.

There's a lot of people with a lot of undiagnosed mental illnesses.

A good percentage of those can be treated with medication, but also a good percentage of those will not continue any medication they are prescribed and their "evil" thoughts will resurface.

Another percent of people are born with conditions such as severe psychopathy that just seem outright evil, even though they just got given a bad hand in life.

Punishment either has zero effect, or the opposite effect on many of these people. Additionally, prison treats people so severely that they come out with a ton of side-effects which make them vastly more anti-social than when they entered.

Some people are irredeemable, but we need better systems for dealing with those. Right now we put them in mental facilities -- and they do need to be kept away from society -- but we need to take into account those people are born with those defects and they are not the product of their own making.

For the ones who are redeemable we need better support. Rehabilitation is unbelievably difficult. There is almost zero money for programs inside prisons that would help anyone on the outside. All the money goes into the punishment bit, because that is easy. The programs that do exist (cleaning, serving food, stamping license plates) are mostly "do busywork, it will make an honest citizen out of you."

Visit any halfway house where parolees are trying to reenter society and see how badly the system is stacked against their success. It's hard enough for a regular Joe to find a job in 2026, never mind someone who has no money, no phone, no bank account, no address and a criminal record.

Criminal justice is the hardest of the hard problems. Maybe ASI can figure it out...

I don’t normally point to people’s spouses as evidence of anything, but the fact that he and Trump Jr both spent years with Kimberley Guilfoyle tells me that there is not very much difference in personal ideology between the two.

That is, I think the Trump family ideology is “Trump must win” and I think the Newsom ideology is “Newsom must win”. Newsom only appears better than Trump to a certain portion of the population because Newsom understands who he needs to pander to. Put Newsom on the national stage, and he will go just as low as Trump, without hesitation.

A true career politician

My position is that if we'd like to lower recidivism then treating prisoners poorly is a very bad idea.

Society is bearing the cost (in repeat offending) of treating everyone who goes to prison as a person incapable of acting pro-socially.

It's not just that the death penalty is cruel (though I believe that it is), its that much of the carcerial state is there to do everything possible to make it hard to do anything other than remain a criminal once a person has been to prison.

From my position, much of the cruelty and retribution against criminals (ranging from poor conditions to bad healthcare to lack of post-incarceration support) just increases recidivism and that a real problem for all of us:

cruelty in the name of retribution is the real sacrifice of the good of the whole.

The apparent contradiction between "pro-life" and "pro-death-penalty", and "anti-spending" and "pro-expensive-appeals" has always been addressed by "tough on crime saves more lives" and "its worth it because the death penalty is a deterrent".

Accusations of hypocrisy generally only work if they're coming from inside the house. Basically, if you know that I already disagree with you on a fundamental level, you're not going to trust that I have a deep enough grasp of your position to point out a real inconsistency.

> and in favor of spending more money, not less.

A lot of them still aren't aware that the death penalty costs so much more because of the intense appeals process.

It permanently protects these people from ever being executed, which the moratorium doesn't.

"It saves the state money.."

Sure it does.

I believe that the death penalty is counter-intuitively more costly[1].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...

As others have said, the death penalty is actually more costly to the state than simply housing people in prison for life.

The US is also the only "first world" nation that still has the capital punishment.

Our justice system is flawed by bias and careerism (the same is true anywhere, and the US is no exception). The fact that innocent people sometimes exonerated for crimes years or decades later is reason enough to ban the death penalty forever, IMO. Every time an innocent person is put to death, that's horrible itself, but it also means the real offender is still out there somewhere. Even if it happens 1% of the time that's still dozens of people over the years.

I would rather let the worst criminals stay alive in prison if it means one innocent person isn't put to death so they can appeal their case.

Not sure, but since we are comparing the costs, I am also curious about the costs of maintaining infra required for and performing the executions.

Edit: after reading the article seems like a no-brainer, CA is not executing anyone anyway, so why maintain the fiction:

> The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

This argument only really makes sense for summary executions. For real US executions, there are significant costs to carry out a death sentence. Drugs, reviews, appeals, protests, etc are all expensive.

Cost of lifetime imprisonment is less than capital punishment.

Should the state implement a system where anyone sentenced to over X amount of years in prison is automatically executed? Should something like the potential value a person can provide to society be considered a mitigating factor in sentencing?

Housing someone for the rest of their natural life is cheaper than the two decades or more of mandatory court appeals and processes that need to be completed before an execution can happen. Death penalty cases have a lot of these to try and prevent executing innocent people.

The state is usually paying for the prosecution and defense as well as the court staff in these hearings.

I don't think "whatever's cheapest" is a great foundation for a justice system.

> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

Imagine using _just saving some money_ to justify the death of a person. What a country.

> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?

Relative to California's law enforcement and judicial budgets required to investigate, arrest, try and convict them in the first place? Irrelevant noise. That's just a silly argument.

(There's also the whole moral thing about "we should kill people because it's too expensive to keep them alive", but even so, the financial thing just doesn't logic.)

We have prisons already dude

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If you spent 30 seconds with a search engine you'd have an answer to this question. Here is an ELI5: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v5wj73/...

The crimes are horrific and the victims families want revenge, that’s what life prison sentences are for. Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death.