What If: The Good Riddance plan, default sentence for great felonies is death.

As the title says, starting after WW2 all felons guilty of the following crimes are automatically sentenced to death, no life imprisonment, no parole, simply death.

Those crimes include:
  • Homicides of any kind excluding manslaughter.
  • Pedophilia, Child Porngraphy, and Rape
  • Grand Larceny
  • Grand Theft
  • Treason

How much will American society change if these offenses default to death, will it be for better or worse?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
The amount of rape victims murdered by their rapists in order to eliminate witnesses drastically rises since rapists have nothing to lose by doing so. Thieves decide to just to kill the people they rob. Criminals always decide go down fighting when caught instead of surrendering to cops. If a criminal is caught they never tell the police anything.
 
This scenario needs a decent POD and backstory to be plausible. For this to come into effect, American society has already changed so drastically that it's nearly unrecognizable.
It's even harder to pull off when you need all 48 states to go that route.
 
As the title says, starting after WW2 all felons guilty of the following crimes are automatically sentenced to death, no life imprisonment, no parole, simply death.

Those crimes include:
  • Homicides of any kind excluding manslaughter.
  • Pedophilia, Child Porngraphy, and Rape
  • Grand Larceny
  • Grand Theft
  • Treason

How much will American society change if these offenses default to death, will it be for better or worse?

If you punish lesser felonies than murder by death, what incentive does the criminal have not to kill the victim or any potential witnesses?
 
Americas death row is even more crowded and backed up? Many people sentenced to death spend over a decade waiting. You are very quickly going to overburden an already very stretched system. Executing someone is expensive and drawn out.
 
As the title says, starting after WW2 all felons guilty of the following crimes are automatically sentenced to death, no life imprisonment, no parole, simply death.

Those crimes include:
  • Homicides of any kind excluding manslaughter.
  • Pedophilia, Child Porngraphy, and Rape
  • Grand Larceny
  • Grand Theft
  • Treason

How much will American society change if these offenses default to death, will it be for better or worse?

Much for the worse. America would be a more brutalized, violent place. Throughout history the death penalty was widely used, for many of the offences you listed. Governments used the most brutal forms of execution, sadistic minds could imagine, with little deterrent effect. Today America's less violent, and more humane then it's ever been. Man created the law to administer justice impartially, and maintain internal peace, and order. No legal system can maintain order by coercion alone. Internal constraints make civilization possible.

No society ever became more just, or humane by terrorizing it's population, that only makes people worse. Only moral education has ever done that. Weather it was the Humanist Philosophy of the Greeks, Confucian Ethics, the teachings of the Gospels, or many other systems that seek to cultivate the good in mankind have we made any progress has a species. Only light can dispel darkness. Vengeance isn't Justice, and Compassion isn't wasted.

As a person who believes in the death penalty, in limited circumstances, I believe human experience teaches us draconian measures only cheapen life, and desensitize people to the suffering of others. "Hey guys there's a mass hanging in the Mall this afternoon, want to go?" "No, lets just watch it on TV." You'd have to kill off Human Empathy to carry the policy out. Even in the harsh days of Biblical Law, the death penalty was rarely enforced. Compassion compelled judges to find any excuse not to enforce it, in all but the most extreme cases. History teaches us enforcing inhumane laws dehumanizes the enforcers. Nothing good would ever come of these kinds of laws.
 
Last edited:
The amount of rape victims murdered by their rapists in order to eliminate witnesses drastically rises since rapists have nothing to lose by doing so. Thieves decide to just to kill the people they rob. Criminals always decide go down fighting when caught instead of surrendering to cops. If a criminal is caught they never tell the police anything.
I don't think the effects are as drastic as you'd think since all of the crimes listed by the OP carried the death sentence in many places throughout history yet you still had plenty of crooks who did not resort to murder to kill witnesses/their victims "just because they could".

If you punish lesser felonies than murder by death, what incentive does the criminal have not to kill the victim or any potential witnesses?
Did abolishing the death penalty for rapists and child molesters decrease the number of rapists and child molesters who were also murderers? I'd like to see some research on this.
 
I don't think the effects are as drastic as you'd think since all of the crimes listed by the OP carried the death sentence in many places throughout history yet you still had plenty of crooks who did not resort to murder to kill witnesses/their victims "just because they could".


Did abolishing the death penalty for rapists and child molesters decrease the number of rapists and child molesters who were also murderers? I'd like to see some research on this.

Your right, whatever the penalty is crime, and degenerate, sick behavior continue. Nothing is new under the sun. Fear of punishment has only a limited effect on human behavior. There are lots of factors in the rise, and fall of crime rates. The death penalty is a measure of our outrage, and judgement that an individual is irredeemable. Hope of redemption, and the value we place on life further mitigate against capital punishment. It's my understanding that the United States has never executed more then about 30 people a year, and that was in the crime ridden 1930s. This OP would bring that number up to hundreds of thousands a year, which is unthinkable, in any America I could imagine.

Interestingly with all the recent talk about America's ugly history of Lynching, the Lynchers would have to be executed. Since so many of those killers were shielded, in many cases by local law enforcement, those lawmen would be executed, and all who abetted them to. In the age of ME TOO the list of rapists, and sexual assaulters in high places, (Going all the way to the very, very top.) seems longer then we ever thought. Every 18 year old, who had sex with a 15 year old goes to the gallows, with the rest. It just goes on, and on. So the World is left Blind & Toothless.

One last thought. Knowing that these crimes would be punished with death juries would be loath to convict, in all but the worst cases. Prosecutors have many times seen defendants walk because they overcharged them, and the jury wouldn't go for it. The state wins over 90% of the time, want to see that ratio reversed? Oh and by the way, why not include indirect murderers, like drug dealers, or the heads of Pharma who knew how dangerous the opioids they were selling like M&Ms were, then lied about it? I personally don't see much redemption in that cast of characters.
 
Did abolishing the death penalty for rapists and child molesters decrease the number of rapists and child molesters who were also murderers? I'd like to see some research on this.

"The 1995 DOJ summary of the SHR report found that between 1976 and 1994, the rate of rape-murders as a percentage of all murders was in steady decline from the previous period.347 1994 marked the lowest rate of rape-murders at only 0.7%.348 As 1978 was the year Coker was decided and 1972 was the year of the Furman decision, the 1976 time-point marking a decrease coincides with the time frame that the death penalty for rape was eliminated. While this evidence is not statistically controlled, the trend seems clear: the more time that elapsed after the removal of the death penalty as a punishment for rape, the fewer rape-murders occurred in the United States. Such an analysis cannot survive scientific scrutiny, but it should at least shift the burden to advocates who casually dismiss the notion that capital punishment increases the risk that the person being raped will also be murdered. The incentives for murder are “rational” in a world of capital rape statutes and the limited statistical evidence that exists supports that proposition." https://ccoso.org/sites/default/files/import/Better-dead-than-raped.pdf

There are obviously always problems with proving marginal deterrence empirically, given the large number of factors that can influence the rate of any given crime. But it seems to me that advocates of deterrence (and of course I realize that there are arguments for capital punishment other than deterrence) cannot have it both ways. Either criminals calculate the punishment they could receive if caught or they don't. If they don't, that undermines the deterrence argument for capital punishment for murder. If they do, you simply cannot ignore the incentive to eliminate possible witnesses (whether victims or bystanders) created by capital punishment for crimes other than murder.
 
The US currently has near largest per capital prison populations on the planet. However drug use has held steady or increased in the past four decades. Severe mandatory penalties have not significantly decreased drug use.
 
One thing that would have to end would be the condemned spending 10 - 20 years going through the appeals process, otherwise you'll have whole prisons being built just to house those waiting to be executed.
 
I dont know what the current costs are now, but back in the 1990s some numbers published showed how the average US state & federal death penalty conviction cost a bit north of $1,100,000. this was contrasted with the $35 a day cost of a maximum security inmate of that era. That came out to only $12,775 a year, or half a million over 40 years.

One thing that would have to end would be the condemned spending 10 - 20 years going through the appeals process,
...

Its not hard to see how the death penalty is no savings to the tax payer. In many states a death penalty trial and conviction is a financial hardship. Short and long term. A actual economic disincentive for DP trials. Unlike the mass incarceration for drug offences the DP inmate population is to small to attract the interest of the 'prison industry'. So, no lobbying in that direction.
 
I dont know what the current costs are now, but back in the 1990s some numbers published showed how the average US state & federal death penalty conviction cost a bit north of $1,100,000. this was contrasted with the $35 a day cost of a maximum security inmate of that era. That came out to only $12,775 a year, or half a million over 40 years.



Its not hard to see how the death penalty is no savings to the tax payer. In many states a death penalty trial and conviction is a financial hardship. Short and long term. A actual economic disincentive for DP trials. Unlike the mass incarceration for drug offences the DP inmate population is to small to attract the interest of the 'prison industry'. So, no lobbying in that direction.

The ultimate irony being that when they finally meet the executioner it's often years after they'd have been paroled if sentenced to life.
 
I can understand why we can’t have ‘capital’ punishment but I’ll settle for ‘cruel’ and ‘unusual’ punishment.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
The federalization of criminal law changes pretty much everything from the constitution downwards.
Maybe the feds just pay the states to adopt implement the death penalty en masse. That's how they got the drinking age set to 21.
 
Whether a country hangs or imprisons criminals is largely a function of the country's wealth. Rich countries (e.g. NATO) can afford to house criminals indefinitely.
Poor countries cannot afford to house criminals for the rest of their lives, so execute more murderers.

One scary new development is American for-profit prisons releasing convicts when they turn 65 ... to avoid the increasing medical costs of elderly inmates.

Lawyers are the only people to profit from decades-long appeal processes.
 
Top