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

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.

Also, given the USA's rather high levels of miscarriages of justice, vastly more innocent people are killed.
 
Understand this much - even in some of the more execution-happy parts of America, getting a death sentence is really fucking hard. Outside Texas and maybe a few other states, courts are really averse to giving death sentences and even more averse to carrying them out.

First off, you need a conviction of first-degree murder (by any name; here in Ohio, it’s called aggravated murder, which is basically murder plus additional circumstances) to be eligible at all for capital punishment. Then you need to clear a shit-ton or hurdles. You need every damned juror to vote for death - ONE no-vote and it falls apart. You need to clear at least two rounds of appeals of a death verdict - it can fall apart if there was any problems with the prosecution’s case or if there’s any reason established in law that a person can’t be executed. And it’s this point where people get the most bogged down and why executions take so goddamn long to carry out.

If the prosecution’s case is shipshape AND there are no disqualifying circumstances - mental illness, mental handicap, exonerating evidence, a witness recents or the victim’s family asks for life without parole for some reason - then you have to make sure the execution itself is in order. You need the right drugs, the right people on hand, and the governor can’t commute the sentence.

(For purposes of this statement, I’m assuming it’s a state crime; federal crimes such as treason and terrorism can be included at that level, and the President can be the one to commute a sentence.)

Finally there has to be a will to execute the condemned. If a condemned prisoner is rotting away in death row, a lot of justice systems will ask, why bother executing them? Just let them languish on death row, they’ll kick off sooner or later, and the state can spare itself some culpability, publicity and a few bucks in expenses.

Add to that the overwhelming cloud of suspicion that we have over the process itself. Enough people argue, “well, just execute them after they’re convicted and save some money,” often allowing for a quick appeal to a court of last resort. These are probably the same people who would support death as a punishment for anything from murder to rape to harming a child to any violent felony to (insert light offense here) to talking smack about this leader or that celebrity to driving slow in the left lane (author’s note: the last one absolutely should be a felony, but death is too good for those people.)

The problem? It’s a recipe for executing a fuckton of innocent people. And it’s the only way a system like the one described in the OP could even hope to work, with the sheer number of executions that would have to take place. (And forget the one where people get death for killing animals - this isn’t ancient Egypt, where cats were fucking worshipped, although I guess it is plausible to allow people to use lethal force to defend pets if we have precedents dating back to horses and livestock that happen to include working dogs and mousing cats.)

I don’t see a single country that is not an out-and-out authoritarian and/or totalitarian nightmare being OK with executing innocent people. Even the most hardened death penalty supporters in America would rather let a guilty person go free than chance executing an innocent person (well, most of them would, and those who say otherwise will usually wisely shut the fuck up about it.)

So if you want a PoD that allows for mass execution for a metric shit-ton of crimes, you need something that turns America - and probably much of the West - into what amounts to authoritarian democracies. You would need a culture that is OK with executing innocents just to get the guilty ones (picture a hardline fundamentalist church at the forefront of society that preaches, “kill them all and let God save the innocent.”) And in America’s history, I’m aware of no such PoD that could send the country in this direction.
 
Dear Mike D,
Sounds like UK and Canadian child-pornography laws are similar. 16 may be the age of consent, but difference in age is also a major factor.
If both sexual partners are younger than 16, judges tend to go easy on them.
Primarily, Canadian judges are trying to discourage 23 year old men from impregnating 14 year old girls. Those 23 - 25 year old men are too immature to marry adult women and few of them are willing to financially support their un-planned children. Ergo, those un-planned children become a drain on their (teen-aged) mothers and the public purse.
 
Dear Mike D,
Sounds like UK and Canadian child-pornography laws are similar. 16 may be the age of consent, but difference in age is also a major factor.
If both sexual partners are younger than 16, judges tend to go easy on them.
Primarily, Canadian judges are trying to discourage 23 year old men from impregnating 14 year old girls. Those 23 - 25 year old men are too immature to marry adult women and few of them are willing to financially support their un-planned children. Ergo, those un-planned children become a drain on their (teen-aged) mothers and the public purse.


Many years ago at school we were given a lecture on the age of consent by the police. They said if it's an older man and an underage girl the man goes to prison but if it's an older woman and an underage boy (and this is a direct quote) we give him a gold medal the size of a dinner plate and say no more.
 
It strikes me that the main obstruction to the death penalty in the USA is the length of time between getting the death sentence and the actual act itself. Having inmates sit in solitary cells for 10 or 15 or 30 years while lawyers get rich really just says "We don't want to execute the murderers". Might as well just automatically commute all death penalties to life imprisonment.

Making it a legal necessary for executions to take place within 3 months of sentencing, bar any new evidence coming to light, would have the effect of keeping costs and prison populations low. The UK practice was for the whole thing to be over within weeks, a legal gap of three Sundays being necessary, to allow for appeals.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28688474

Might want to reconsider the method of execution too. Drawn out methods such as electrocutions or injections have a bad press nowadays. Why not stick with hanging or firing squad?
Could even make executions a Federal practice - once the death penalty is applied the prisoner goes to a Federal facility - take the pressure off the State.

And such max time limit for execution is going to be changed as soon as several innocent people are executed, their innocence proven 3 years down the road and the government need to pay compensation.
 
Sure it's quick and there was an appeal, but the UK executed relatively few people in the 20th century, and even still managed to produce a number of high-profile wrongful executions. Those handful of cases played a not insignificant part in building opposition to the death penalty, which helped lead to the suspension and later abolition of capital punishment. In the USA, well over a hundred people facing the death penalty have been exonerated while on death row, some of them by evidence that wasn't available until years after their death. Some studies have estimated that around 4% of the people currently on death row in the US were wrongfully convicted, and if every single case of homicide, rape, grand larceny and grand theft case was punishable by death, I'd expect that statistic to become even higher.

The problem isn't unique to the US. The UK was executing around 17 people a year between 1950 and 1953, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission has since posthumously exonerated or pardoned four of the men executed during those four years. That suggests that at least 5-6% of the men being hung by the UK at that time hadn't committed the capital crime they'd been convicted of. And this hypothetical America would be executing thousands or more likely tens of thousands of people every year, not 15-20, which suggests a vastly higher number of wrongful executions.

Now, the cynical argument is that the pressure on lawyers, family and police to look for exonerating evidence is greatly reduced after the execution happens, so with a three Sunday system our hypothetical America will never know the total number of innocent people that it killed. Of course, that was also true for the UK in the 50s, which didn't prevent some of these cases from being reopened and reviewed decades later. Of the hundreds of innocent people that would be executed each year under this system, many of them will later be exonerated by new evidence, by the revelation of improper conduct by the police or prosecutors, or by evidence of prejudice on the part of the judge or jury. Their surviving families are going to demand compensation, to say nothing of the public's reaction to so many innocent people being killed.

The problem of wrongful execution seems to be quite serious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_States
 
Dear Mike D,
Sounds like UK and Canadian child-pornography laws are similar. 16 may be the age of consent, but difference in age is also a major factor.
If both sexual partners are younger than 16, judges tend to go easy on them.
Primarily, Canadian judges are trying to discourage 23 year old men from impregnating 14 year old girls. Those 23 - 25 year old men are too immature to marry adult women and few of them are willing to financially support their un-planned children. Ergo, those un-planned children become a drain on their (teen-aged) mothers and the public purse.

Actually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography#United_Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, it is illegal to take, make, distribute, show or possess an indecent image of a child under 18. Before 2003 it was illegal to take, make, distribute, show or possess an indecent image of a child under 16. The maximum sentence is 10 years' imprisonment for extreme cases, 5 years' imprisonment for high level cases, a summary conviction of 6 months' imprisonment and/or statutory maximum fine for lower level cases.

Child porn law in UK doesn't care about age difference.
 
Here's another thing, consider that prosecution and arrest of persons is often biased by race and ethnicity. Consider how many of the lynchings of African-Americans throughout the South were based on trumped up charges of "black male allegedly raped a white woman". In California's Central Valley this tactic was used against Asian-American and Latino/ Chicano men who dared to proposition a white woman.

And to those people who claim that the law would be applied equally across race, consider that when white men raped people of color, it was ruled as "young boys sowing their oats". As such this law would serve to reinforce racist policies and divisions through mass incarceration and execution...
 
There's also the problem that the age of consent doesn't always match the age of 'adulthood' - for example in the UK the age of consent is 16, meaning that I could be having regular, perfectly legal (albeit very creepy since I'm a lot older than 16) sex with a 16 year old girl but as soon as she sends me a topless photo we're both guilty of child pornography offences (me for owning child porn, her for producing it) because she's under 18. That's an instant death penalty for both of us under the suggested laws.

If you happen to have a large number of older copies of the Sun, Star or Sport newspapers back from when they regularly had 16 - 18 year olds on Page 3 (or throughout the paper in the Sport's case) lying around in your garage you're also in the queue for the rope.
The other problem with that is that using earlier definitions huge numbers of Gay Men over 18 would have been executed along with trans bi and any other mildly deviant and pretty dam harmless people, and early birth control pioneers and any antiques dealers who have a pears soap advert or container lying around since the 19th century Also war crimes against the nation under some definitions include strikes, rescuing Jewish refugees, and being a conscientious objector, and I see that this has also arguably made abortion a death penalty offence (using US republican definitions) The problem is there IS no universally agreed definition of some of these crimes what was treason in occupied France, or even the USA. .
 
The other problem with that is that using earlier definitions huge numbers of Gay Men over 18 would have been executed along with trans bi and any other mildly deviant and pretty dam harmless people, and early birth control pioneers and any antiques dealers who have a pears soap advert or container lying around since the 19th century Also war crimes against the nation under some definitions include strikes, rescuing Jewish refugees, and being a conscientious objector, and I see that this has also arguably made abortion a death penalty offence (using US republican definitions) The problem is there IS no universally agreed definition of some of these crimes what was treason in occupied France, or even the USA. .

The more a person knows, the more they reject knee jerk reactions. The misuse of the Treason charge in England led the Founding Fathers to define what it means. It's the only crime spelled out in the Constitution. Some idiots think treasonable acts include burning a flag, taking a knee during the pledge, refusing to take the pledge, not applauding the president, or not showing the president personal loyalty. Your loyalty is to country has a whole, and to the Constitution, not a faction, or a leader.
 
Understand this much - even in some of the more execution-happy parts of America, getting a death sentence is really fucking hard. Outside Texas and maybe a few other states, courts are really averse to giving death sentences and even more averse to carrying them out.

First off, you need a conviction of first-degree murder (by any name; here in Ohio, it’s called aggravated murder, which is basically murder plus additional circumstances) to be eligible at all for capital punishment. Then you need to clear a shit-ton or hurdles. You need every damned juror to vote for death - ONE no-vote and it falls apart. You need to clear at least two rounds of appeals of a death verdict - it can fall apart if there was any problems with the prosecution’s case or if there’s any reason established in law that a person can’t be executed. And it’s this point where people get the most bogged down and why executions take so goddamn long to carry out.

If the prosecution’s case is shipshape AND there are no disqualifying circumstances - mental illness, mental handicap, exonerating evidence, a witness recents or the victim’s family asks for life without parole for some reason - then you have to make sure the execution itself is in order. You need the right drugs, the right people on hand, and the governor can’t commute the sentence.

(For purposes of this statement, I’m assuming it’s a state crime; federal crimes such as treason and terrorism can be included at that level, and the President can be the one to commute a sentence.)

Finally there has to be a will to execute the condemned. If a condemned prisoner is rotting away in death row, a lot of justice systems will ask, why bother executing them? Just let them languish on death row, they’ll kick off sooner or later, and the state can spare itself some culpability, publicity and a few bucks in expenses.

Add to that the overwhelming cloud of suspicion that we have over the process itself. Enough people argue, “well, just execute them after they’re convicted and save some money,” often allowing for a quick appeal to a court of last resort. These are probably the same people who would support death as a punishment for anything from murder to rape to harming a child to any violent felony to (insert light offense here) to talking smack about this leader or that celebrity to driving slow in the left lane (author’s note: the last one absolutely should be a felony, but death is too good for those people.)

The problem? It’s a recipe for executing a fuckton of innocent people. And it’s the only way a system like the one described in the OP could even hope to work, with the sheer number of executions that would have to take place. (And forget the one where people get death for killing animals - this isn’t ancient Egypt, where cats were fucking worshipped, although I guess it is plausible to allow people to use lethal force to defend pets if we have precedents dating back to horses and livestock that happen to include working dogs and mousing cats.)

I don’t see a single country that is not an out-and-out authoritarian and/or totalitarian nightmare being OK with executing innocent people. Even the most hardened death penalty supporters in America would rather let a guilty person go free than chance executing an innocent person (well, most of them would, and those who say otherwise will usually wisely shut the fuck up about it.)

So if you want a PoD that allows for mass execution for a metric shit-ton of crimes, you need something that turns America - and probably much of the West - into what amounts to authoritarian democracies. You would need a culture that is OK with executing innocents just to get the guilty ones (picture a hardline fundamentalist church at the forefront of society that preaches, “kill them all and let God save the innocent.”) And in America’s history, I’m aware of no such PoD that could send the country in this direction.
But why the "toughest" on crime D.A.-s get elected? I've seen articles detailing cases where a child kills somebody, and most comments are in favor of trying the child as an adult. If the person in question had been an adult, death penalty would've been demanded. The attitude "Let God sort them out." is rampant.
 
But why the "toughest" on crime D.A.-s get elected? I've seen articles detailing cases where a child kills somebody, and most comments are in favor of trying the child as an adult. If the person in question had been an adult, death penalty would've been demanded. The attitude "Let God sort them out." is rampant.
I imagine it's a lot easier to vote for someone saying they're tough on crime than it is for a juror to cast a vote the will send someone to their death after spending weeks looking them in the eye.
 
Also consider that in some states, multiple cases of "public indecency" is considered a felony. As such, every entertainer worth their reputation including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jim Morrison & the Doors, Ozzy Osborn, Rolling Stones, Joan Jett, Cher, Madonna, Elton John, 2 Live Crew, Culture Club, Ariana Grande, Brittany Spears, George Michaels, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus have all been charged with multiple counts "public indecency" and "lewd behavior", as such they could be executed in the ATL...

But as noted earlier, the law would most likely only applied to singers who were LGBTQ and/or people of color....
 
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