But it is odd if the statute of limitations here was less than the 25 years that the victims were in prison for.
Because they are unrelated crimes. You are asking why the statue of limitations for torture or for forced-confession doesn't coincidentally line up with the specific sentencing of a specific person for the unrelated crime of murder (bearing in mind that there is a min/max sentence, and the judge decided something based in-between).
Put it another way: if we accept that after time, people are rehabilitated even if they didn't get punished at all, why is it that in the US, people are locked up for decades?
Because we not only have to balance the theoretical possibility that people might change their behavior on their own (i.e. reformation), we also have to take into account dissuasion, vengeance, and also public safety (removing potentially dangerous people from society to prevent them committing future crimes).
Personally, I agree most sentences seem too long. And others (like in the situation that began this thread) are too short. I feel prison sentences in-general, whether short or long, don't do provide high probabilities of reformation. I'm not sure what the alternatives are, though, because there is serious potential for abuse in other solutions (like forced labor).
In this situation, are you saying we should raise the statue of limitations for torture, or only for torture-used-by-people-in-authority-to-get-confessions? And if the latter, is that only confessions that are proven false, or does that include confessions that are proven true (e.g. if the confession was for a kidnapping, and the confession correctly revealed the location of a kidnapped child who otherwise would've starved to death in the next few hours)?
That you have asked this question, seems to suggest that you support water boarding as was initiated during George Bush presidency?
No, I wasn't promoting torture. I ask many questions and think many things that I don't support or agree with, or that I'm undecided on. :)
I asked the question precisely because this was part of the whole waterboarding debate a half-decade ago - I had exactly the Bush (and Obama) waterboarding in mind, because it provides some very clear cut ethical issues that are worth sinking our teeth into from time to time.
Clear cut as in the situations are clearly defined and unambiguous, and the variables can be tweaked one way or another way as good thought-experiments should be, but the situations make no claims about morality, providing excellent thought experiments for thinking about victim-perpetrator ethics (especially where the victim can also be an on-going perpetrator of a different crime) and the ethics of the balance between society and individuals. Essentially, the it's hard to create off-hand a more excellent ethical case study than the Bush waterboarding raise serious ethic questions that can't be honestly answered without digging deeper and thinking them through.
That said, my goal wasn't to discuss the ethics of torture itself in this thread; my only goal was tossing more coals onto the fire of thinking through the legal system: Should the perpetrator's mindset change the severity of the punishment?
For me any information derived from torture is invalid irrespective of the outcome.
When you say, "the information is invalid", are you saying:
A) The information is invalid, because information provided under torture is often false? (i.e. lying under torture just to get the torture to stop?)
B) Or 'invalid' as in immoral for us to condone torture, even if it were to produce accurate results 100% of the time?
Either way, my question was, assuming torture is 100% evil 100% of the time, should the motives of the person committing an immoral act (if we can be 100% certain of his mindset) in any way influence his sentencing?
Where do you draw the line? who plays God to determine when torture will reveal the location of the kidnapped child or whether it will force out a false confession?
If he genuinely thought he was doing good (and we could prove it), should the punishment be lessened?
If he was intentionally doing it for self-serving reasons (and we could prove it), should the punishment be increased?
Or rather I should say, "Should the duration of his government-enforced reformation be adjusted?", bearing in mind that I'm referring to a sub-portion of his total 'punishment' and not the whole punishment, which covers more variables than just reformation.
Likewise, if his motives were more benign, "Should the duration of his government-enforced isolation for the protection of society be adjusted?", bearing in mind that that's a different subset of the entire punishment.
In fact before that paragraph your analysis was very positively informative and intriguing, then after that, it seemed like a different person continued writing
If you mean the ideas of my post feel disjointed, that's probably true. I kinda had two different thoughts going simultaneously, and so my post lost it's train of thought as they both got jumbled together.
It's also difficult to know what the perpetrators truly thought. Did they genuinely believe they had the person who committed murder? If so (and if we had evidence that they truly believed they had a murderer), should that belief reduce their sentence or not? Is torture in the pursuit of safe neighborhoods, puppies, and justice for all worse than, equal to, or less than torture in the pursuit of career advancement and simply reducing paperwork and footwork? Torture is torture, and ought to be punished... but to what extent do we punish it? Is self-interested torture worse than for-justice torture or worse than self-sacrificing torture?
It shouldn't matter what the perpetrators were thinking, In any civilised country there should be zero tolerance on extracting information through torture. There should be other humane means of extracting the truth,.
Right. I'm saying: we all condemn 100% the torturing this person did. And I personally think it was heavily racism-driven as well as us-cops-vs-them driven, as well as career- and get-this-case-checked-off-my-list driven.
I'm not defending his methods or motives in this specific case (or in torture in general). But in our general legal system, courts take into account both one's actions and one's motives.
As an example, whether a crime is accidental or not dramatically changes the punishment, even though the result was the same, because they have entirely different mental choices having to be made.
With us humans always overly pushing the boundaries of what is legally possible, its a dangerous slippery slope.
Absolutely. I agree with that 100%.
Left on their own, I think more humans on average gradually get worse over-time rather than better (that is, I believe by people's morality slackens bit by bit, but only by conscious decision can they tighten their morality).
I think systems of group behavior get even worse and at a faster rate, whether corporate, administrative, or governmental (system as in i.e. "police culture" (at the individual police station level), "CIA culture", etc...).
but to what extent do we punish it?
all the way, maximum
Ah, but now you are throwing out some of our goals for why we punish. If one of the reasons why we punish is reformation, and reformation is entirely mental, why give equal punishment to two equal criminals who had entirely in-equal motives, assuming (in our thought experiment) we can be 100% certain that one's motive was more benign than the other's?
Surely whatever piece of the overall punishment was intended for reformation ought to be tweaked based on how much reformation is actually needed? (ideally speaking, not realistically)
Likewise, if part of the punishment is for removing the person from society for the protection of society, surely the two different motives the two people used when committing the exact same 100% immoral act affects how much of a danger to society they are, and thus that sub-portion of the punishment should be adjusted to match?
That is to say, since we have at least six different goals in sentencing someone (I had forgotten earlier about 'protection of society'), some of those goals is the help the victims recover, some of those goals is to help society, and some of those goals is to help the perpetrator be reformed.
If the two criminals doing the same crime are deemed to pose different future threats to society, why should they be given identical sentences?
If the two criminals doing the same crime are deemed to require different levels of reformation, why should they be given identical sentences?
We say "the punishment fits the crime", but really, part of it needs to fit the criminal.
The only benefit of identical sentences is that one of our goals is the societal perception of fairness/justice. However, that goal cannot dominate the other goals, but must be balanced with them.
How do we know the hearts and minds of those we are judging?
I doubt you will ask this question universally?
Oh believe me, I'm happy to ask and consider all sorts of despicable ideas and uncomfortable ethical questions. :lol:
My family discusses the ethics of cannibalism - both from an atheist perspective and from a Judeo-Christian Biblical perspective - literally around the table at thanksgiving, tweaking up the variables to provoke thought and discussion. (e.g. suppose he died already, and we're trapped and need food - so no murder involved...). We're not morbid for the sake of morbidity or shock value, but don't shy away from morbidity for the sake of interesting discussions.
Asking, and thinking it through, is not the same thing as promoting or agreeing with. :)
Would you ask the same of a psychopath serial rapist?
Yes, except your pre-disposed an answer using the word "psychopath" (the cause), instead of just saying 'serial rapist' (the crime), implying that he's mentally defective as a fact. (i.e. you are making assumptions on his internal mental state).
Insanity is actually part of my point. As a nation, we give people different sentences based on their court-recognized (but absolutely not infallible!) mental faculties.
The reason for this is because we are balancing not just "justice" with our sentencing, but at least six different variables (as listed in my first post).
But yes, in my rationality I'm perfectly willing to question the heart and mind of a rapist. In my emotional self-righteousness, then self-righteous anger tries to demand lynching. But setting aside emotions, and thinking rationally, absolutely we should judge two identical crime-wise rapists differently, balancing their crime with their internal state.
The difficulty is how to do that without perfect knowledge, and with natural human bias. "Judging their internal state" might just be an excuse that leads to more black rapists being punished than white rapists, which obviously would not be good.
But it is precisely this ability to take into consideration the mental state of someone, why judges are given freedom to assign punishments within a range (minimum to maximum sentence). Unfortunately those ranges themselves are often badly set (often due to politics). Also the increased minimum sentence for repeat offenders is directly an attempt to legislate based on imperfect knowledge of mental states (the faulty assumption being, they aren't reforming, they are more locked in their ways, so they must need more reformation than someone else doing the same crime).
Maybe his parent dumped him on the streets at age 5 and he never had the parental guidance and family upbringing the rest of us had. So no one taught him there are boundaries to what you can do. On the streets if want something you just go and grab it, even if that action violates other people. No one graduating from the streets can be normal, so in their hearts and minds they see the world differently, can we truly judge them?
Yes, we can still judge them. There's two kinds of judging: "weighing and considering" and "sentencing" (passing judgement).
You say, "Can we still judge them?", but the idea of "Don't judge other people" comes from the Judeo-Christian worldview (perhaps among others), and the Judeo-Christian worldview is more nuanced than that.
The Bible basically says (I'm paraphrasing), "Weigh and consider (to gain sympathy for them, to help them, and to avoid similar pitfalls), but don't pass judgement (even in your heart)", so that's partially where I'm coming from. Though ofcourse, for governments, they need to weigh and consider and pass judgement.
The thing is, after weighing and considering, governments need to tweak the judgement they passed based on the weighing and considering not just of the crime, but of the individual committing the crime. Which is what our legal system partially does.
(They also weigh and consider the repercussions of the crime, in terms of damages, sometimes to an extent that I think is unhelpful... but I digress)
Further, many "boundries" are naturally known without being taught. Sure, some are cultural, some are taught, but some are innate.
Because he does have a genuine excuse for turning out to be a criminal since your background (good parental upbringing, education, decent neighbourhood...) does affect how a person would turn out to be irrespective of the genes
Genes, education, environment, and guidance (parental/guardian/role-model/government), are explanations but not always excuses (justifications), depending on what goals of punishment we are trying to address.
First, anything that does not remove choice (i.e. genuine mental defects), does not change responsibility for crime itself.
Second, regardless of one's justification, it doesn't lesson harm done to victims, and thus doesn't change restitution owed.
But it can absolutely reduce punitive restitution, because the purpose of that is reformation.
When trying to balance for all 6+ goals, explanations of mental state, only tweaks some of those six variables.
But the general point remains - zero tolerance for extracting confession through torture. No justification for water boarding
But this contradicts what you just said. :)
"so in their hearts and minds they see the world differently, can we truly judge them?"
"Because he does have a genuine excuse for turning out to be a criminal"
"No justification for water boarding"
I think you are mixing the delineation of the crime itself, for the judgement being sentenced on the perpetrator of the crime.
Human-guided injustice is imperfect. And will always be imperfect, until we can read criminal minds perfectly - both their present state, and the state of their mind during the crime.
It is indeed. But most people only think this way if the elites (police included) cross the law. But when some "lowly street dudes" cross the law, its normally "3 strikes and you're out!"
Not always. Look at the hubdub around Hillary Clinton (one of the most elite in the country). Millions of people are saying "three strikes and you're out!". Granted, mostly because of political opposition to her, but even many liberals are unnerved at her and Petranus getting almost no punishment, but others who have done the exact same crime even to lesser degrees, getting punished twenty times worse.
And look at the people supporting the Marine accused of using an insecure email to send classified secrets - many are supporting him, because of his motives in doing so.
But in-general I agree - if someone prominent (like a movie star) or some type of person (like an officer) does something wrong, we either teeth-gnashingly publicly lynch them, grant them a free pass, or first one and then the other if they sufficiently cow-tow enough to satisfy our self-righteousness.
And if it's someone who's not prominent, and no specific occupation, than our biased perceptions judge them based on how shifty we think they look. And "shiftiness" is actually often just us using our clan-based friend-or-foe identification - meaning by default, people who look less like our family we're pre-disposed to mistrust (for good reason), but that makes us terribly biased when judging (both types of judging). Which means it's usually, "three strikes and your ought" for black people specifically, because blacks are at the extreme end of our innate clan-based visual system.
My self-righteous human response to a serial rapist is, castrate them and drag them behind a car for 50 miles. I have to take a deep breath and say, "No, wait, first we should direct any emotional energy and use it to help the victims, then, once we've calmed down, we need to help the rapist be reformed - if possible (because it depends on the rapist's (continuous long-journey) choice to want to be reformed)."
In theory anyway. In practice, sitting in my computer chair, my response is, "Well, back to Age of Empires". :D
Anyway, there goes some food for thought.
I spent about two hours thinking and writing, and as enjoyable as it is to think (I'm a huge thinker), I gotta go run some errands lest I waste the entire day. :ph34r:
