Alito Opposes Mo. Execution

AP ^ | Feb 1, 2006 | AP

[Stoooopendous]

I suppose you were against the Iraq War too?? I mean.. innocents died, so you must of been against locking up Saddam Hussein.

[Palpatine]

at least this misleading headline will make some people in the country who are not interested in details think that the democrats are idiots for opposing someone like Alito. The MSM might have made a critical mistake here :-)

[Peach]

I can always count on you, Jane, to keep us straight! Thank you!

[q_an_a]

My reaction is to the fact that NOBODY knows how someone will vote once on the court. Thus, all the stuff about Meirs, which may have been a bad choice, but is the right of President to make, was not so much about how she would vote, but that people did not know in advance her positions. Meirs still serves in the President's office and he seems to like her.

[JRochelle]

No I am not against the war.
I just have a problem with the death penalty.
Bring back hard labour. I'm all for that.

[Porterville]

I'm just reading what I got from the story... If he stood up for himself away from the pack because he has an personal interpretation than I am impressed. If the story is wrong, then that is a whole other matter.

[Don'tMessWithTexas]

I am no expert on federal procedure, however, I do know that this was NOT a ruling on the constitutionality of the death penalty. The SCOTUS was reviewing whether to overturn a stay put in place by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

One has to overcome a high standard in order to overturn a stay put in place by a lower court. I don't understand why Roberts, Scalia and Thomas voted to overturn, but at most Alito was simply allowing a stay, put in place by one of the more conservative circuits, to remain in place pending that Circuit's own review.

In addition, Alito's vote was not determinative. The stay would have stayed in place regardless, because the vote was 6-3.

Therefore, given his arriving at the court yesterday, it was more than judicious to simply maintain the status quo. Bottom line: Chill folks.

[Stoooopendous]

So you think innocents should be sent to do hard labor during the day, behind bars at night?

[Mr. K]

He did NOT oppose the execution, he simply voted to refuse to overturn the lower appeals court- essentially leaving the matter in the state appeals courts hands.

I see no problem with this.

[Stoooopendous]

Cmon, you can answer.. Do you support sending your innocent family member, wrongly convicted, to days of hard labour without pay and nights locked up in a prison with convicted felons?

[JRochelle]

No. Our justice system is not perfect. But once we put someone to death there is no chance of correcting that mistake.

[illinoissmith]

"I suppose you were against the Iraq War too?? I mean.. innocents died, so you must of been against locking up Saddam Hussein."

It is a matter of what is necessary for which goals. Regarding the innocents who died in the Iraq war, those deaths, tragically, were necessary for removing a tyrant who was a vital threat to huge numbers of people in both his nation and ours.

Regarding punishment of murderers, the goals are direct prevention (by keeping those who have murdered before off the street so they can't do it again) and general prevention via deterrence, at the minimum cost possible without sacrificing accuracy. (This knowledge, the knowledge that punishing a criminal is vitally important for preventing future crimes, is in the tradition of Western Civilization going back to the Socratic dialogues, and it is bolstered today by study at the intersection of biology, psychology, and game theory.)

Direct prevention can be achieved not only by the death penalty, but also by life imprisonment without parole, providing the government makes such a sentence a real life sentence with no loophole outs.

Some deterrence is achieved by life imprisonment. Arguably, more deterrence is achieved by the death penalty, on the assumption that most people consider being killed as worse that being imprisoned. However, arguably, only negligibly more deterrence is achieved by the death penalty, on the assumption that there are diminished returns beyond life imprisonment - the idea is that living in cell for the entire rest of your life is bad enough that, if a person is thinking clearly enough to be swayed at all by a deterrent, life in prison is plenty of deterrent. According to this argument, if that's not enough of a deterrent, more won't help much, because you're probably not dealing with a very aware person. So, the extent of any extra benefit of the death penalty over life in prison is disputable.

Now, cost and accuracy. In order to have the death penalty and have only a small number of innocent people put to death, you have to have heck of a lot of checks and chances for appeal. This costs a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.

So, basically, the point is that those conservatives who argue against the death penalty usually do so, not on the basis of utopian pacifism, but on the basis of the idea that the death penalty confers nothing much more than real no-parole life sentences do, and at a much greater cost, in terms of either innocent people dead (if done on the cheap without lots of legal checks) or in terms of taxpayer funds (if done with the many expensive legal checks).

I'm not necessarily trying to convince you of this, but at least understand that when a conservative has a problem with the death penalty, they quite likely have serious reasons for it. Treating them as if they were in the ranks of the utopian pacifist moonbats at DU is usually uncalled for.

(And for the record, this is totally meant in the context citizens debating preferred policy, not in the context of duties of judges and justices. In that context, the duties of the judge or justice are bound by the Constitution and by the decisions of the citizens and their representatives.)