This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

entonio at gmail.com · 14 Apr 2012, 15:16 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (entonio at gmail.com)
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:16:51 +0100
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
In-Reply-To: <1334365421.38375.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1334365421.38375.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <E3BC3400-E3E4-4AE7-80BD-469708913E88 at gmail.com>

Ok, Marc, this is where we part ways for a number of reasons:

- I have much less confidence than you in the inerrancy of the judicial system. 
- You seemed to be considering the processual guarantees for the defendants as exaggerated, and a system with less guarantees would be likely to yield more wrong convictions. 
- I see sentences primarily as a mechanism for deterrence and incapacitation - incarceration being the prototype -, not retribution. That is not rooted in compassion - 'I don't care at all what happens to murderers' - but pragmatism. 
- The injustice of a wrong conviction, for me, is of such degree that it trumps everything else. Since it is more or less unavoidable, I'll rather have any number of murderers die of natural causes in jail than one innocent hang. Apply that, mutatis mutandis, to any other irreversible penalty. 

So I guess it comes down to different views of what the role of a judicial system should be. Nothing to do with compassion or science.

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