this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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I appreciate their sentiment but no govt should be allowed to murder its citizens
The headline is less sever that it looks at a glance.
That said, it's the age-old is/ought problem of governance. Would love to see China abolish the death penalty. But I'm glad to see someone complicit in social murder through the powers of the state is not held to a lower standard than a peer who committed grievous harm to his neighbors through more direct methods.
Lets say a real person, who is doing very well in a job that contributes to society, can take home 150k a year. And lets say they work from 18 to 65, that's about a $7M career over 50-ish years.
The crook in OPs post stole more than 440 lifetimes of wealth. Even if he were to be put to work paying off that debt in the highest paying position which productively aids society (no lawyering, no managing, no marketing, no internet fame bs) it wold take him over 440 LIFETIMES to pay it off.
You can sentence him to 18,000 years of prison but he will never receive even 0.5% of that punishment.
The crime does not matter. The reason the death penalty should be abolished everywhere is to spare the innocent a wrongful execution. It can never be 100% accurate 100% of the time so it should not be allowed at all.
The guilty can rot in prison. The innocent should never be executed.
Even beyond the fact that they may execute the innocent it's still wrong. Let's say a world exists where the government has a 100% accuracy rate. The issue is that by giving them the right to execute their own citizens and the power to make laws it then allows them the ability to create laws designed to kill specific people.
This is fallacious statement - nothing is ever 100% accurate 100% of the time, that's impossible.
This is called absolute inaction in ethics - if you say that you can't take action unless there's utter most certainty and there's nothing in the universe that is utter most certain -> you can't take any actions. You're perpetually stuck in indecision.
So it's perfectly possible to reach certainty where someone is practically 100% guilty. Would you say that the killing of Musolini was unjustified? Should he be serving a life sentence instead and we ought to risk revival of nazis just for sake of not breaking this dichotomy? Yeah he's 99.99999% guilty but we can't be 100% sure.
EXACTLY. So while we need a system to punish and reform criminals we do not need to execute. Thats just not necessary and we can absolutely operate without it. We can ensure that we are not executing innocent people by not executing anyone.
It is not absolute inaction. It is sparing the innocent because the govt cannot be trusted.
Why draw the line at execution?
Seems like that same logic could be applied to imprisonment, or any punishment in general. "It can never be 100% accurate, so prison should not be allowed at all".
Under your proposed system, innocent people willl rot in prison for life.
You can't bring somebody back to life after killing them. If it turns out they were innocent after all, there's no releasing or recompensating a corpse.
Agreed that some innocent people will be set free, but again this is not 100% perfect, so it is certain that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
Why draw the moral line at executing innocent people, but not at imprisoning innocent people for life ?
So youre saying being wrongly imprisoned is just as bad as being murdered? No, I dont agree with that
No, that's not my argument at all. I agree with the utilitarian argument that imprisonment is better than the death penalty.
What I'm saying is that every moral argument against the death penalty can also be applied to life imprisonment. If you justify your anti-death penalty stance on the moral argument ("innocent people will die", as the first person I replied to said), then it is a slippery slope to a prison abolitionist position.
So you ARE equating living life in confinement with literal death. This is where we disagree. Death and imprisonment are not at all the same or equal.
Imprisonment sucks, yes, but thats part of a crime and punishment system. Death does not need to be part of that system. How hard is that to accept?
Your argument is flawed, and they calmly described exactly how for you, but you doubled down? Duuude. 🙄
Because you can review a case under new evidence or for any numbers of reasons, and figure you got the wrong person.
Ooops can't un-execute that innocent. My bad.
And the whole rehabilitation thing. But I am guessing your argument is you can't rehabilitate a billionaire or something. You are wrong btw if you think that.
You're right to say that life imprisonment is an improvement over execution because some innocent people will be set free. But under the imprisonment system, it is still guaranteed that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
You can't un-execute the innocent, but you also can't un-rot the innocent who die in prison.
Why is one morally acceptable and the other is not?
Both arent good, sure, but how can you say death is the same as life in prison?
You can not rehabilitate the thousands of people who's lives were worsened by a billionaires actions. They commit crimes on a scale so insane that they need to be addressed in an entirely different way from conventional crime. They don't rob a business and kill a store keeper, they put thousands of people out of work and leave them unable to support themselves and their families. They destroy lives for the sake of personal gain on an industrial scale.
A single armed man in a stadium couldn't do as much harm to humanity as a multi-billionaire does from his desk.
Why are you talking about punishment when we're discussing justice?
So i take it its a no for rehab over punishment?
A thief can be rehabilitated, a murderer can be rehabilitated, those people hurt others by the ones and tens and maybe even hundreds. A billionaire commits crimes on a scale that rivals war.
The story in OPs post is surprisingly accurate and the man did have 40B USD from bribes and other illegal business. Give the population (3M) and average income (17K USD) of Haikou he stole the equivalent of more than a year's wages from all 3 million residence. There is no way he was ignorant of the scale of his crime and there is no way to ever make him feel the 3 million working years of value that he stole from the people.
There is no rehabilitation there, punishment as a deterrent to other industrial scale criminals is all that can happen.
Counter point - many of greatest society failures were due to insufficient isolation of bad actors. Hitler failed his first coup attempt and came back after 5 years in prison - very few people remember this.
So some form of banishment is required and obviously death is the easiest, full-proof option so this is not a black/white issue as you make it out to be.
The reason to abolish the death penalty is to spare the innocent a wrongful execution, not to 'prevent a hitler'
I appreciated the sentiment, but here's my counterpoint: Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. That's only one industry and is nevertheless incomplete, but if I kept going it would take too long.
As long as the death penalty exists it will be used against an innocent, as it already has and will continue to do.
As long as there is even a MICROSCOPIC chance of executing someone innocent, it should NEVER be used. And since there’s no way to ensure there is NO CHANCE someone innocent is executed, it should be abolished.
also, fwiw, i don't think killing someone is the right way to show that killing people (among other things) is wrong. it's pretty contradictory.
Justice demands it. As a compromise, we could do it as a special military tribunal a la Nuremberg rather than having it be the regular law of the land
Any death penalty will create wrongful executions. It simply can never be perfect. How many innocent people is it acceptable to execute as long as we also execute guilty people?
To me that is none.
Any death penalty also means that there is an incredibly high level of trust in the government to be accurate and thorough and not corrupt. In the US thats the same government that allows the Epstein class to walk free right now. You trust them to wield death penalty?
I don't think they executed any innocent people at Nuremburg. This isn't like the death penalty for a given crime like murder, where you can get the wrong guy. We know exactly who they are, there's no ambiguity or any need for an investigation to find the guilty party.
This would not be the Epstein government doing the executions, in this scenario they would be the ones being executed
and yet the death penalty that exists today and is used today HAS killed innocent people. You know how we can prevent that? stop executing people.
Sure, but before that we got some stuff to take care of
Stealing billions is stealing hundreds and thousands of lifetimes of work from society. When crimes are at that scale they should receive the kind of attention that ensures 100%, that the accused will receive a punishment equal to the lives they have destroyed through greed.
Yeah, hoarding that much? He needs a mental institute not a death sentence.
It should be limited to crimes committed while in public service.
No it should be abolished entirely. To allow it to be used in any circumstance is to accept it will be use against the innocent. The only way to be sure innocent people are not wrongfully executed is to stop executing people entirely