| | Ted, I wanted to reply to your death warrant idea. Before addressing it directly, it brings up another related argument. If someone who goes to jail or is executed eventually is found not-guilty, should the judge and jury (and police, and appeals courts, etc., etc.) go to jail themselves? Taking the best case, these are people who worked hard to make sense of the evidence, knew that for anyone to live that criminals had to be put away, and went with the evidence. The fact that the evidence ended up being misleading is not their fault. Errors can happen even under best case conditions.
The question then is, were these people unjust? In a kind of cosmic sense, you might say there was an injustice. This is the same kind of sense where a person's house burns down even though they're a good person and it wasn't their fault. He didn't deserve that result. But in both cases, there was no person being unjust. Acting on their best knowledge, they treated him how he deserved to be treated. In terms of morality, they were practicing the virtue of justice. They didn't decide he deserved one thing, and treated him in another. Their actions were in every way justifiable. So why would they be punished?
Similarly, you could ask whether or not they initiated force. Again, in some kind of cosmic sense, if we had omniscience, we would recognize that they were in fact the first party of these two parties to initiate force. But again, this blurs the reasons why an initiation of force is bad. It's not just that damage is done, but that one party has decided that he wants to use violence against another to get his way. This is why an accidental killing is treated very different from a murder case. The damage done is one part of the problem, but the intent of the criminal is another. In this case, if we said the jury had initiated force against the defendant, it would completely obscure what had actually happened. The jury, acting on behalf of the government, evaluated the evidence under objective rules and methods designed to create an accurate assessment. The executioner or jailor acted on this judgment again on behalf of the government.
So if someone argued for executing the jury, or even throwing them into jail, the right question to ask is "for what reason?". There was no crime. These people are performing a necessary function. Through following the agreed upon procedure for dealing with potential criminals, they made what was, at the time, the right decision.
The problem I have with the death warrants is that I don't see these as being any different from the existing system, except to say that the executioner (or jailor) himself would be allowed to be convicted. If, through a proper procedure a man is found guilty, there is and should not be anything punishable by putting that judgment into effect. If the government decides that the person is guilty through a legitimate procedure, and says he should be punished, there should not be later convictions.
Properly, we act on the best information we have. We make the courts objective through method and in application (through a process of appeals if necessary). The decision made is the best we can make, and we need to act on it. And anyone who does is perfectly justified in acting on it. If later some new evidence comes out, nobody can or should be blamed for not being omniscience.
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