I always find the phrasing of these posts weird, as if we have to pretend that Texas has not executed innocent people before and this would be a first.
on edit: not just the post, but the articles, we must pretend that of course this would be a first time event that would otherwise sully the fine nature of the criminal justice system with accidentally murdering someone.
>Texas may well execute soon an innocent man on the false premise of "shaken baby syndrome". [1] He would be the first in US history.
This is pretty clear to me. If you wanted to make it sound like you're claiming, you'd phrase it something like "Texas may well execute soon an innocent man, the first in US history, on the false premise of "shaken baby syndrome.""
As it is, the first sentence very specifically scopes down this case to "shaken baby syndrome."
That's also clear but I don't think the original is odd wording at all... Like I said, two separate sentences. If you read the first one, not sure how you misread the second one as applying to only a portion of the first one.
What is odd about the original wording? If anything, the one you present feels more formal/awkward compared to normal conversational English.
Personally I think it's absolutely ludicrous to believe that anyone would be trying to suggest that only now, in the year 2024, has a possibly-innocent person been executed in either Texas or the US. Like, you'd need crazy strong evidence to make that claim, while the post in question seems very specific to shaken baby syndrome.
It feels like an intentionally un-charitable, adversarial reading.
This may be a regional thing but the second just sounds better to me:
Texas may well execute soon an innocent man
Texas may soon execute an innocent man
“on the false premise” is also strange. I don’t think it’s really a logical argument so much emotional manipulation around an images of a dead and bruised body that was compelling. Kids are tough, the idea of shaking hard enough to damage a neck is plausible but to cause serious bruises is difficult to believe. Add in evidence of a serious medical condition and you get a different picture than just a false premise.
> It feels like an intentionally un-charitable, adversarial reading.
Saying this might be the first isn’t strictly speaking wrong as far as I can tell. I don’t know of anyone proven to be innocent that’s been executed. Sure, it’s likely happened several times, but I can’t exactly put a firm number so it may well be zero.
I don't think it's there to mislead someone on purpose, I just think people feel uncomfortable pointing out Texas is killing people that are innocent and thus end up not pointing it out or accidentally making things sound like "oh no, Texas is going to make a mistake they don't normally make!"
It is clear that it is meant the shaken baby syndrome is what is the first here, but still it could be taken the other way, and it ends up downplaying how contemptible the State's actions are, even though the poster really wants to highlight that.
I guess I would prefer something like -
"Texas, continuing its tradition of executing innocent people, will for the first time use the dubious science of Shaken Baby Syndrome as its cause."
It's not just the post, everybody does it whenever they say "Texas might execute an innocent person" they ignore that Texas has executed people that were extremely likely to be innocent (so likely that it is reasonable just to describe them that way - in case anyone has problems with my phrasing here)
How would you phrase it better. Sorry if it sounds confrontational to ask this question, but I can’t think of spot anything out of sorts with this phrasing.
That seems likes a pretty bold statement to make without backing it up further. To say a state with the death penalty could sometimes get it wrong is one thing, but your phrasing makes it sound more like the state regularly commits murder.
Abbot just pardoned an open white supremacist, who publicly expressed his desire to kill BLM protesters, before actually going out and doing it, so your shock at the questioning of how criminal justice is pursued in Texas seems a bit naive.
I wasn't questioning criminal justice in Texas broadly, the topic was innocent people being put to death.
> From what I understand, Texas executes possibly/probably/definitely innocent people with regularity.
The GP comment seems to imply that Texas is intentionally putting innocent people to death regularly. That had nothing to do with the governor or pardons.
You could help explain the connection a bit more. The original topic is wrongfully execution, your example seems to be wrongful release? Is your issue with the death penalty or governor's pardon power?
IIUC what dragonwriter is saying is that by way of pardoning the murderer, Abbott is condoning the murder, making it in a sense a "private execution".
I think that logic is sufficiently sound, provided we know we are not being precise. I don't know enough about the case to say whether it actually applies here.
I haven't seen anything that clearly lays out Abbott's reasoning or intent, though I may very well have missed it.
Pardons aren't always condoning a person for the crime they were convicted of. The legal system is fallible and writing clear laws to handle ant scenario that comes up is impossible. A pardon can be used to free an individual who seems to have been wrongfully convicted but without sufficient proof or process for an appeal. It can also be used to free individuals who have been rehabilitated, or who the executive believes has learned from their crime and is ready to return to public life.
I have no idea if Abbott was motivates by anything like that or if it was more akin to jury nullification, but I wouldn't assume that a pardon can only mean that the elected official is condoning the crime itself.
I appreciate your taking the time to demonstrate that your arguments throughout this thread were not the product of naïveté, as I had originally suggested, but instead just tedious concern trolling. What motivates Abbot, as well as the murders he sanctions, judicially and extrajudicially, has been quite plainly stated by himself and those doing the killing. Instead of making pointless arguments in the abstract, familiarize yourself with the particulars.
I believe the outrage is not about how good this particular 'martyr' is but because he was found guilty by the same system that decides when a person can reasonably use deadly force in a state that has laws specifically designed to 'stand your ground' and even then he was found guilty by a jury of his peers.
So with everything going for him he was still found guilty, so now someone can undo all of that just because they feel like it?. This spits in the face of the entire state and its judicial system.
Wouldn't that argument extend to every government? Every state has to decide what level of force or violence is allowed and in what situations, and the power given to individuals will never match the power of the state.
It sounds more like an anarchist argument than an anti-Texas argument.
it is pretty difficult to make statements about innocence once someone is dead and everyone involved with the case has moved on, however there are a number of cases in which it is obvious that the standard of beyond the shadow of a doubt was not meant, not even beyond a reasonable doubt - these cases are extremely doubtful and in that case it is reasonable just to describe them as "innocent"
Unfortunately we all agree to live under this rule of law though. "Innocent" legally only means you weren't convicted, and whether standards like beyond a shadow of a doubt was met is up to the jury and later the appeals court.
I agree the system is terrible, if even one innocent person can be found guilty and punished or even killed then the system is broken in my opinion. We can't fix that one-off though, and targeting one state's use of the death penalty is only going after a more obvious symptom while ignoring the root cause.
While I will always support seeing a person wrongfully convicted go free, I'd much prefer a fundamental revisit of our legal system so we don't have to catch mistakes like that after the fact.
I think the point is in this case, it can indeed be stopped since executions, once done, can't be undone. It's not an academic topic, it's a life and death topic, a basic morality issue. The current Texas government is quite corrupt, particularly Ken Paxton, the attorney general, but I'm not sure that matters here other than as a tangential point of data.
I think I'll put my critical but practical trust in government on a grand scale rather than small tribes of anarchist humans with each having their own idea of justice and laws. That didn't go so well for a lot of people in the "Old West" of the US and other examples of that.
We still have different state governments in the US and different country governments around the globe. Are you more confident in those because its larger groups of people deciding, and enforcing, what is right and wrong?
What the 'scale' appears to do, is to sugarcoat things which appears less hurtful for most people:
1)Eliminate individuals targeting other individuals at a personal level on a routine basis.
2) An officially worded notice, as opposed to some thug threatening at you.
3) Some written text that has has a resembles of order call the 'law'. To give an analogy consider why religions texts appeal to people. People have a lot of reverence for the written word including areas where IMO it should not be relevant: example marriage.
To highlight my point, if a thug were to go around extorting people for money verbally on a periodic bases which are _less_ that the taxes currently paid and provided _more_ services than the government then the targeted individual of the extortion would more resentful than he/she would have been of the government.
So is your argument here that the scale of governments, and their willingness to write down the rules they want to impose, is better mainly due to optics? I.e. we're better off with governments because someone has to be in charge and a government at least appears to be better intentioned thugs due to their use of a pen and paper?
Generally correct. Put another way the government to a large extent are thugs. No, I personally am not sure if we are better of with governments. I have lived in places with virtually no government and those places have generally been better than the ones with the government.
Scale and respect for institutions brings order. Anarchists remind me of one of two things, primitive villages trading with other primitive villages for supplies and goods or post apocalyptic tribes people living off a past of greatness until they become primitive villages trading for supplies and goods of other villages. Anyway that type of life is gone. As soon as a country like the USA goes "anarchist" everything falls apart and another country like Russia or China invades and enslaves the population
I'm not trying to propose anarchism here at all, and agree any shift from the world today to anarchy seems horrible in the short term even if its a long term utopia (trying to be as generous as possible of the upside there).
Respect for institutions is really a sticking point for me though. For one thing, they need to earn and deserve our respect. For another, if respect for institution is the goal then those institutions shouldn't need the power to impose their will upon us.
I don't need someone to that I have respect for to force my hand, and if someone does force my hand I likely won't respect them.
I’m not sure what definition of “criminal” you’re using to make that assessment. All the ones I know are based on laws, which are enacted by states. You have to accept the very framing you’re decrying to call anything criminal.
It's only criminal because those in charge wrote criminal states declaring those acts as such. There's no universal, fundamental code that defines criminal or right and wrong.
Innocent under whose eyes ?
one man’s revolutionary is another man’s terrorist. what morality and code stands the test of time ?
actions which was legal and moral say 200 years ago would be illegal and amoral now , who is to say how 200 years in future would see our framework for ethics from now ?
Taking any sentient life is a crime against nature and humanity.
Societies supporting death penalty are not civilized for the same reasons any cannibals are not.
Killing is killing, what difference does it make if you were hungry or felt scared or vengeance or merely sadistic to justify it .
I think... it has to do with "start with" part of their statement (as in where to start to find what different people can hopefully reach a consensus on), as a more-likely-to-be agreeable thing than the general "killing a person".
what good will consensus on a statement everyone already agrees on help with ? nobody is ok innocents with being executed[2] . Even the Texan criminal justice system responsible for a third of the about 1600 executions since 1976 will say they don't want innocent to be executed. They just say everyone is guilty.
The methods to establish innocence or exonerate[1] in legal systems objectively are extremely difficult or impossible. People will never be able to agree on who is innocent, no matter how obvious it looks to you or me.
DNA evidences have exonerated many in the recent years, many of the executed were mentally ill, a lot of the evidence is circumstantial and based on unreliable testimony which all too frequently is racially colored, there is no certainty they did the act they are accused of, let alone deserve to die for it.
The only meaningful consensus that can actually make a difference is that death penalty should be abolished.
It is barbaric and morally abhorrent,it is also not ineffective as a punishment, is not deterrent, and also extremely expensive.
---
[1] Pardons is not one of them, pardons require admission of guilt
[2] Innocent Americans that is, we are quite fine with "collateral damage" of women and children without any due process in drone strikes or now in Gaza.
> It would be a terrible legacy for all of us to be associated with executing an innocent man based on a rush to judgment and bad science. We must prevent Texas from making a tragic, irreversible mistake.
I believe that this statement is making specific reference to this particular case. (I miss-read this next part, but will leave my mistake here with this comment. See below conversation. Sorry for the confusion) Earlier in the article it is made very clear that this has not been the only execution of an innocent person wrongly accused of shaken baby syndrome:
> According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been at least 32 exonerations of those wrongfully convicted under the shaken baby hypothesis.
on edit: not just the post, but the articles, we must pretend that of course this would be a first time event that would otherwise sully the fine nature of the criminal justice system with accidentally murdering someone.