bring back hanging yes or no?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by palo5

Who tells you that? Winters in New York are short, Comrade. But in the Arctic they are much longer, and colder

I've lived in both places.

Upstate New York, where we do have prisons is bitterly cold. The St Lawrence freezes hard. The US Army's premier cold weather unit, the 10th Mountain, is based at Fort Drum, and the Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory is just a bit to the East in New Hampshire.

Inland Alaska is very cold, but there's essentially no one there. Some oil workers on the North Slope, a few native settlements, and one very modest town in Fairbanks . . . these are colder places

But Alaskans live in Juneau and Anchorage . . . those are the big towns, the only place where you'd be able to build any kind of Federal prison (you need transport in and out, access to courts and hospitals and so on).

Having spent a winter in Juneau, and one in Plattsburgh, NY -- Plattsburgh was far colder. Juneau is a cold Pacific winter, but its only slightly below freezing. Upstate New York is a bitter cold, arctic winter . . . kind of place where you need engine block heaters to keep your car's fluids from freezing.

Trust me: our prisons are in very, very, very unpleasant places, and the crowding in them makes them even worse. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, running at double capacity . . . yes, you could create a work camp out on the tundra, but really, it wouldn't be much more severe than what we've already got.

[3745 Laddie]

But for goodness sake,unless guilt has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt,then any decent juror with the brains they were born with should vote not guilty and continue doing so,irrespective of how petty or serious the allegation.The onus is on the accuser to prove guilt,not the accused to prove innocence.

I'm very much against the tampering with jury trial,majority verdicts and all the rest of the rubbish that's going on here.And I don't relish the prospect of anyone being wrongly puished for any crime.But the logical conclusion of the argument you advance is the doing away with custodial sentences.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by 3745 Laddie

But for goodness sake,unless guilt has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt,then any decent juror with the brains they were born with should vote not guilty and continue doing so,irrespective of how petty or serious the allegation.The onus is on the accuser to prove guilt,not the accused to prove innocence.

I'm very much against the tampering with jury trial,majority verdicts and all the rest of the rubbish that's going on here.And I don't relish the prospect of anyone being wrongly puished for any crime.But the logical conclusion of the argument you advance is the doing away with custodial sentences.

No, that is not the conclusion. Juries make mistakes; that's usually not their fault -- usually that there's some piece of evidence that they didn't see.

Accepting that the Courts and Juries are, like everything else done by man, fallible-- do you want to put people to death on their judgment?

Especially when you know that in some percentage of cases, years after the fact, evidence will emerge showing that the original verdict was wrong? If you've wrongfully imprisoned someone, you can release them after the fact -- it happens, quite a lot.

If you've wrongfully executed someone? Then what?

[palo5]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

I've lived in both places

Then you should know the Arctic is colder for longer. I bet even my great-granddaughter knows that, and she's only three

[3745 Laddie]

It's tragic that anyone should be wrongfully convicted of anything,even if they're not sentenced to prison let alone death.He who would take my good name and all that.I'm not disputing this for a second.As I said,I wouldn't want restoration before double jeapordy and other wrongs were righted.And qualifying for jury service ought to be tough enough to weed out people like the fool who thought it okay to talk to the accused on Facebook.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by palo5

Then you should know the Arctic is colder for longer. I bet even my great-granddaughter knows that, and she's only three

But the thing is, the population centers in Alaska are sub-Arctic, not Arctic climates . . . and most of Alaska is south of the Arctic circle.

Originally Posted by 3745 Laddie

It's tragic that anyone should be wrongfully convicted of anything,even if they're not sentenced to prison let alone death.He who would take my good name and all that.I'm not disputing this for a second.As I said,I wouldn't want restoration before double jeapordy and other wrongs were righted.And qualifying for jury service ought to be tough enough to weed out people like the fool who thought it okay to talk to the accused on Facebook.

Wrong verdicts are not necessarily caused by dumb juries, nor bad judges nor lying informants, nor bad cops . . . any and all of these things can and have happened.

But to say "if we were just really, really careful, we'll always be right-- well that's clearly wrong"

As it is, US capital murder cases get extraordinary judicial review, they get better lawyers, get automatic appellate review at the highest level . . .

. . . and yet it turns out that even after all that, the verdicts are still sometimes wrong.

That's not some "correctable defect" in the system -- its inherent. We never have "perfect knowledge", and its not infrequent that, over time, new evidence turns up, or new techniques for examining old evidence.

Knowing that, do you still want this system killing people?

[palo5]

Originally Posted by 3745 Laddie

double jeapordy

I don't understand 'double jeopardy'. Is it really true criminals can't be retried when you discover later they're guilty?

[sweatyhat]

Originally Posted by palo5

I don't understand 'double jeopardy'. Is it really true criminals can't be retried when you discover later they're guilty?

I'm not sure, but I thought they got rid of that archaic law.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by palo5

I don't understand 'double jeopardy'. Is it really true criminals can't be retried when you discover later they're guilty?

Can't be tried for the same offense by the same entity

In the US, it is possible to try them under the law of another entity. For example in the 1960s in the South, we had racist killings where State juries were unwilling to convict white defendants of murder. These defendants were subsequently tried for other charges under Federal law. . . (Federal law doesn't have a distinct crime of "Federal Murder" . . . so the charge was something else "violating civil rights" or such)

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The "separate sovereigns" exception to double jeopardy arises from the dual nature of the American Federal-State system, one in which states are sovereigns with plenary power that have relinquished a number of enumerated powers to the Federal government. Double jeopardy attaches only to prosecutions for the same criminal act by the same sovereign, but as separate sovereigns, both the federal and state governments can bring separate prosecutions for the same act.

[3745 Laddie]

Originally Posted by palo5

I don't understand 'double jeopardy'. Is it really true criminals can't be retried when you discover later they're guilty?

The law still stands in Scotland,for the moment anyway.We have a different civil and criminal legal system to the rest of the British mainland,where,I'm sad to say,it has already been done away with.