Troy Davis murdered by State of Georgia; The death sentence is not Libertarian or Christian.

[ClaytonB]

https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/a-praxeological-account-of-law/20383

Re: a, yes, death is final. However, say someone is sentenced to life and his innocence is discovered 20 years later. How do you correct that miscarriage? Pay him off? Does that make things right? How much is 20 years worth?

The root problem is that the legal system itself is not legally liable for its own actions, see the link above.

In a justice system, it is imperative that people weigh the evidence carefully and only convict when it’s beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the case regardless of the punishment. The fact that some innocent get punished and some guilty go free is an indictment of what takes place in the court room, at the crime scene, etc, not of the punishment itself.

But no matter how carefully the evidence is weighed, unjust outcomes are inevitable when the justice system itself is legally immune from the consequences of its actions. The problems with our legal system are not confined to the academic details of legal practice that can be debated endlessly. Rather the problems with our legal system all ultimately stem from the system’s own legal immunity. Judges, jurors, prosecutors, investigators, witnesses, etc. are all immune (in many cases absolutely immune) from legal recourse by the accused. Is it any wonder that our poor, beleaguered prosecutors can only manage to maintain a 98% success rate (where success = somebody goes to jail)?

Re: b, most importantly, this is not a prohibition of all taking of human life. It is the prohibition of murder. The very same law in the OT authorizes the state to take the life of certain criminals (including that of murderers).

Such a distinction is theological - it is no different than any other kind of special pleading. Killing by the State cannot be categorized differently based on the theological beliefs of one or another sub-group.

My biggest concern when it comes to the justice system isn’t the choice btwn life imprisonment (is that kidnapping btw? if capital punishment is murder…) and the death penalty. I’m more concerned about whether the guilty are being charged and punished or not and whether the innocent are being released or not. People rely on “expert” testimony on arson, DNA evidence and its interpretation is taken to be infallible, plausible motive is treated as damning, etc. Not to mention trials and punishments string along months and years after the act. If this stuff was straight, I’d have an easy time advocating the death penalty in murder cases where the defendant’s guilt was beyond a reasonable doubt. As it stands, given the corruption and incompetence that run rampant, I’m less eager to cry for blood.

The myopic fixation of the public and the modern legal system with the Platonic ideas of “guilt” and “innocence” is a key part of the problem. Without legal liability for its own actions, the legal system is free to abuse its victims with impunity so long as certain word games are played properly (and so long as the accused doesn’t happen to be very wealthy and well-connected, cf Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s recent legal adventures). The idea of granting any human being or human organziation legal immunity for their actions should be rigidly terrifying to anyone with a pulse. But our society is replete with such “loopholes”. We have Predator drones flying all over the world shooting missiles into any damn building that the CIA decides contains “terrorists”. The innocent people who are often nearby have no legal recourse. They cannot sue the CIA. Even those with the money and the inclination (say, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or the ACLU) cannot sue because any such lawsuit will be kicked to the curb in a nano-second on the grounds that the government has “acted in the interests of national security.” Such actions are not subject to legal scrutiny. We have self-described Murder, Inc. “kill teams” roaming the planet assassinating any goat-herder the CIA fingers as a terrorist. We indefinitely detain minors and, yes, even US citizens and perform brutal acts of torture until recently only practiced by NKVD on dissidents in their underground dungeons in Leningrad. All of this the US gov’t does while trumpeting from the hilltops that ours is a nation under “rule of law.”

We must end all forms of legal immunity without exception and without delay. Everyone is 100% liable for every act they perform and every decision they make, 100% of the time. Any other rule is social suicide - insanity - and must quickly lead to the breakdown of social order under mob rule by sociopathic syndicates.

Clayton -