Mumbai attack gunman executed

[K. A. Pital]

Being against the death penalty as a legal mechanism (as I technically am for reasons unrelated to the thread) does not mean I don't think this person should be dead. Which I do.

I suppose it might be a bit hard to grasp, but that's my position.

In this person's case, guilt is established without reasonable doubt and there are no chances of a false positive. In princple, however, I wouldn't trust the Indian justice system, where people sometimes get arrested for posting something inflammatory on the Internet.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I guess that makes China the most enlightened state on the globe, huh? After all, nobody kills as many enemies of the state year for year like them, which means they must obviously on the forefront as far as collective rights and environmental respect go. O yeah, and they're totally not corrupt too, killing people makes immune to that after all, Duchess told us so.

I never said killing people makes them immune to corruption, you're just trying to slander my position with typical theatrical tricks of short posts in N&P.

At any rate, most people the PRC executes are not guilty of directly assaulting the stability and structure of state legitimacy. Uighur and Tibetan independentist fighters would, for example, be legitimate targets of a demonstration of state sovereignty (if they have committed fighting acts, violent acts, I mean to say, by calling them fighters). Also people committed to the violent overthrow of the PRC's constitutional order by armed revolution or coup or the introduction of outside elements.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I suppose I should clarify that my remarks on other subjects were a slightly rambling observation that the atomist position of absolute individual rights causes substantial social ills; it is neither necessary the sole cause of those ills, nor is it a direct correlation between certain behaviours, but rather a tendency that extreme atomism in a society opens it up to a large degree of predation by removing socially constructed support structures, and therefore the atomist position so popular on this board (of the absolute nature of individual rights) does not produce a healthy society. Bad GINI coefficients, low levels of happiness, both of these directly correlate with the Anglo-Saxon capitalist notion of absolute individuality, which even though a lot of people here are notionally anti-capitalist, is directly related.

Anyway, it's not very important except to observe that the particular argument being used by Irbis against the death penalty is simply an absurd extension of this absolute atomist position, that someone's life is more important than the interests of the collective whole, whereas we can see that societies that do not adhere to this system have better outcomes.

Essentially, I disagree completely with this particular philosophy, and thus find the argument pathetic and useless. There are functionalist arguments against the death penalty which are very, very good, but they don't apply in the case of terrorists shooting people up on camera. So rather than acknowledge that your position should be flexible, the anti-death penalty people here fall back on tired appeals to an idea of perfect individualism in human rights, when we see that the application of that society creates objectively worse outcomes for individuals than one with more collectivist notions.

Also, before I get accused of being a schizophrenic on this board again, I am using the word atomist in the philosophical sense as an absolute irreduceable quantity--same rough meaning as for the Epicureans, something from which there is nothing smaller. In that sense, I'm using it to describe this left-liberal, American-European (mostly post-WW2 "triumph of democracy") ethnocentric application of an ideal of the absolute rights of the individual as a philosophical programme for the entire world.

[UnderAGreySky]

Not sure if this is permitted but... would the three people who voted "No, he may be innocent, and deserves a retrial- his "confession" was coerced" volunteer to explain why they did so? I'm fairly curious how that opinion came about.

[UnderAGreySky]

In this person's case, guilt is established without reasonable doubt and there are no chances of a false positive. In princple, however, I wouldn't trust the Indian justice system, where people sometimes get arrested for posting something inflammatory on the Internet.

I have no qualms about this line of argument. Even Indians don't trust their own justice system *much*, that said I think there is a big gap between the judicial establishment and the legal enforcement of certain laws; people have more faith in judges doing their duty (whether this faith is warranted or otherwise) than they have with the politicians making the laws and the police enforcing them. The arrest of the two girls for a facebook comment and a "like" was infuriating, but even legal experts are convinced that the case won't stand in court. It's a saving grace in the mess.

[Sidewinder]

Not sure if this is permitted but... would the three people who voted "No, he may be innocent, and deserves a retrial- his "confession" was coerced" volunteer to explain why they did so? I'm fairly curious how that opinion came about.

Perhaps they were concerned about the way his confession was supposedly coerced, and wanted the Indian justice system to investigate claims of police brutality or falsification of evidence (or whatever the legal term is for a forced confession).

[SAMAS]

It's funny all the excuses you guys make to justify why killing someone is okay if you don't like him.

"But it's legal!"
"Keeping people alive takes up resources!"
"Being in prison is just as bad as being murdered!"
"You can't prove he won't get superpowers and kill EVERYONE!"

Honestly, the only justification I need is "He deliberately participated in the killing of 166 people for the crime of not being like him".

[Kamakazie Sith]

Some people do find justice in the execution of a hungry child who stole loaf of bread. Does this mean we should go and placate them?

Don't be ridiculous. We're talking about the murder of 166 people. Not stealing. Why would you think that is a comparable example?

A loaf of bread can be replaced. A person can not.

No, I am saying we should leave decisions in the hands of people who A) don't have personal stake in what is happening, B) are not acting irrationally, if only because they're hurt. If either, or both conditions are failed, it's lynch, not justice, no matter how well argued or justified.

A) Impossible. Even if the people are completely detached they still have a responsibility to public safety. B) Executing someone that took place in murder of 166 people isn't an irrational decision. It makes sense from several perspectives; economical and public safety.

Guess what happened to that guy? Sorry, still think Norwegians did prove their moral superiority.

In my opinion they just proved a different way of doing things. It isn't superior to what India did. If Norway had the economical problems that India did then I'd argue it to be inferior.

[Lord Zentei]

Rights are also rights of the collective common of humanity represented by the State as an institution created from a shared identity of individuals who do not have rights exceeding those of the rest of the group.

The problem is that this line of reasoning can be used to justify any level of bullshit. The state exists to serve people, not the reverse, and it serves as the guardian of their rights.

The focus on individual rights is ethnocentric to the United States and ridiculous, as humans are inherently social creatures.

No, it is not exclusive to the US, though perhaps it is more common there. The fact that humans are social creatures does not make the focus on individual rights "ridiculous" in any sense.

Besides which, I cannot see how the claim that individual rights are ridiculous somehow negates my points that (a) power of the state should ideally not exceed the requirements for its functionality (note I am not saying that it should have no power at all), nor (b) the false positive argument.

[Hamstray]

Bad GINI coefficients, low levels of happiness, both of these directly correlate with the Anglo-Saxon capitalist notion of absolute individuality, which even though a lot of people here are notionally anti-capitalist, is directly related.

Yes, because the GINI coefficients in communist countries like China are any lower and they are totally free of capitalism, and the HDI is utter bullcrap, ...

[Simon_Jester]

Rights are also rights of the collective common of humanity represented by the State as an institution created from a shared identity of individuals who do not have rights exceeding those of the rest of the group.

The problem is that this line of reasoning can be used to justify any level of bullshit. The state exists to serve people, not the reverse, and it serves as the guardian of their rights.

But does it exist to serve "people," or to serve you personally? In a case where you personally have done something that endangers the community, sure you have rights, but are your rights absolute and unlimited regardless of what you do?

Does your right to be immune to capital punishment (if there is one) trump the government's obligation to do something when its people are starving to death?

A state that acts purely to safeguard the individual's rights won't answer those questions the same way as one that exists to "serve the people." Serving the people means feeding the beggars, not building huge expensive jail cells for individual murderers.

The focus on individual rights is ethnocentric to the United States and ridiculous, as humans are inherently social creatures.

No, it is not exclusive to the US, though perhaps it is more common there. The fact that humans are social creatures does not make the focus on individual rights "ridiculous" in any sense.

I think what she's ridiculing is the idea that we can build a model of society that works just by rigorously enforcing individual rights on behalf of every person. That's not working out very well, because of a huge range of practical problems that would take a long time to explain in detail.

At some point, the argument goes, institutions have to step back and define "the public interest" as something other than "this person's property rights plus THAT person's property rights plus the other person's property rights." Otherwise we end up ignoring opportunity costs and non-obvious cases where someone's getting hurt without a clearly defined 'right' being violated.

So when a man grabs a machine gun and starts shooting people at random because he wants to drive all the Hindus out of Bombay, what do we do after trying him? If all we think about is individual rights, pretty much the only rights that matter now are his. No one else has legal rights that affect how he will be punished.

But when we think about the public interest, we make some other calculations: can we afford an adequate prison for this man? What are the opportunity costs of recognizing his 'right' to stay alive as absolute? Does this impact the public's faith in the judicial system, and as a consequence affect the rule of law? Does it impact the public's faith in their government's willingness to protect them from renegades, and therefore affect the stability and legitimacy of civil society?

Bad GINI coefficients, low levels of happiness, both of these directly correlate with the Anglo-Saxon capitalist notion of absolute individuality, which even though a lot of people here are notionally anti-capitalist, is directly related.

Yes, because the GINI coefficients in communist countries like China are any lower and they are totally free of capitalism, and the HDI is utter bullcrap, ...

Read between the lines. She's comparing the US to the social democracies of Europe. Similar economic background and prosperity, broadly similar cultures, democratic governments... and yet people in Europe live happier than Americans. Why?

We've heard this in N&P before: it's because the European governments have more politicians fighting for the good of the public (who need things like high wages, cheap health care, and rehabilitation for criminals). Instead of this laser-like focus on making sure no one's "rights" are violated by business regulations, taxes, having to admit to their children that gay people exist, or the like.

[Hamstray]

Read between the lines. She's comparing the US to the social democracies of Europe. Similar economic background and prosperity, broadly similar cultures, democratic governments... and yet people in Europe live happier than Americans. Why?

I don't think that is what she is saying.

The failure to execute Breivik for a crime against the state demonstrates the weakness of the modern European notions of civil rights.

[Lord Zentei]

But does it exist to serve "people," or to serve you personally? In a case where you personally have done something that endangers the community, sure you have rights, but are your rights absolute and unlimited regardless of what you do?

What the fuck is this shit? What gave you the idea that I'm concerned about my personal rights at the expense of the rights of everyone else? But to answer your second question, my rights only extend to the point where they would infringe on the rights of another person. And the community consists of people who have rights of their own. This includes the rights of the victims and their families.

Does your right to be immune to capital punishment (if there is one) trump the government's obligation to do something when its people are starving to death?

Nice appeal to emotion, there.

A state that acts purely to safeguard the individual's rights won't answer those questions the same way as one that exists to "serve the people." Serving the people means feeding the beggars, not building huge expensive jail cells for individual murderers.

People HAVE rights, moron. Who is talking about building huge expensive jail cells for each murderer, anyhow?

I think what she's ridiculing is the idea that we can build a model of society that works just by rigorously enforcing individual rights on behalf of every person. That's not working out very well, because of a huge range of practical problems that would take a long time to explain in detail.

I'm not sure how you can assert that "it's not working out very well", since that's hardly what anyone is doing. But if you're not going to justify your position, feel free to fuck off instead of cluttering up the thread with your usual sanctimonious bullshit.

At some point, the argument goes, institutions have to step back and define "the public interest" as something other than "this person's property rights plus THAT person's property rights plus the other person's property rights." Otherwise we end up ignoring opportunity costs and non-obvious cases where someone's getting hurt without a clearly defined 'right' being violated.

So if we assert people's individual rights, we ignore opportunity costs? Justify this claim.

So when a man grabs a machine gun and starts shooting people at random because he wants to drive all the Hindus out of Bombay, what do we do after trying him? If all we think about is individual rights, pretty much the only rights that matter now are his. No one else has legal rights that affect how he will be punished.

Wow, you are a fucking moron.

But when we think about the public interest, we make some other calculations: can we afford an adequate prison for this man? What are the opportunity costs of recognizing his 'right' to stay alive as absolute? Does this impact the public's faith in the judicial system, and as a consequence affect the rule of law? Does it impact the public's faith in their government's willingness to protect them from renegades, and therefore affect the stability and legitimacy of civil society?

The rule of law and the "legitimacy of civil society" would not be served by killing people simply because the "public interest" wants them killed, so this has jack and shit to do with individual rights. Neither should the public's faith in the judicial system be served by their willingness to see people killed, but by the system's ability to discern the guilty from the innocent. Incidentally, you neglected to address the false positive argument.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I don't think that is what she is saying.

It actually was; Europe is better than the US in some ways but still promotes individual rights excessively, it just does so in ways different than the US, but both stemming from the same liberal tradition which became the de facto western standard in the post-WW2 era.

[Hamstray]

It actually was; Europe is better than the US in some ways but still promotes individual rights excessively, it just does so in ways different than the US, but both stemming from the same liberal tradition which became the de facto western standard in the post-WW2 era.

Europe is not better than the US despite the fact that it promotes individual rights excessively, it is better because the US to a further extent shits over individual rights. Relating to this concrete case a good example is the death penalty. Civil liberties don't necessarily lead to excessive free market capitalism.

[Simon_Jester]

Hamstray, many of the rights Duchess is talking about are economic.

Europe pays less attention to the right to property as defined in libertarian tradition; this is why libertarians (especially far-right American ones) tend to denounce European social programs.

Europe tends to be better at protecting the sort of civil rights that defend the general public from state persecution- but most European states have a distinct concept of the public interest that is separate from "this person has the right to do this, that person has the right to do that." The US government, at this time, is having trouble with that... which swiftly reduces it to a basket case, as we've seen.

But does it exist to serve "people," or to serve you personally? In a case where you personally have done something that endangers the community, sure you have rights, but are your rights absolute and unlimited regardless of what you do?

What the fuck is this shit? What gave you the idea that I'm concerned about my personal rights at the expense of the rights of everyone else? But to answer your second question, my rights only extend to the point where they would infringe on the rights of another person. And the community consists of people who have rights of their own. This includes the rights of the victims and their families.

I think you are reacting to a wrinkle of conjugation. The point here is that 'the state serves the people' isn't necessarily something you can reduce to:

"The state protects the enumerated rights of person 1, person 2,..., person N-1, and person N, therefore the state is serving the people."

Sometimes, serving the people is complex, and we place restrictions on rights, or see conflicting rights and resolve them in a way that is very bad for the few, but good for the many. A state that cannot do this will cease to function as a state, one way or another.

Does your right to be immune to capital punishment (if there is one) trump the government's obligation to do something when its people are starving to death?

Nice appeal to emotion, there.

That's not an appeal to emotion, that's an honest question. Physical realities do not go away just because someone's rights are involved. The state can spend a million dollars on prisons, or a million dollars on famine relief; it cannot have its cake and eat it too.

Maybe we should say that the rights of convicts to not be executed, and to be preserved by the state under whose authority they fall, DOES trump famine relief. Maybe we should not say that. But if we aren't willing to answer one way or the other, then we are in no position to tell the government of India what to do, because unlike you and I, they don't get the luxury of ignoring the question.

A state that acts purely to safeguard the individual's rights won't answer those questions the same way as one that exists to "serve the people." Serving the people means feeding the beggars, not building huge expensive jail cells for individual murderers.

People HAVE rights, moron. Who is talking about building huge expensive jail cells for each murderer, anyhow?

Because that is, by all appearances, exactly what the state is doing for the particular murderer we're talking about.

I think what she's ridiculing is the idea that we can build a model of society that works just by rigorously enforcing individual rights on behalf of every person. That's not working out very well, because of a huge range of practical problems that would take a long time to explain in detail.

I'm not sure how you can assert that "it's not working out very well", since that's hardly what anyone is doing. But if you're not going to justify your position, feel free to fuck off instead of cluttering up the thread with your usual sanctimonious bullshit.

One of the practical problems I'm talking about is deciding which rights to enforce, and how. It turns out that some classes of rights are easily enforced by the legal system... but not always the classes of rights which are most important to keeping our society healthy.

Enforcing the rights of high-status people, who can hire lawyers and public relations men, turns out to be a lot easier than enforcing the rights of mundane people. Easily delineated rights like "It's my property, I'll raze it if I want to" are easy to enforce. Much harder than nebulous ideas like "the right to the city," the right of the people living in a city to have a collective say in what kind of city it will be, rather than having the choice imposed on them by technocrats and developers.

At some point, the argument goes, institutions have to step back and define "the public interest" as something other than "this person's property rights plus THAT person's property rights plus the other person's property rights." Otherwise we end up ignoring opportunity costs and non-obvious cases where someone's getting hurt without a clearly defined 'right' being violated.

So if we assert people's individual rights, we ignore opportunity costs? Justify this claim.

Rights are absolute. We class some things as rights and others as non-rights precisely because we know we can't afford to guarantee certain things. You have a right to free speech- but it's not costly to enforce that, because talk is literally cheap. You do not have a right to your own house, even if everyone would like you to have one, because houses are expensive. Even wishing that everyone have a house doesn't mean they'll get it, and doesn't offer grounds for guaranteeing it.

There are a lot of things that it is in our interests to have (clean air) but that we don't have an absolute right to. My interest in clean air doesn't trump your right to use the public roads... until it does and we enact emissions standards. If you protest that you have a right to drive, that won't get you far. Should it?

It's the gray areas at the edges I'm concerned about, and that's where a rights-absolutist model of government breaks down. When we enforce a right at the expense of all interests less clearly delineated than the right, someone's often going to get hurt.

So when a man grabs a machine gun and starts shooting people at random because he wants to drive all the Hindus out of Bombay, what do we do after trying him? If all we think about is individual rights, pretty much the only rights that matter now are his. No one else has legal rights that affect how he will be punished.

Wow, you are a fucking moron.

No, seriously. The families of the victims don't have a right to see him die. There's no way you could justify a general principle that 'survivors have a right to revenge.' Who except the gunman himself has any rights which matter in determining how he is treated? As opposed to having interests, needs, goals which are not absolute and therefore cannot truly be considered rights in the "only end when my fist threatens to reach your nose" sense?

The rule of law and the "legitimacy of civil society" would not be served by killing people simply because the "public interest" wants them killed, so this has jack and shit to do with individual rights. Neither should the public's faith in the judicial system be served by their willingness to see people killed, but by the system's ability to discern the guilty from the innocent. Incidentally, you neglected to address the false positive argument.

In this case, we have clearly discerned the guilty, as the man was caught on videotape and vast numbers of witnesses committing a heinous crime. Is there some doubt about his guilt I don't know of? Because if so, yes that changes the issue. But unless I'm badly wrong, the false positive argument is totally irrelevant to this case. Hence my neglect of it: it will matter for some other crime, but not this one.

As to the rest- why do we even have a judiciary? Think about the question seriously. We wouldn't bother with one if the only goal was to point and say "I am sure he is guilty, I am not sure she is so she is innocent." We have a judiciary to protect the public and prevent society from being overrun by crime. We have a military to prevent society from being overrun by invaders. Part of the public trust in government is the trust that we won't let that happen. Which can influence how we treat people who invade or attack society by killing citizens, especially when this is an act of political terrorism instead of random crime.

Do my rights guarantee fair treatment from the judiciary? I would say so, yes. Is an execution automatically unfair, under all circumstances? I wouldn't say that.

[Hamstray]

Hamstray, many of the rights Duchess is talking about are economic.

Europe pays less attention to the right to property as defined in libertarian tradition; this is why libertarians (especially far-right American ones) tend to denounce European social programs.

Have you read her posts? Most of what I've read out of them is a collectivist wankfest about how individual freedoms invariably go along with capitalism and make people unhappy and depressed. The things she is specifically addressing such as the Norwegian justice system, which she seems to have a problem with, concern civil liberties and not purely economic ones. The topic is capital punishment, this is hardly an economic issue.

[Rogue 11]

The failure to execute Breivik for a crime against the state demonstrates the weakness of the modern European notions of civil rights.

Eh. This guy has been FAR more useful to Norway alive than dead. In purely practical terms (Disregarding all ethics) keeping him alive and treating him ethically has given us far better results as far as our society is concerned.

Dead he is a bogeyman and a symbol. Alive he has become a whiner who does more damage to his own credibility (And by extent his cause) than we ever could.

That I think this is the ethical way to do it would just be a helpful bonus.

That you seem too hung up on acting on a need for revenge rather than what gives the best practical results isn't Norway's problem (See our recidivism rates).

[Lord Zentei]

I think you are reacting to a wrinkle of conjugation. The point here is that 'the state serves the people' isn't necessarily something you can reduce to:

"The state protects the enumerated rights of person 1, person 2,..., person N-1, and person N, therefore the state is serving the people."

Sometimes, serving the people is complex, and we place restrictions on rights, or see conflicting rights and resolve them in a way that is very bad for the few, but good for the many. A state that cannot do this will cease to function as a state, one way or another.

One of these days, you might want to justify your claims. I honestly don't see any reason for me to answer your arbitrary say-so. Moreover, you are spouting a strawman. Check to see if I have ever claimed that rights are without restriction. You won't be able to find such a case.

That's not an appeal to emotion, that's an honest question. Physical realities do not go away just because someone's rights are involved. The state can spend a million dollars on prisons, or a million dollars on famine relief; it cannot have its cake and eat it too.

It most certainly was an appeal to emotion, the way you presented your question. But here's a hint: your argument could just as easily be used to justify the revocation of the right to a fair trial in the first place. And my objection to capital punishment ties in with that. Oh, hey; we can't afford fair trials or police investigations. Best spend the money on social programs. What, you got a problem with that? Can't hear you. Voting costs money too.

Because that is, by all appearances, exactly what the state is doing for the particular murderer we're talking about.

So, essentially, you're taking a specific case, and negating a general principle because of it?

One of the practical problems I'm talking about is deciding which rights to enforce, and how. It turns out that some classes of rights are easily enforced by the legal system... but not always the classes of rights which are most important to keeping our society healthy.

Enforcing the rights of high-status people, who can hire lawyers and public relations men, turns out to be a lot easier than enforcing the rights of mundane people. Easily delineated rights like "It's my property, I'll raze it if I want to" are easy to enforce. Much harder than nebulous ideas like "the right to the city," the right of the people living in a city to have a collective say in what kind of city it will be, rather than having the choice imposed on them by technocrats and developers.

ROFL. So, because you don't want people to be subject to rich people, technocrats and developers, you allow for a justice system which allows for the death penalty, but which does not give people the permission to do with their personal property as they wish? That's hilarious.

Say, as an aside, when was the last time a really rich person in the USA got the death penalty as opposed to a poor member of a minority? And who cares that poor people find it harder to defend their property in the absence of clear legal protections that defend property rights? All the while you don't want people to be subject to "technocrats" - the very technocrats who would be taking away poor people's housing for their harebrained schemes, all the while sentencing them to death. Even within the context of your value system, your ideas make no sense.

Rights are absolute. We class some things as rights and others as non-rights precisely because we know we can't afford to guarantee certain things. You have a right to free speech- but it's not costly to enforce that, because talk is literally cheap. You do not have a right to your own house, even if everyone would like you to have one, because houses are expensive. Even wishing that everyone have a house doesn't mean they'll get it, and doesn't offer grounds for guaranteeing it.

There are a lot of things that it is in our interests to have (clean air) but that we don't have an absolute right to. My interest in clean air doesn't trump your right to use the public roads... until it does and we enact emissions standards. If you protest that you have a right to drive, that won't get you far. Should it?

It's the gray areas at the edges I'm concerned about, and that's where a rights-absolutist model of government breaks down. When we enforce a right at the expense of all interests less clearly delineated than the right, someone's often going to get hurt.

OK, for once you're making some kind of sense. But as ever you reach the false conclusion. Your rights only extend as far as they can go without transgressing against other people's rights. The "rights absolutist" model you refer to is a strawman.

Ironically, this point you raise undermines your argument for a "right" to economic benefits, and underscores the primacy of socially low-cost rights such as individual property rights.

So when a man grabs a machine gun and starts shooting people at random because he wants to drive all the Hindus out of Bombay, what do we do after trying him? If all we think about is individual rights, pretty much the only rights that matter now are his. No one else has legal rights that affect how he will be punished.

Wow, you are a fucking moron.

No, seriously. The families of the victims don't have a right to see him die. There's no way you could justify a general principle that 'survivors have a right to revenge.' Who except the gunman himself has any rights which matter in determining how he is treated? As opposed to having interests, needs, goals which are not absolute and therefore cannot truly be considered rights in the "only end when my fist threatens to reach your nose" sense?

The families don't have a right to see him die... my point, indeed. But you are wholly wrong in claiming that individual rights don't allow retribution. FYI there are libertarians who wholly support the death penalty, and they justify it on the grounds of individual rights!

In any case, the survivors have suffered tremendous personal loss at the hands of the killer, only an idiot would say that their rights have not been transgressed against. Besides which, the deceased had their rights violated too, wouldn't you say?

The rule of law and the "legitimacy of civil society" would not be served by killing people simply because the "public interest" wants them killed, so this has jack and shit to do with individual rights. Neither should the public's faith in the judicial system be served by their willingness to see people killed, but by the system's ability to discern the guilty from the innocent. Incidentally, you neglected to address the false positive argument.

In this case, we have clearly discerned the guilty, as the man was caught on videotape and vast numbers of witnesses committing a heinous crime. Is there some doubt about his guilt I don't know of? Because if so, yes that changes the issue. But unless I'm badly wrong, the false positive argument is totally irrelevant to this case. Hence my neglect of it: it will matter for some other crime, but not this one.

Incorrect. The false positive principle exists due to the fact that high levels of presumed certainty cannot be guaranteed if one can arbitrarily revoke concerns for the existence of such errors. When do you get to decide when such possibilities are not legitimately present? If you assert certainty in one case, you cannot then know that this very loophole that permits such certainty to be claimed won't be abused at a later time. As I pointed out before "this should be most particularly applied when the crime involved is disgusting or contemptible, and when people are all riled up about the crime, because that is the time when people are most apt at sacrificing their rights in return for security and/or making errors of judgement." It is these cases where abuse needs to be guarded against just as much as in the case we have before us at any given point.

You understand that there's a difference between a general principle on the one hand and your idealized assessment of a particular situation on the other? Does the Mumbai killer "deserve to die"? Arguably, yes. Is it wise to construct our justice system such that it is something we can make happen? That's something else again.

As to the rest- why do we even have a judiciary? Think about the question seriously. We wouldn't bother with one if the only goal was to point and say "I am sure he is guilty, I am not sure she is so she is innocent." We have a judiciary to protect the public and prevent society from being overrun by crime. We have a military to prevent society from being overrun by invaders. Part of the public trust in government is the trust that we won't let that happen. Which can influence how we treat people who invade or attack society by killing citizens, especially when this is an act of political terrorism instead of random crime.

Correction: we have a judiciary to better determine whether a given suspect is guilty or not, and to ensure compensation and punishment in the case of harmful and involuntary interactions that take place. We must acknowledge the inherent imperfection of such systems.

Do my rights guarantee fair treatment from the judiciary? I would say so, yes. Is an execution automatically unfair, under all circumstances? I wouldn't say that.

"I would say yes... I would say no..."

Oh, come on. Really, now? Try harder.

[Grumman]

Do my rights guarantee fair treatment from the judiciary? I would say so, yes. Is an execution automatically unfair, under all circumstances? I wouldn't say that.

"I would say yes... I would say no..."

Oh, come on. Really, now? Try harder.

He was addressing two clearly defined points with two clearly defined answers. He's not contradicting himself, he's saying that he has the right to fair treatment, but that if you commit a sufficiently severe crime and leave sufficiently damning evidence being sentenced to death is fair treatment.

[Lord Zentei]

Do my rights guarantee fair treatment from the judiciary? I would say so, yes. Is an execution automatically unfair, under all circumstances? I wouldn't say that.

"I would say yes... I would say no..."

Oh, come on. Really, now? Try harder.

He was addressing two clearly defined points with two clearly defined answers. He's not contradicting himself, he's saying that he has the right to fair treatment, but that if you commit a sufficiently severe crime and leave sufficiently damning evidence being sentenced to death is fair treatment.

I was not claiming that he was contradicting himself. I implied that he was appealing to his own opinion.

[LaCroix]

Guess what happened to that guy? Sorry, still think Norwegians did prove their moral superiority.

In my opinion they just proved a different way of doing things. It isn't superior to what India did. If Norway had the economical problems that India did then I'd argue it to be inferior.

Also, if Norwegians executed Brevik, they would have made him a martyr for "the cause" among right elements, whe weren't that radical, yet.
For the Indians, executing a member of a radical terror organization that already has made several attacks; won't make the organization any worse.

[weemadando]

Not sure if this is permitted but... would the three people who voted "No, he may be innocent, and deserves a retrial- his "confession" was coerced" volunteer to explain why they did so? I'm fairly curious how that opinion came about.

It's voted it, not because I think he's innocent, but as I detailed in my original post, because the alleged coercion is a concern - and depending on what happened, he deserved the right to see those responsible for his mistreatment or torture face justice. From what I could see from his legal team's statements it seems that the allegations were ignored. Perhaps they were properly investigated and I couldn't find the articles about it.

However horrible he may have been, he's still a person and deserving of justice.

[UnderAGreySky]

Okay, I can see that line of thinking; thanks for answering. I do take issue with the "he may be innocent" part, but the reasons you give are not fully covered in the options.

[K. A. Pital]

You understand that there's a difference between a general principle on the one hand and your idealized assessment of a particular situation on the other? Does the Mumbai killer "deserve to die"? Arguably, yes. Is it wise to construct our justice system such that it is something we can make happen? That's something else again.

Exactly. Which is (among other things) why I oppose the death penalty. However, in this case they should have just put him into ordinary prison; then the convicts would kill him, and that's it - accidental death. Since the state cannot provide all people with solid safety bubbles that exclude the change of injury or death, neither should they give special protective treatment to criminals.

Your rights only extend as far as they can go without transgressing against other people's rights.

The tyranny of small decisions and general irreversibility of actions, as well as the sheer complexity of social interaction, render this point moot. At one point holding a slave was not considered a transgression against the slave's rights. And not that the slave necessarily had no rights either; for example the Indian slavery system allowed slaves to have wages and property, and even somehow protected these posessions. The sheer stupidity in relying on currently established social rights is manifested in the evolution of the category through the vast historical background that we can see from today. Rights are never solid and pre-determined, which makes relying on them quite arbitrary.