When is Imprisonment worse then Death?

[someone_else]

HOW do you ever make that distinction?

The only plausible way would be by legislator fiat. That is you codify the legislator's opinions on "when enough is enough" into law.

Which is no answer at all.

Why? You asked HOW, I told you how democracies take decisions giving the finger to morals since those change from individual to individual and from generation to generation (death penalty was standard practice and everyone agreed with it in the past). This or any other issue would make no difference in practice.

That's not what we were talking about, though.

Last sentence from the OP:
So, dealing with people who can and will escape standard prisons with ease to terrorize society again, at what point (if any) do you say "screw it, it will be monstrously expensive and infeasible to keep this man, and he'll live in conditions we could never, ever, allow for the other prisoners. It's kinder to just put a bullet in the back of his head."?

You start dropping standard anti-death-penalty arguments since the beginning, so it may be that you didn't understand well what the point of this thread was.

Because an entire state is going to go bancrupt by imprisoning someone?

Maybe you haven't read harry potter so you could not understand what the hell he was talking about in 60% of the OP. It's a crappy book for the masses so I can understand you, to make it simpler I can tell you that each adult wizard of HP can do what an entire platoon of marvel superheroes can do, like teleporting around non-stop, summoning decent critters, blowing stuff up, controlling people, reding minds, erasing memories, and so on. It's like a level 10 D&D 3.5 wizard with a full spellbook and limitless spell-ammo.

In the movies they play it down a little and only do lotsa phew phew, but in the books they know far better than phew-phew-spells.

Imprisoning such a being without a D&D antimagic field that takes away his powers requires pretty fucking extreme prisons.

And when you have dozens or even hundreds of these beings.... uh, that's a definite cost.

if a flying bulletproof man is found committing a crime, and we arrest a flying bulletproof man... a competent judiciary should have a lot less trouble identifying the guilty party beyond any plausible doubt.

I scream RACIST!!!! to that. You're biased against flying bulltproof men just because of their race !
If there are more than 1 flying bulletproof men in the same general area (and also women and children), things get harder.
Like for example the OP's example of Azkaban. Every wizard in HP-verse can be sent to Azkaban, and they can be innocent as well just like normal humans.

Although I'd be sympathetic if you said "then this should be moved to Fantasy..."

Seconded. Ths way it's easier to avoid people thinking it's just another Standard Death Penalty thread.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Is it your place to decide whether or not that person would rather be dead? No, it isn't. Especially so, since death is very final, while people can be released from prison. Civilized states don't kill people, unless they really really have to in order to save others.

Because it is inhuman of us to keep some people confined. Personal choice is not the only thing that matters in the universe. If you want to call all of human history barbaric, go right ahead, I'm proud to be a barbarian then, but it shows how silly you are. Humans are social creatures, and it is demeaning to society to keep people confined. It's fundamentally more corrosive to the society presented with the choice of "death or tortuous confinement" to choose the later; it's corrupting, it promotes an attitude of indifference to suffering. It is certainly better for that reason to execute people who cannot be safely confined in groups (i.e., in a mentally healthy social situation for humans) than to keep them alive. Of course how many people there are like this I'm not sure; European countries don't seem to have the same problems with prisoners murdering each other that the US does. But when they do exist as a product of their own minds rather than prison conditions, there is very little choice but to shoot them unless we want a sort of social corrosion where we value arcane definitions of rights over the actual healthy maintenance of the social organism and the actual biopsychological outcomes within individual humans.

[Simon_Jester]

I still think, also, that there's a contradiction between saying "it's the prisoner's right, not ours, to decide if they want to live out a life sentence in prison" and saying "put the prisoner on suicide watch."

And yet we do put prisoners on suicide watch if we think they're likely to harm themselves. If we use "it's their choice not ours" as an anti-death penalty argument, we can't do that without denying them the very choice we claim to be giving them.

[InnerBrat]

I am continually surprised (in that 'yes, I know it's due to narrative imperative shutup' way) that New Jersey or whichever state Gotham is in, has not introduced the death penalty, because while I understand vigilantes on the streets being averse to killing, on the 50th time Joker escaped and went on a killing spree, you'd think SOMEONE in office would say "goddamn it, death penalty!"

I am sympathetic to Skgoa in that in the real world I am fully against state-sanctioned executions. Absolutely against it for any number of reasons. But the rate of prison breaks and the potential damage for any one criminal is incredibly lower in the Real World.

But here's the thing - we know from our Real World experiences that keeping someone on death row is incredibly expensive to the state, and while we go through procedure after procedure to establish guilt - the Wizarding World has a deeply flawed justice system, and so do the Marvel and DC universes by virtue of being based on RL systems - the cost racks up.

However, if the option is Dementors-for-Life or Avada Kedavra, which as far as we know does no harm to the body and causes no pain, I would change my mind and go behind the latter. We have seen what happens to a man who is subjected to Dementors for a decade, and it is inarguable Not Good and equivalent to torture.
(Though, seriously, Wizarding World, you know you can do better. You made a secondary school into a defendable fortress. Use some of those charms on a prison, why don't you?)

Similarly, solitary confinement-for-life on animals as inherently social and large-bodied as humans is akin to torture. So yes, if you could prove without reasonable doubt that - for example Poison Ivy, Magneto, Mr. Freeze, or Sebastian Shaw, who by virtue of their powers need a solitary cell; or hell, Joker, Cheshire and Bullseye who for fucks' sake look at their body count - were guilty, then I'd probably support the death penalty as more humane than the kind of confinement they need.

if a flying bulletproof man is found committing a crime, and we arrest a flying bulletproof man... a competent judiciary should have a lot less trouble identifying the guilty party beyond any plausible doubt.

Actually there is precedent against that in the Marvel Universe, courtesy of Matt Murdock, who successfully argued that having the required powers to commit a crime does not prove guilt. Of course, this WAS in the Marvel Universe, where people with superpowers are ten a penny.

So I guess my answer is: at the point at which the choice is life in solitary confinement and/or constant pain, or death, and the crime (and chances of reoffending) are above a certain threshold, then death becomes the humane option.

Which still sucks for the executioner.

[Simon_Jester]

if a flying bulletproof man is found committing a crime, and we arrest a flying bulletproof man... a competent judiciary should have a lot less trouble identifying the guilty party beyond any plausible doubt.

Actually there is precedent against that in the Marvel Universe, courtesy of Matt Murdock, who successfully argued that having the required powers to commit a crime does not prove guilt. Of course, this WAS in the Marvel Universe, where people with superpowers are ten a penny.

Not quite what I meant.

Put this way. Suppose that you know a crime was committed by a left-handed redhead between 76 and 78 inches tall. Left-handed redheads make up only 0.5% of the population, and people that tall make up only a small fraction of those. So it's pretty easy to exclude most people as suspects. There may only be a few hundred people in an entire major metropolitan area who could possibly be mistaken for the criminal, and most of them will easily be able to produce alibis, or evidence proving they were not the criminal.

It's still possible that the wrong person will end up in jail, but it's a lot less likely than it would be if we were looking at "suspect is a caucasian male, between 68 and 73 inches tall, brown hair, brown eyes."

Likewise, there are only so many radioactive giants on Earth even in a superhero setting. It's entirely possible that you could find and discard all but one of them as having an ironclad alibi or not matching some other forensic thing. At the end of that process, if you have enough other evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, I'd feel very very comfortable saying "this is the right person, there is effectively no possibility of it being a frame-up." Faking the presence of a radioactive giant or mistaking him for someone else would be a lot harder than doing the same with a normal person.

Which removes the single biggest moral objection to the death penalty, and the one that usually puts ME decisively against it in real life.

[InnerBrat]

With you on that.

Of course, there's always this factor in most superhero universes, which I think emphasizes just how flawed their justice system can be.

[Ziggy Stardust]

You also have to consider that this is a world full of shape-shifters, powerful psychic beings, and any number of strange supernatural beings that could easily trick witnesses into thinking they saw the Hulk or whoever. Hell, the entire plot of "Watchmen" revolves around Adrian's ability to fake a Dr. Manhattan attack (the movie, anyway).