Just days before inmate Freddie Owens is set to die by lethal injection in South Carolina, the friend whose testimony helped send Owens to prison is saying he lied to save himself from the death chamber.
Owens is set to die at 6 p.m. Friday at a Columbia prison for the killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk in 1997.
But Owens’ lawyers on Wednesday filed a sworn statement from his co-defendant Steven Golden late Wednesday to try to stop South Carolina from carrying out its first execution in more than a decade.
Prosecutors reiterated that several other witnesses testified that Owens told them he pulled the trigger. And the state Supreme Court refused to stop Owens’ execution last week after Golden, in a sworn statement, said that he had a secret deal with prosecutors that he never told the jury about.
That the United States holds ourselves a bastion of democracy and human rights is absolutely absurd. The death penalty shouldn’t exist; This is quite possibly murder.
I understand you’re speaking casually, but in fact many of us do not say that. It’s always a risky proposition when you conflate an organization with individuals in it.
Yeah but it’s many who do agree with it. In this case there’s enough elected officials who’s constituents want the death penalty to be a thing. Ours isn’t a perfect democracy but to argue our government isn’t a representation of its citizens is just a lie
In that case, you should be talking about which state did the execution, because the death penalty is state-specific. It’s not the country that did it, it’s the state. So target those people.
Also, you’re saying that the government represents its citizens because it’s a democracy. Of course that’s not true. Elected officials might represent the majority of voters, or they might pass legislation that is supported by a majority of voters on a given issue. But then what about the minority? They still exist. Please don’t forget about them. Please don’t pretend that the government is representing them.
(And sometimes that’s a good thing. There are people who have fringe views, and depending on those views I’m happy that they don’t have political power.)
I think the original statement that the US can hardly be thought of as a bastion of human rights when allowing death penalty to be used on state level is true anyway.
We have to do something about people who can’t be in society.
Many people can be rehabilitated but some cannot. For them, our options are killing them or imprisoning them permanently.
I’m not sure, of those two options, which is a greater violation of rights.
I do think that permanent imprisonment immediately becomes less of a rights violation if the prisoner is given the option to commit suicide in a painless way.
But if they’re forcibly kept alive, or forced to do something horrific like banging their head into concrete to escape their life, I think it’s very possible that’s a greater injustice than simply ending them.
Well, you could work with them like in Scandinavian countries. Prison doesn’t have to be torture, right? People don’t have to suffer there and do horrific things to kill themselves to escape the suffering.
Killing somebody because they killed somebody just seems hypocritical. Regardless of the ethics.
From a strict utilitarian “this person is an active threat to the lives of others and cannot be rehabilitated” perspective, I get it. We kill wild animals for a lot less. Given perfect knowledge I don’t have a hard line against execution.
But that’s a hell of a hypothetical. Lots of violence is circumstantial and not necessarily and indication of future behavior, especially if we actually gave a shit about mental health and improving the living conditions of struggling people. Far too many convictions are improper or outright incorrect. Society should have a responsibility to care for the worst of itself. It all stacks up to “do we trust ourselves, and our government, with something so extreme and irreversible?”
Well it always costs more, in the US Justice system, to execute someone than to keep them in prison for life. So that alone throws out the utilitarian approach. We’re all paying extra just to kill him now than if we just kept him locked up for life because he might be a direct threat to everyone and not be rehabilitated.
It’s not that cut-and-dry. Yes the monetary cost is higher, mostly due to appeals and such and I’m not suggesting we do things to make the conviction and sentence less certain. But there’s an argument to be made that a lifetime of solitary imprisonment, necessary for this hypothetical criminal, is more cruel than death.
Perhaps it should be a lifetime of imprisonment, with access to a painless suicide option.
That’s a very coercive relationship, I don’t think there’s an ethical way to implement “optional” suicide when the only alternative is the other party having total control over your life.
Yes it is a very coercive relationship. It should only be used on people who have proven incapable of having non-coercive relationships with others.
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I’m not sure there are people so unrecoverable that they need a lifetime in solitary. I’m fact I’m not sure how you pass the cruel and unusual criteria with that. Even in super max prisons for people who WANT to go out and kill strangers for example, they are able to regularly socialize and exercise and have mental stimulation. So no I don’t think there are a lot of people where spending extra money to kill them would be “more humane”. Seems more like a straw man/hypothetical than a practical reality.
I did literally use the word “hypothetical” to couch my statement. It should probably be reserved for people whose existence is dangerous to society as part of a larger movement, cult leaders or treasonous generals or some such that have a substantial influence beyond their confinement. I know: martyrdom, you can’t kill an idea, etc. Not sure I buy it.
There are ways to silence those people without killing them though. Theoretically that is the reason that GITMO exists.
That’s the reason the intelligence agencies seek influence in people’s lives. You can silence a person simply by disrupting their income. If they overcome those measures, you can escalate, but the “minimum” intervention is to fuck with their life and relationships.
Guantanamo Bay is a pretty rough argument to hold up, considering its history of human rights abuse and the fact that it’s stolen land from another sovereign state. (“Perpetual lease” for a fucking pittance. Bullying weak neighbors more like.) Not exactly on a clear moral high ground.
But we can stop people from killing. We can get into questions of mercy killing when we start talking about supermax for life. But at the end of the day once someone’s in custody and known to be extremely violent they’re able to be stopped from killing people.
If that is your only benchmark for morality, sure.
I don’t have a problem with the death penalty as a concept.
I have a problem with the fact that it disproportionately is given to people of color where evidence is dubious and circumstantial.
Treason and sedition should still be capital crimes.
I do, when you start putting the right to kill for crimes, in the hands of the state, you’ve lost the plot in democracy.
well we also made a ton of dubious self defense loopholes, so the state doesn’t have a monopoly
not to diminish your point - but separately - also disproportionately innocent people
I agree. You kill someone, your life should also be over. There is no rehabilitation, you don’t get a second chance. There is no “making it right”, you ended the life of another person and no you go bye-bye as well.
But there needs to be certainty, and the way it is handed out now (especially in red states) is atrocious.
I keep reading these comments of people talking about how the murderer can be rehabilitated and then society is better. No, it’s not. And if someone killed their loved one they would be singing a completely different tune.
You keep saying kill and not murder. In our legal system there’s some pretty significant differences.