[greggyb]

I see a lot of people playing language lawyer with what it means "to die."

I think another fruitful thing to think about what "for life" means. It is not unreasonable to interpret "for life" as "while living", instead of "until dead."

Indeed, the sentence if "life in prison" is logically equivalent to "no life outside of prison." No one debates the fact that this man is alive now. If his sentence is to live only in prison, then there is no issue.

The interesting case is whether declining to honor his DNR counts as cruel and unusual punishment by extending his term in prison.

[sandworm101]

But remember that this is America, where super-natural sentencing is a norm. Prisons are filled with people serving double, triple or "life plus 100 years" sentences. Logic isn't running this show.

[aaomidi]

I honestly think there's nothing more disgusting than imprisoning someone.

I've actually made this argument in my social sciences class that the reason prison sentences are so long is that people generally thought/think the afterlife exists. It's easy to take away an individuals right to life when you think there's going to be another one in another life.

I would personally much rather have the death penalty than anything above 5 years in prison. I don't understand how we're collectively okay with just caging a human being... It's so terrifying and disgusting.

The act of imprisonment for over 5 years itself is a cruel and unusual punishment :(

[greggyb]

I'm not trying to pull a "gotcha!" or oversimplify your position or anything else devious. I am honestly curious about your answer to this question, given your position above:

What do you think about cases where the accused is found not guilty after some long period of time (longer than your five years, or any other threshold we might negotiate)? There are certainly cases where accused have been released after such time spans. There are also cases of accused being pardoned or having their sentences commuted after this period of time. These people would be denied that chance if they were killed instead.

[aaomidi]

Oh I'm not for killing anyone. Heck I have a problem with a LOT of our system. I'm just saying if I knew I was guilty I would like to have the option to die.

I'm very against state enforced killing.

[chriselles]

Do you believe that imprisonment is more disgusting that premeditated murder, rape, felony assault?

If so, can you please elaborate?

What alternatives do you suggest as sufficient deterrence to and effective punishment for the crimes of murder, rape, and felony assault?

[aaomidi]

I think in the short term we're kinda fucked. But in the long term I would like if we tried to make these crimes not happen. Find out why they're happening.

Can we help these criminals before they become criminals essentially?

And I wasn't saying we should get rid of prison, rather allow the person to choose death if they wish.

I'd also like to see if we can actually slowly introduce them back to society, slowly give more freedoms back or help them take jobs that gives their life meaning.

It's a hard problem and we definitely don't have the correct solution right now.

[javagram]

The person already suggested an alternative: execution.

That’s what human societies did for those crimes for thousands of years after all. The replacement of execution with prison is relatively modern, pre-industrial societies couldn’t afford to run prisons and punished using capital punishment, slavery, or exile instead.

(Of course we did switch for a reason, prison was thought to be more humane than the above)

[jaffau]

Beware the downvoting theists...

[dang]

Could you please not post flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar? We're hoping to avoid that here.

(Also, if you read them to the end, you'll find that the site guidelines you not to go on about downvotes in comments. Downvotes can be annoying but the posts about them are boring and do no good.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[weaksauce]

The logic there is if the criminal appeals and gets a charge dropped due to a technicality or some other issue then they are still in jail. Not ideal but not without logic.

[sandworm101]

"Technicality" is a euphemism for "constitutional rights". You don't get out of prison because the cop spelled your name wrong as he booked you. You get out because, in the eyes of the system that sentenced you in the first place, someone steamrolled over rights enshrined at the heart of the American system. Those rights are meaningless if governments may violate them without repercussion. The sum of all the "technicalities" is the thing we call freedom.

[sparky_z]

I not sure where you're going with this. If someone committed 10 murders, but the turns out to have been wrongly accused for the 11th, should that be a get-out-of-jail for the other 10?

[beerandt]

Which seemingly would cover this exact situation. Even if his sentence was complete, he would have more life sentences to serve.

Of course that's a big hypothetical "if."

[lumberingjack]

This so much. Not only are the length strange but it seems like if you don't have a good lawyer and you really didn't do anything you get convicted for attempted (fill in the blank) I've seen people get convicted of attempted assault what even is attempted assault.

[greggyb]

Attempted assault is a bit weird, simply because the crime of assault is typically defined to include both attempts at and successes at causing bodily harm to another.

That said, the concept of punishing attempted crimes is well established. After all, if one of the goals of having a criminal legal system is to prevent crime, we should punish those who attempt to commit crimes.

If someone fires a loaded gun at you, and you're lucky enough for them to miss, they should still be punished for the attempt to inflict harm on you or potentially kill you.

We can certainly debate whether the legal system should take more of a "no harm, no foul" kind of approach, but I hope the explanation above helps to clarify why our current legal system penalizes attempted and successful crimes.