LogFAQs > #931436676

Jakyl25 posted...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/11/us/death-penalty-family-plea-daniel-lewis-lee/index.html

Where do we all stand on a situation like this? I expect it might not break down along usual ideological lines

I'm against the death penalty and don't believe the state should be in the business of executing people. FWIW, I also think life in prison is the "harsher" penalty so even to the extent that people argue in favor of the death penalty out of revenge it rings hollow to me because in my view it's the easy way out for the criminal in question.

So really that belief of mine would apply here without even analyzing this case specifically, but doing that... yeah, the prosecution of this case seems motivated more by revenge than anything else - and by the part of the government no less. Jury returned a life sentence for the alleged ringleader of the crime and the prosecution intended to seek the same sentence here until DOJ overruled the Arkansas prosecutors in charge of the case and told them to seek the death penalty.

It really gets fishy when you get to the part where two federal judges cast doubt on whether a death sentence would have been returned had the prosecution not used discredited science to cast him as someone who would be a psychopath in prison and honestly this one is more key to me - misled the jury about a prior murder that had been falsely attributed to him to argue he would be a danger in prison. The judges couldn't do anything because of procedural limitations however.

I'm curious as to what exactly those procedural limitations are because honestly? The way it reads there is that the judges had cause to believe the death penalty was handed down on discredited science and misleading information given by the prosecution but are restricted from acting because of some technicality so I'd have really appreciated some more detail on the procedural limitations in play here.

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