• The US federal government has the authority to, at any time, outlaw state-sanctioned murder across the country either via Supreme Court ruling or via constitutional amendment and tell states to kick rocks. It chooses not to do this. I don’t care that an amendment is “hard”; if it’s possible to do but it fails to do this, then it’s the federal government’s fault. The votes of about 355 legislators and the signature of Joe Biden 5 SCOTUS justices could end this today; it’s the stroke of a pen, and they simply don’t do it.
• This case went before the SCOTUS requesting an emergency block, where it was voted against 6–3. The SCOTUS had the power to trivially prevent this and decided not to.
• The majority of US states (27) as well as the federal government have state-sanctioned murder on the books as a legal criminal punishment. 12 states and the federal government have carried it out in the last 10 years.
• This is incidental to your overall point, but the current US population is ~337 million; “almost” 400 million is doing so much lifting there.

Edit: I accidentally became so sleep-deprived that I forgot a constitutional amendment has a separate proposal and ratification process. The SCOTUS method would 100% work, though, and it hasn’t yet been banned at the federal level which is a simple majority of Congress and a presidential signature, so they do overall endorse it.

Is the death penalty illegal at the federal level?

That is frankly a disgusting point of view. Death and non-rehabilitory imprisonment are both wrong but not because it “costs money”.

This is clearly from an incredibly privileged person, because if you understood how minoritized people are treated by the legal system you wouldn’t be arguing for more executions.

And the huge list of people executed by the state despite it being reasonably likely they’re actually innocent is… cheaper (it’s not), and therefore acceptable?

There’s also no way to profit from an execution so far as I can tell.

there absolutely is, with legal injections whoever sells them makes money, you save money as a prison by not having to house these people, and while you can’t exploit them for labor, there is never really a guarantee that you can. It’s a little more nuanced than this, for example solitary confinement generally makes it pretty hard to make money off of people. Death row is often a multi year process, taking many many thousands of dollars of human upkeep to keep it going.

technically you could go a step futher and say there’s a broader economic benefit to killing them as you can use it as some sort of social driving pressure. Stalinist USSR for example.

show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.

However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?

If the prisons are focused on rehabilitation and reintegration instead of just keeping people locked up and treating them like they’re not human? Yes. Do I believe prisons in the US are like that? No.

I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.

They just said they do not trust it though.

carceral slavery

legal prison slavery* (for those of you who don’t know that word)

Removed by mod

Maybe you should have read my whole statement before writing this wall of text?

I basically said that it is not okay, maybe you should have read the second sentence as well. But even with a “sentence of a couple years”, guilt has to be profen, not innocence. If there is plausible doubt of guilt, there shouldn’t be a guilty sentence.

Is “almost” anywhere in your definition of conviction? If so, you lack conviction.

Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Fantastic one-line explanation, I don’t think I’ve thought about this before but now that you’ve said it it feels like something obvious that I really should have understood already.

someone in the military describing the best way to decide who to kill

Read a book by a Navy SEAL who was in Afghanistan. He said if they were wearing black Reeboks they were fighters, shoot to kill on sight.

I’m betting he was right! But Jesus, using that as a hard criteria to execute someone?!

I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that’s fair and they’re OK with being the ones to do it.

It has always been this way. Particularly because there are people and groups who actively materially benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery and oppression of other people and groups within the social organization of our societies. The enforced poverty/slavery will never stop without sufficient and sufficiently organized, centralized, disciplined violence to overcome those who actively benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery by means of the same; and then maintaining that authority over the exploiters until their interest and strength are no more.

It’s the same reason why there’s never been a “peaceful bloodless decolonization.” Why would the colonizer ever willingly permit that? They would be, from a standpoint of their own material interest as a societal class, complete morons to do so and make such a willing choice. Which is why (and this is historically borne out) they must be not given a choice by an organized militant anti-colonial resistance. This is also why the “authoritarianism” criticism of the doctrine and practice of revolutionary groups like Castro’s revolutionaries or Lenin’s Bolsheviks is laughable; the liberal peanut gallery can only have that criticism because they succeeded and survived to be criticized; having overcome the oppressors who, in the event of the revolutionaries’ failure (historically borne out in how every failed revolution played out including the previous ones in those countries); would show the truth of themselves as 1000x more vicious, having honed that capability for 100x longer.

Look up any countries’ “Red Terror” in history, then look up their corresponding “White Terror.” You will see [wiki:NSFW images if you click on them]. Or read about any decolonization struggle. Like in Algeria, where every uprising that killed 10 Frenchmen resulted in a colonial reprisal with hundreds of butchered Algerians.

We live in a material reality with material interests which are enforced by people who will use your pacifism as a means to exploit you easier, and kill you easier if you even are seen as inconvenient or ‘in the way’ of those interests, let alone if you resist and struggle against them. And that argument has been happening since Marx and Engels’ time in the framework of materialism; and was exactly the realm of rationale behind the policy of terror with the Jacobins before that in the French Revolution; from which many later revolutionaries took lessons and learned from the mistakes and refined within their contemporary material conditions and circumstances.

The crimes of this guilty land will never be washed away. Period.

We should absolutely spill 'em, yes; but we should also never allow the world to forget what was allowed to transpire here.

I did not hit her I did Naaaaaht! Ohimark!

I’m only posting some context from Wikipedia, I didn’t make a comment in either direction