• 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?

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?

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.

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.

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

Like a book can be judged by its cover cause its all the same book?

Puppy rape? Is that supposed to be an argument?

Actually SCOTUS speaks for Trump since he was the POS that installed them.

Where are you from?

ok so technically, regime is just a sort of generic term more often than not used to talk about a “government leadership” for ex. “stalins regime” or a “dictators regime” beyond that it’s use is usually specifically with reference to how the government operates.

An “anti rights regime” for ex. The problem that i have, is that not only does this, just not really apply, because we’re talking about a specific state, exercising independent rights over capital punishment, arguably illegally and immorally, considering the evidence we have doesn’t demonstrate him to be the murderer in this case.

The title frames it as if the “US” “regime” whatever that means, idk if it’s implying the president, the federal government, or the federal government and the state government, or that specific state government, there are so many levels of government in the US it’s really not appropriate to call it a “regime” you could call the trump admin or biden admin specifically a regime i guess. Though i’m not really sure what the point of that would be.

The title reads as if the “US government” (an entity, which is not an appropriate description) solely and single handedly murdered a guy who was not actually a criminal (which to be fair, did happen) and then it says “another” like it happens extremely regularly or something. Which while it happens more often than not, there aren’t that many to begin with? There have only been 18 so far as of this year. Even in the last like 50 years, only 200 people have been “exonerated” for their crimes. (only about 1600 people executed in that time as well) Most of those have been black, a majority even, the next highest is white and Hispanic, which make sense. So that seems to follow the populous of the jails at least from what i would expect. It looks like there have been about 20 “very likely innocent” people that have been executed in the same period.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/ most of my info has been from here and memory, don’t take it as gospel.

Like with all due respect, i just think this is an incredibly irresponsible and flagrant way to phrase the title specifically. Data doesn’t support it, the sheer numbers don’t support it either. Like the actual number is 0.000004% percent of the US population have been sentenced to death, and executed in the US since 1976. The VAST majority of that coming from the south.

Again, i don’t support capital punishment, i think it should be illegal, although i think if we’re going to keep it legal we should make them public, that way people actually have to deal with the consequences of the law. But It’s so miniscule to other problems like healthcare access, and obesity, that i really don’t think it warrants the title that implies the government is literally executing people on a whim as it pleases with no regard for anything at all.

TL;DR the title is extremely generous and i think rather inflammatory for something that simply doesn’t warrant it given the stats and figures, as well as the political structure of the government, and the clear public sentiment on the problem at hand.

not all that oppressive

so far the worst thing that’s happened is an abortion ban, which is highly unpopular. As far as oppression goes, that’s pretty good, not great obviously, but it’s not killing people for protesting levels of oppression either so.

not all that anti-democratic

we literally live in a country with a democratic republic system, and multiple levels of government with independence. The worst thing to happen in the last 10 years was trump trying to over throw democracy, which i will remind you, didn’t work. Some people might point to kamala harris being on the ticket but that’s stupid, you can’t expect a primary party vote this close to locking in politicians, kamala was also the VP of the previous admin, so it’s not that different, and she also has her name on the super PAC funding as well. There just aren’t many options there. And even then, that doesn’t prevent you from voting, somehow. You can still vote for kill stein if you like supporting russian agents i guess. Or trump, if you hate democracy i guess. Or just some other dude.

under a post about an innocent person being executed despite mountains of exonerative evidence

i was complaining about the title and the wording of the title?

well yeah the productive discussion is “stop doing the death penalty, it’s stupid”

For the innocent victims of the death penalty, I imagine it feels like a regime.

well i mean yeah, that would be the second definition of regime, even doing shit like renewing your license feels like dealing with a regime. Dealing with any government is technically “regime” like if you think about it for long enough.