I think it is important to be reminded that first and foremost they are humans too. A basic level of respect does not mean you like or agree with them. Leading with the statements emphasises that.
Besides, aren't their last words the entire point of the site?
"Charles Thompson, executed January 28, 2026
In April 1998, Thompson forced his way into a Houston residence and shot a man and a woman following an argument. Both victims succumbed to their injuries as a result of the shooting."
Wow so they kept this guy for almost 30 years on death row and then killed him. USA is so fucked
They knew how broken the world is— they took part in the mayhem. They knew there is great evil around.
They found peace. Most asked forgiveness and apologized for what they had done. They left their relatives and friends with reasons to think of them as deeply flawed, but not completely terrible.
It seems a smart thing to do. It’s better than staying evil, frustrated and scared of your impending death.
The joke is in the long-winded, self-centered empty apologies and appeals to God; the punchline is in the subsequent brief and clinical descriptions of completely unforgivable acts. These are nauseating to read.
I appreciate the recommendation and I will read it (I also appreciate that you made a recommendation instead of downvoting me), however I don't think free will has much to do with this. If they were predetermined to be like this then I have sympathy for the bad dice roll, but once they've stomped an infant to death they're always that person. It doesn't change much about how to deal with them; you can't trust that they won't do it again no matter how much time passes, and that means that saying sorry and making Pascal's wager come off as completely hollow.
> That 'the system' is responsible for driving them to their actions ?
not the system, but the design of life itself we all sustain. the "system" is only a projection of it.
everything that happens in the world is your responsibility also, as you help make it happen. it's our world after all.
if something happens but is not supposed to happen, either the person made a mistake, or the design is broken and nudges to make it happen, or both. blame-the-person is the default strategy, but it doesn't lead to a better design, and it denies the plain reality that the design puts some people at the center, so they can party and are not to be bothered by the downsides of their actions, and others are pushed to the edge, and will fall off. by design.
you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone. it's what people at the center would think, but it's not a good idea to give them power over the design of our lives that puts them first.
there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
> everything that happens in the world is your responsibility also, as you help make it happen. it's our world after all.
No, there clearly are things that are 'outside the individual or groups control'. There are three kinds of events, things we can control, things we have partial control, and things we can't control.
Nobody is responsible for the sun rising, nobody is responsible for gravity. Nobody is responsible for another persons actions, each person has choice, love it or hate it they do.
If you can't see that I don't know what to say, we fundamentally have a disagreement on reality.
If individuals are 'responsible' for everything, we all should share the same yolk of punishment for individual actions, and this should extend to all sentient life, why stop at people, why not kill their pets and farm animals, trees and plants nearby, (I assume this is what you want, see what i did there ?)
> you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone
Please don't assume my take on caring for people, this take is very wrong.
> there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
The deeds are horrifying to read. You can do nothing wrong and die by hands of some piece of shit just because you were at wrong place at wrong time. follow up actions of some are even more sad and scary. Killing another human being meant nothing to some of murderers, like killing a fly.
Those apologies are too little too late. Good riddance.
I have no sympathy for them, and I’m all in for using those for involuntary dangerous drug testing and stuff like that. Those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did.
Yes, those acts are immensely terrible and the apologies feel minuscule by comparison. But I think there's room for more nuance here.
There are multiple reasons we put people in jail:
1. the victims can feel some vindication and retribution
2. other members of society can feel some vindication and retribution and a sense of justice
3. other would-be criminals are detered from committing similar crimes for fear of punishment
4. making people feel safe by showing them criminals are punished
5. removing a bad actor from society
6. reforming a bad actor and reintroducing them into society
Different cultures emphasize different combinations of reasons. For example, ine notable divide is how, in the US, 6. is considered to be the product of a naive mind, whereas in some nordic countries, that goal is taken seriously, with some amount of success (and perhaps at the detriment of other goals).
Anyway, I think your point is that, even if you take the convicts' apologies at face value, goals 1. and 2. remain unfulfilled. And 3. is probably weakened.
I've always felt very alone in my view on this, so don't feel bad if you disagree with me because most people probably do, but I just feel super morally icky when I hear about how part of our justice system is built around "retribution" / "vindication". Like it is one thing to punish, it is quite another to allow others to derive some sort of satisfaction from that punishment, even if they were victims, I just find it sick. It means as a society we are no better than the perpetrators at the end of the day.
> it is quite another to allow others to derive some sort of satisfaction from that punishment
I sometimes see this behavior in close friends, and it totally changes the way I see them. I don't know if it's a moral failing on their part, but I just don't experience the desire for vengeance the same way they do, and it really scares me to see how they experience it. What will they do when they start to have mental decline, and (incorrectly) decide they were wronged in some way? :(
I think this thought process is something that only people who have never been wronged can afford. There comes a time in life where the punishment must fit the crime, even if its only to make an example of the criminal.
Life is hard enough, we should deter crimes at every possibility, people are rarely punished for every evil they commit.
See this is my point though, it shouldn't matter what has happened to you, if that matters, then this is 100% emotional and not based on reason or justice.
Of course goal 1 is unfulfilled. Because victims are already dead. Often in very bad way.
I’m sure there are enough people who will consider goals 2, 4 and 5 fulfilled. I disagree with your assessment.
As I said - those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did. You don’t fix them or reintroduce them to society.
I don’t care about abstracts. I care about the fact that some of those scumbags were kept alive longer than their victims lived on this earth, and suffered less in their demise.
One of the man was convicted and put to death for killing his abusive mother. Don't get me wrong, killing is bad, he should feel bad and get punished, but his brother forgave him, he already did 20 (!) years, I don't know who you're protecting by putting him to death. A second mother?
I am not talking about generic inmates, who deserve all protection (“no cruel and unusual punishment”), I’m talking about people like ones from the website. Who did horrible stuff and were convicted to death for it.
I’m sure that if needed, society can develop necessary framework (declare them “legally dead” or something like that).
I consider the risk of wrongful conviction to be an argument against the death penalty and for the very same reason I'm against performing any kind of inhuman treatment of them (which might be worse than death).
Even if 95% would totally deserve it, I don't think we should just accept that on average 4 innocent people every year are just treated as subhumans just so we can unleash our wrath over those who did truly horrible things.
Death is still a better option rather than being used as lab rat
There should be doubt. There should be due process.
At the same time, I think that with the advancement of the tech (surveillance cameras everywhere, dna tests, the cell tower triangulation and/or mobile device location tracking) there are cases when the guilt can be established without any doubt, and the overall chance of wrongful conviction will drop down.
Hell, have you read the website? One of those pieces of shit made his accomplice to video the murder on the phone.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those convicted are rightfully convicted.
But paint me skeptical as to whether increased use of technology can actually improve the reliability of the proofs.
Imagine a world where deep fakes are much better quality but our system hasn't yet caught up to take that into proper consideration etc.
Serving for life is already a big deal as punishment goes. I'm just asking to not have experimental medical experiments on people. I'm not saying they should walk free
I was thinking about deep fakes and tech advancements. Yes, that will add doubts etc. but you know what? There always will be ways. If somebody was convicted in 2015 most likely there weren’t any deep fakes.
Let’s look at, let’s say, Apple and its tight control over entire hardware and software iPhone stack. Nothing prevents them to announce that starting from iPhone 19 they cryptographically sign the video to ensure that it’s authentic and, at least, the video and sound are what the camera saw. Pro cameras can do it, for Apple it’s even easier, more or less. I’m sure that even on this site there are experts who can design such system that is as secure as we expect from Apple devices. And that thing will slowly spread due to competitive pressures.
—-
Involuntarily drug testing was one of examples that I gave, and you seem to be against. To some it may be extreme, and I completely understand where you’re coming from. To me… as I said - for some examples from the side the murderers surely lost their human privilege. That comment summarized my feelings after reading the website in much more succinct form: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302490#47305803
Killing 13 month infant, putting bleach on 20 yo gas station employee and setting her on fire, stranding female who was screaming for help during sa. Mate, if your kidney is compatible with someone who is in need, you made your choice way too long ago to have any right to say anything now. Or if there are other uses that will benefit society and humanity as a whole - they are allowed. You are guilty (without doubt and with clear evidence) and sentenced to death. Now you have same amount of rights as cadaver on the table, but probably more uses while you still breathing.
The problem is that I do understand you! I do feel exactly as you do! My lizard brain would like to do all sorts of horrible retaliations to those people who performed such abhorrent acts. I get it, it's natural.
But I think that society should prevent this kind of basic instinctive response to become the way that we collectively handled those monstrosities, mainly because those punishments will be abused against innocent scapegoats.
The US has executed around hundreds of innocent wrongly convicted people that we're mostly to pretty certain of. And it has thrown a significant fraction of the lives away of around a million who were either innocent or committed very minor infractions, and condemned millions more to near civil death to remain permanently banished from society... untold numbers of innocents swept up to feed the for-profits prison slave labor camps and prevent certain people from voting.
It's always naive, unlearned, horrible people who clamor for "deterrence" and "revenge" via "throw away the key" and executions. Like Trump and the Central Park Five.
95% of your text has nothing to do with what I said and the issue being discussed.
Invoking Trump (that I don’t care about, especially in the context of this conversation) is so cheap... I suggest you to go straight to Godwin law and compare me to literal Hitler, because that’s the quality of your argument (lack of there of, to be precise).
The presumption and occasional assumption of justice system infallibility is breathtakingly arrogant. And then the bloodthirsty, heartless rabble that cheers on more pain and death without regard to actual guilt, incompetency, or innocence. Judge not ...
There's at least one wrongful conviction in there.
They should put the reason before the text so you know none of them are worth reading.
I think it is important to be reminded that first and foremost they are humans too. A basic level of respect does not mean you like or agree with them. Leading with the statements emphasises that.
Besides, aren't their last words the entire point of the site?
An interesting Asian counterpart is the Japanese death haiku.
MUMON GENSEN
Died on the twenty-second day of the third month, 1390 at the age of sixty-eight
Life is an ever-rolling wheel
And every day is the right one.
He who recites poems at his death
Adds frost to snow.
"Charles Thompson, executed January 28, 2026 In April 1998, Thompson forced his way into a Houston residence and shot a man and a woman following an argument. Both victims succumbed to their injuries as a result of the shooting."
Wow so they kept this guy for almost 30 years on death row and then killed him. USA is so fucked
Interesting but now suprizing how many have found solace in religion.
For a lot of parole boards "belief in a higher power" is a mandatory part of being eligible for any kind of clemency.
In other words: if they want to have any chance of making it out alive, they have to at least pretend to be religious.
Where else would you go?
They all knew they were going to die soon.
They knew how broken the world is— they took part in the mayhem. They knew there is great evil around.
They found peace. Most asked forgiveness and apologized for what they had done. They left their relatives and friends with reasons to think of them as deeply flawed, but not completely terrible.
It seems a smart thing to do. It’s better than staying evil, frustrated and scared of your impending death.
Just evil
How come no one ever makes a joke?
The joke is in the long-winded, self-centered empty apologies and appeals to God; the punchline is in the subsequent brief and clinical descriptions of completely unforgivable acts. These are nauseating to read.
I advise having a read through Sapolskys book "Determined" to get another perspective
I appreciate the recommendation and I will read it (I also appreciate that you made a recommendation instead of downvoting me), however I don't think free will has much to do with this. If they were predetermined to be like this then I have sympathy for the bad dice roll, but once they've stomped an infant to death they're always that person. It doesn't change much about how to deal with them; you can't trust that they won't do it again no matter how much time passes, and that means that saying sorry and making Pascal's wager come off as completely hollow.
"If they were predetermined to be like this..."
Lack of free will is not the same is predeterminism.
What is your goal in asking someone to read this book, we're supposed to have sympathy for those who have had a bad rap in nature and nurture.
That 'the system' is responsible for driving them to their actions ?
> That 'the system' is responsible for driving them to their actions ?
not the system, but the design of life itself we all sustain. the "system" is only a projection of it.
everything that happens in the world is your responsibility also, as you help make it happen. it's our world after all.
if something happens but is not supposed to happen, either the person made a mistake, or the design is broken and nudges to make it happen, or both. blame-the-person is the default strategy, but it doesn't lead to a better design, and it denies the plain reality that the design puts some people at the center, so they can party and are not to be bothered by the downsides of their actions, and others are pushed to the edge, and will fall off. by design.
you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone. it's what people at the center would think, but it's not a good idea to give them power over the design of our lives that puts them first.
there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
> everything that happens in the world is your responsibility also, as you help make it happen. it's our world after all.
No, there clearly are things that are 'outside the individual or groups control'. There are three kinds of events, things we can control, things we have partial control, and things we can't control.
Nobody is responsible for the sun rising, nobody is responsible for gravity. Nobody is responsible for another persons actions, each person has choice, love it or hate it they do.
If you can't see that I don't know what to say, we fundamentally have a disagreement on reality.
If individuals are 'responsible' for everything, we all should share the same yolk of punishment for individual actions, and this should extend to all sentient life, why stop at people, why not kill their pets and farm animals, trees and plants nearby, (I assume this is what you want, see what i did there ?)
> you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone
Please don't assume my take on caring for people, this take is very wrong.
> there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
Right back at ya ;P
You didn’t find the “that will be 5 dollars” one funny?
The deeds are horrifying to read. You can do nothing wrong and die by hands of some piece of shit just because you were at wrong place at wrong time. follow up actions of some are even more sad and scary. Killing another human being meant nothing to some of murderers, like killing a fly.
Those apologies are too little too late. Good riddance.
I have no sympathy for them, and I’m all in for using those for involuntary dangerous drug testing and stuff like that. Those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did.
Yes, those acts are immensely terrible and the apologies feel minuscule by comparison. But I think there's room for more nuance here.
There are multiple reasons we put people in jail:
1. the victims can feel some vindication and retribution
2. other members of society can feel some vindication and retribution and a sense of justice
3. other would-be criminals are detered from committing similar crimes for fear of punishment
4. making people feel safe by showing them criminals are punished
5. removing a bad actor from society
6. reforming a bad actor and reintroducing them into society
Different cultures emphasize different combinations of reasons. For example, ine notable divide is how, in the US, 6. is considered to be the product of a naive mind, whereas in some nordic countries, that goal is taken seriously, with some amount of success (and perhaps at the detriment of other goals).
Anyway, I think your point is that, even if you take the convicts' apologies at face value, goals 1. and 2. remain unfulfilled. And 3. is probably weakened.
I've always felt very alone in my view on this, so don't feel bad if you disagree with me because most people probably do, but I just feel super morally icky when I hear about how part of our justice system is built around "retribution" / "vindication". Like it is one thing to punish, it is quite another to allow others to derive some sort of satisfaction from that punishment, even if they were victims, I just find it sick. It means as a society we are no better than the perpetrators at the end of the day.
> it is quite another to allow others to derive some sort of satisfaction from that punishment
I sometimes see this behavior in close friends, and it totally changes the way I see them. I don't know if it's a moral failing on their part, but I just don't experience the desire for vengeance the same way they do, and it really scares me to see how they experience it. What will they do when they start to have mental decline, and (incorrectly) decide they were wronged in some way? :(
You're definitely not alone and I 100% share the thought in your last sentence.
I think this thought process is something that only people who have never been wronged can afford. There comes a time in life where the punishment must fit the crime, even if its only to make an example of the criminal.
Life is hard enough, we should deter crimes at every possibility, people are rarely punished for every evil they commit.
I was mugged as a teenager, and my house was burned down as an adult because a drug dealer lived on the same street.
Does that count me as sufficiently wronged to not be dismissed for sharing the parent posters viewpoint?
If it doesn't.. it wasnt.
See this is my point though, it shouldn't matter what has happened to you, if that matters, then this is 100% emotional and not based on reason or justice.
Of course goal 1 is unfulfilled. Because victims are already dead. Often in very bad way.
I’m sure there are enough people who will consider goals 2, 4 and 5 fulfilled. I disagree with your assessment.
As I said - those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did. You don’t fix them or reintroduce them to society.
I don’t care about abstracts. I care about the fact that some of those scumbags were kept alive longer than their victims lived on this earth, and suffered less in their demise.
> Because victims are already dead.
In this case, I was thinking of the family as the "victims", but, yes, you do have a point.
The Nordic countries do not have the demographics of the US. There’s some kind of person who is not reformable.
One of the man was convicted and put to death for killing his abusive mother. Don't get me wrong, killing is bad, he should feel bad and get punished, but his brother forgave him, he already did 20 (!) years, I don't know who you're protecting by putting him to death. A second mother?
> Those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did.
If inmates don't get human rights, then every single person is just a corrupt judge away from becoming a non-person.
No matter how horrible a person has acted, the government simply cannot be trusted not to abuse such power.
Please don’t rephrase me so it’s easier to argue.
I am not talking about generic inmates, who deserve all protection (“no cruel and unusual punishment”), I’m talking about people like ones from the website. Who did horrible stuff and were convicted to death for it.
I’m sure that if needed, society can develop necessary framework (declare them “legally dead” or something like that).
I consider the risk of wrongful conviction to be an argument against the death penalty and for the very same reason I'm against performing any kind of inhuman treatment of them (which might be worse than death).
Even if 95% would totally deserve it, I don't think we should just accept that on average 4 innocent people every year are just treated as subhumans just so we can unleash our wrath over those who did truly horrible things.
Death is still a better option rather than being used as lab rat
There should be doubt. There should be due process.
At the same time, I think that with the advancement of the tech (surveillance cameras everywhere, dna tests, the cell tower triangulation and/or mobile device location tracking) there are cases when the guilt can be established without any doubt, and the overall chance of wrongful conviction will drop down.
Hell, have you read the website? One of those pieces of shit made his accomplice to video the murder on the phone.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those convicted are rightfully convicted.
But paint me skeptical as to whether increased use of technology can actually improve the reliability of the proofs.
Imagine a world where deep fakes are much better quality but our system hasn't yet caught up to take that into proper consideration etc.
Serving for life is already a big deal as punishment goes. I'm just asking to not have experimental medical experiments on people. I'm not saying they should walk free
I was thinking about deep fakes and tech advancements. Yes, that will add doubts etc. but you know what? There always will be ways. If somebody was convicted in 2015 most likely there weren’t any deep fakes.
Let’s look at, let’s say, Apple and its tight control over entire hardware and software iPhone stack. Nothing prevents them to announce that starting from iPhone 19 they cryptographically sign the video to ensure that it’s authentic and, at least, the video and sound are what the camera saw. Pro cameras can do it, for Apple it’s even easier, more or less. I’m sure that even on this site there are experts who can design such system that is as secure as we expect from Apple devices. And that thing will slowly spread due to competitive pressures.
—-
Involuntarily drug testing was one of examples that I gave, and you seem to be against. To some it may be extreme, and I completely understand where you’re coming from. To me… as I said - for some examples from the side the murderers surely lost their human privilege. That comment summarized my feelings after reading the website in much more succinct form: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302490#47305803
Killing 13 month infant, putting bleach on 20 yo gas station employee and setting her on fire, stranding female who was screaming for help during sa. Mate, if your kidney is compatible with someone who is in need, you made your choice way too long ago to have any right to say anything now. Or if there are other uses that will benefit society and humanity as a whole - they are allowed. You are guilty (without doubt and with clear evidence) and sentenced to death. Now you have same amount of rights as cadaver on the table, but probably more uses while you still breathing.
The problem is that I do understand you! I do feel exactly as you do! My lizard brain would like to do all sorts of horrible retaliations to those people who performed such abhorrent acts. I get it, it's natural.
But I think that society should prevent this kind of basic instinctive response to become the way that we collectively handled those monstrosities, mainly because those punishments will be abused against innocent scapegoats.
The US has executed around hundreds of innocent wrongly convicted people that we're mostly to pretty certain of. And it has thrown a significant fraction of the lives away of around a million who were either innocent or committed very minor infractions, and condemned millions more to near civil death to remain permanently banished from society... untold numbers of innocents swept up to feed the for-profits prison slave labor camps and prevent certain people from voting.
It's always naive, unlearned, horrible people who clamor for "deterrence" and "revenge" via "throw away the key" and executions. Like Trump and the Central Park Five.
95% of your text has nothing to do with what I said and the issue being discussed.
Invoking Trump (that I don’t care about, especially in the context of this conversation) is so cheap... I suggest you to go straight to Godwin law and compare me to literal Hitler, because that’s the quality of your argument (lack of there of, to be precise).
The presumption and occasional assumption of justice system infallibility is breathtakingly arrogant. And then the bloodthirsty, heartless rabble that cheers on more pain and death without regard to actual guilt, incompetency, or innocence. Judge not ...