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[PTTG??]

California and Oregon are definitely not San Fransisco and Portland, though.

So that emoluments clause, eh? Crazy how little it matters right now.

[smjjames]

The states that abolish the death penalty are pretty varied too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Abolitionist_States_and_Their_Years_of_Abolition

Some of them did it more recently, some did in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a few did more than a hundred years further back. Some of those are pretty solidly Republican states too, so, it also says something that despite Republican domination in some of those places, they didn’t change that.

[Dunamisdeos]

Pretty sure Christians stoned heretics and witches once upon a time, though burning was the preferred.

Burning was a protestant thing. Other Christians weren't very much into that, going for other methods instead.

I think it was hanging? To my knowledge some leaders at the time thought stoning should be re-implemented, but it never caught on.

Dark stuff, this Ameripol thread. Interestingly, upon checking wikipedia, it looks like witch-burning was primarily a European thing. In the good old USA we mostly burned escaped slaves, or slaves that were suspected of possibly wanting to escape. Surprising.

Some of them did it more recently, some did in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a few did more than a hundred years further back. Some of those are pretty solidly Republican states too, so, it also says something that despite Republican domination in some of those places, they didn’t change that.

Honestly, this is a new subject for me. I was also looking through those same articles for info, and that was my conclusion as well.
The states that abolish the death penalty are pretty varied too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Abolitionist_States_and_Their_Years_of_Abolition

[smjjames]

I think we’ve gotten to darker more unpleasant places before, that I wouldn’t want to return to, also, you accidentally put your response into the second quote there dunamisdeos

[Trekkin]

Plenty of the states that allow the death penalty are not predominantly right wing. California and Oregon some to mind. Trying to pin it on the right is disingenuous.

I was actually curious about whether this held up in terms of actual executions, so I went and grabbed the most recent set of executions and death row inmates per million population by state I could find (which turned out to be from 2011, which might mitigate the impact of the lethal injection shortage on the data) and correlated it to partisan lean as represented by Cook PVI. I get a Spearman's rho of 0.38 for executions per capita since 1976 and 0.33 for 2011 death row inmates per capita relative to Republican lean.

Now, there are some significant holes to be poked in this, but it would appear that more right-wing states tend, albeit weakly, to execute a larger number of people per capita.

[Shazbot]

Which side of the fence would you walk down the street on? Would you let your un-escorted, unwed sister walk on? Its a little judgmental and unevolved of me, sure, but that same lizard brain kept every one of my ancestors alive to survive until reproduction.

The triune brain hypothesis (from which we get the reptilian complex you've simplified into "lizard brain") has been strongly contradicted by both behavioral studies of modern sauropsids and paleontological evidence for earlier origins of neocortex-like pallial anatomy than was understood in MacLean's day. The synapsid ancestors to which you presumably refer benefited in a reproductive fitness sense from "paleomammalian" nurturant behaviors (and altruism more broadly) as much or more as they did the kind of stereotypical reptilian behavior you're now using to defend your geopolitical views on the grounds that 320 million years ago it helped a bunch of lizards get laid.

You read into things really hard.

[nenjin]

No, I think he read in to it just the right amount. Maybe say what you actually mean to explain your beliefs instead of falling back on buzzwords and colloquialisms, then trying to make someone else look stupid for it.

[Dunamisdeos]

@Trekkin

I'm actually super interested, now. Could you link me to that info? I appreciate you doing the legwork there.

[Trekkin]

@Trekkin

I'm actually super interested, now. Could you link me to that info? I appreciate you doing the legwork there.

Sure, but I am absolutely sure there are better data sets out there for both of these; this was literally me throwing around the first numbers I could find on the bus ride home. Here's the death penalty data I used : https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/sep/21/death-penalty-statistics-us#data

And the Cook PVI I grabbed off Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_Partisan_Voting_Index#List_of_PVIs

[Dunamisdeos]

That's very interesting. Also, it's interesting that some of the states with the lower actual executions (Pennsylvania and California, for example) have huge numbers of inmates actually on death row (3/219 and 13/721, respectively).

This is from 2011 of course, I wonder what data exists on today?

EDIT:

There's a site called https://deathpenaltyinfo.org that shows that a huge number of those Pennsylvania death row inmates, hundreds in fact, had their sentences reduced to life in prison. They also have a lotta-lot of resources on the subject.

[smjjames]

Speaking of California, there were actually two popositions on the ballot in 2016 asking about what to do with the death penalty, so, the issue has actually come up here recently.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah according to that website there are multiple "abolitionist" movements in California looking to get rid of the death penalty altogether. Most other states seem to have one or two organized attempts to get rid of it too.

Texas apparently just zaps everyone they can with 400+ executions.

[Hanslanda]

I hate to say it, but Texas has the right idea. If they fail two appeals, fry their ass. Or gas them. Or whatever, preferably something humane and painless. I'm a moderate liberal, but fuck man. Murderers and torturers and serial rapists. At what point does it become okay to live, when you're ruining MULTIPLE lives?

[redwallzyl]

I hate to say it, but Texas has the right idea. If they fail two appeals, fry their ass. Or gas them. Or whatever, preferably something humane and painless. I'm a moderate liberal, but fuck man. Murderers and torturers and serial rapists. At what point does it become okay to live, when you're ruining MULTIPLE lives?

Mostly just how expensive it is to kill them.

[Doomblade187]

I hate to say it, but Texas has the right idea. If they fail two appeals, fry their ass. Or gas them. Or whatever, preferably something humane and painless. I'm a moderate liberal, but fuck man. Murderers and torturers and serial rapists. At what point does it become okay to live, when you're ruining MULTIPLE lives?

Mostly just how expensive it is to kill them.

In large part due to the legal fees involved in death sentence appeals.