Completely agree, the death penalty isn't necessary, but I am glad of the message this sends to some rich folk. Probably mostly Vietnamese ones, but still.
The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.
Wow, when your fraud starts being measured in "percentage of GDP" you know you got too greedy.
Doing a multi billion dollar realestate fraud, in a semi-communist "Socialist Oriented Market Economy"....
...yeah the penalty is gonna be on the steep side. Landlords, rent seekers, and fraudsters aren't looked upon nicely anywhere, but particularly so in a country with that relationship to communism.
Landlords aren't generally considered communal minded. Fraud isn't good for the community, it's not done for the collective good.
The immune system of the masses has weeded out the what was going on here, and will deal with it via putting the perpetrator to death. Making sure this outrageous and damaging conduct will not continue or be encouraged.
I think there are certainly crimes that deserve the death penalty (think CP type crimes). Just get those people out of society tbh, but this is just my opinion.
The only problem I have is with 100% certainly. You would have to be certain, or very very close to absolute certainty, that you have the right person who committed the crime.
If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.
People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there's no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they've served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)
On the other hand, people don't get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there's no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.
The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it's not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.
Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.
About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it's true... But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don't deserve to be executed, like Snowden... Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.
As for escaping prison, it's already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it's definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn't be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner's location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don't have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn't be worth it.
Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil's Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don't want to be prisoners.
I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there's not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn't be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You'd also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you'd have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn't been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.
I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it's currently mostly applied to people that don't have enough money to get better legal counsel.
I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I'd take execution.
Yes, people do escape, but it's extremely rare. I'm far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.
Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.
But when the death penalty is available, it's not just the ultra wealthy who suffer. It's far easier for the ultra wealthy to use their resources to frame someone they don't like as a murderer or something and get that person executed. It's even easier for the state to do that if they are corrupt enough. I'd much rather not give the state the right to sentence anyone to death at any point. Make these ultra rich criminals go to prison for the rest of their lives, make it unpardonable too.
That's a pretty sloppy "you're right but i'm still right" answer. Of course that's not going to happen, they're communists. It's liberal governments that end up going fascist.
What? I was talking about Vietnam, just because they are communist now doesn't mean they will stay communist. I didn't mean that Russia is communist now, perhaps I wasn't clear in phrasing.
