In 2015, Billingsley was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense, court records show.

The Maryland sex offender registry shows he was released from prison in October. The registry classified him in “tier 3,” which includes the most serious charges and requires offenders to register for life.

  • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    There’s a much more intense appeal process because you can’t un-execute someone.

    If some evidence turns up a decade later after someone has been imprisoned for life that proves them to be innocent, while you can’t give them that time back, you can release them and give them a hefty sum of many to at least attempt to repay what you’ve wrongly taken from them. But if you murder them, and they turn out to be innocent, then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.

    In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. But because death is a final judgement that cannot be reversed, it needs an absolutely perfect justice system. And er, I don’t think anyone would accuse our justice system of being that.

    So given that, it’s much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money. The only thing lost is a kind of moral righteousness and satisfaction in seeing criminals die, which I’d personally say is one of our less noble instincts anyway.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, I’d be against capital punishment even in an absolutely infallible justice system. If someone absolutely cannot ever be trusted to return to society no matter what rehabilitative options are available, then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this, while also resulting in less death overall

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’d personally agree (and amusingly enough, so would the Catholic Church, though they weirdly don’t talk about that as much as some other social issues).

        Ultimately though, that’s more a question of moral principles, which are a lot harder to argue and less persuasive than simply talking about cold hard cash.

      • bobman@unilem.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this

        The problem is an issue of cost. It’s impossible to imprison someone for decades at a lower rate than executing them.

        Executions are expensive, but they don’t need to be. He mentioned the “appeal process,” when I then said should be the same regardless of the punishment.

    • bobman@unilem.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.

      So… wouldn’t the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It’s the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.

      In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes.

      I don’t know. I see most people against the death penalty saying that they don’t support the death penalty because of some lofty “the government has no right to kill its citizens” principle. Not really based on anything, but it ‘sounds nice’ so I guess people go for it.

      So given that, it’s much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money.

      It doesn’t need to be. It’s at least possible to execute people for a cheaper price than imprisoning them. We just choose not to do it.

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        So… wouldn’t the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It’s the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.

        The essential difference is the ability for new evidence to come to light that exonerates the prisoner.

        Simply put, there exist a non-trivial amount of people who were wrongfully imprisoned and later freed that would be dead now if we were looser with the death penalty. Some righteous bloodlust is not more valuable than their lives.

        More simply, if you were wrongfully imprisoned, you’d probably be quite thankful for how hard it is to actually apply the death penalty. It’s really that simple.