(CNN) Trump says administration will seek death penalty in murder cases in DC.

While I am not in principle opposed to the death penalty, in the U.S., as historically applied, it has  fatal flaws, which have several flavors.

Criteria for guilt. The instruction to the jury, by which the presumption of innocence is replaced by, “guilty beyond all reasonable doubt”, lacks an objective standard. In practice, the judgment of twelve angry people who debate beyond eye and ear, cannot be codified objectively. The combination with defective rules of evidence has on a number of occasions resulted in miscarriages of justice. When the death penalty is applied, these become fatal and irrevocable.

Quality of evidence. See (CNN) Plans to execute Robert Roberson paused after judge approves restraining order just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution. Quoting,

Robert Roberson was convicted of shaking his child, causing her death. The conviction relied on expert testimony that the injuries were caused by shaking, not by a fall from a bed. Expert testimony which is not validated by the law of large numbers is frequently contradicted by other experts, with spectacle in the courtroom.

Just between you and me, there’s a good chance Roberson is guilty. Does the evidence imply “beyond all reasonable doubt’? The detective who ran the case doesn’t think so. Now place yourself in the jury room, where the phrase “baby killer” swirls like thick tobacco smoke. The result of tangled emotions is a codified blend of justice with street justice, which is no justice at all.

Roberson is on death row due to evidence which has not been  qualified by the law of large numbers, considered by a jury who could not be expected to be mathematicians, powerfully influenced by the heinous nature of an unproven crime, until they prove it. Notice the circularity: the heinousness demands conviction.

The plea bargain. A legitimate way for a defendant to bargain for himself, it can be an illegitimate tactic to deflect a capital charge onto another defendant. See Derek William Bentley, dramatized in the movie Let Him Have It. The trigger-man escaped the noose; Bentley did not.

Quoting from the Death Penalty Information Center ,

A Death Penalty Information Center database of every death-row exoneration since 1972. For every 8 people executed in the United States, one other person has been exonerated from death row.

How can we encapsulate this flaw of the criminal justice system? By this oxymoron: One standard of “beyond all reasonable doubt” is insufficient. Capital cases require an enhanced standard, with restricted rules of evidence.  it would be an admission that the system is not perfect enough. But if we fail to make that admission, we perjure ourselves.

***Let Him Have It***

 

The manned space program, entrenched as a sacred cow, has deflected critical examination for decades with promises and visions of utopian attractiveness. Since the end of the Apollo program, there has been little evidence of tangible scientific benefit. Yet it remains uniquely popular, enjoying the personal pronoun “we” for hopefully exciting vicarious adventures. “We” do not have car accidents. “We” go to Mars. Sharing a religious vocabulary, space mania evokes the unreasoning beliefs of the “Electric Monk” of writer Douglas Adams. Quoting Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

I propose that you believe too much. Readers will search this post, and prior, for unreasoning signs of anti-scientific prejudice or  political agendas.. You will be more receptive to my arguments if I tell you a little bit about my beliefs:

• Climate change is real, and largely anthropogenic.
• I am a fan of Dr. Anthony Fauci and RNA vaccines. Though I did warn against vaccine mandates, and  was skeptical prior to proofs of effectiveness and safety, I’ve had about 10 shots and hope for another.
• I am a fan of the scientific method, and horrified at the politicization of science. There is bad science, but it does not discredit the whole. If there is to be a future, it must be a collaboration of man, his knowledge, and his inventions.
• I am a fan of unmanned, robotic space probes, and the great space telescopes. I am an enthusiastic backyard astronomer, and not entirely skeptical of UFOs.
• I want to know.

Science has on many occasions been co-opted for political goals. Some have been as narrow as ending World War II. Others have been as broad as nurturing the national spirit. On September 12, 1962, JFK gave the “Moon  Speech” at Rice University (text). Quoting,

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

My eyes get a little wet, as I remember some of my older engineer friends, as they began what they would later call the best years of their lives.  They were not hard to find; the Apollo program had 100,000 subcontractors, at a time when making things smaller, faster, more powerful, and more reliable was the secular religion of this country. They were making the modern equivalent of a national myth: We can do damn near anything.

They say that “we” went to the moon on slide rules, which is not literally true, but what they did, with what they had, is an epic that surpasses the Odyssey by many powers of ten. My view was not of The Right Stuff riding the rocket, but of unsung heroes, of how a balding, pudgy nondescript man and his buddies, called by NASA to solve an emergency, managed to reduce the astronaut’s life support monitoring electronics, without which Apollo could not fly, from the size of several bricks to a few cubic inches. They did it with things just out of the lab called PMOS, and Bunker-Ramo Planar Coax. They had to build a hundred for every one that worked, but there was never a failure in service. Countless advances like this one gave rise to the term spin-off, which provided the U.S. with a technological  lead that endured into the 90’s.

Then, in August, 1971, Nixon’s commitment to the program wavered.  Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled. Quoting Canceled Apollo missions,

John Young, who flew on Apollo 10 and 16, believed that fear of losing astronauts was a reason why NASA canceled Apollo 18, 19, and 20.^[14]

Consider: The largest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal weighs 15 tons. The Apollo rocket contained 2700 tons of explosive fuel. Accidents will happen. Suddenly, the dream was over, for 100,000 companies, and for the engineers, the best years of their lives.  I felt a personal void. Yet the end of Apollo was inevitable. The myth was too costly, requiring 5,400,000 pounds of explosives for what the Greeks did with poetry.  New spinoffs would not occur with repetition.

***Next: The Big Tent Revival***

 

 

 

What follows is informed fiction, in which Putin conveys to Trump an assessment and a persuasive alternative alignment of powers. Despite some missteps of U.S. policy post the 1991 breakup, and  of NATO immediately prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,  I am not in sympathy with any of it:

Putin:  Look at this brief, prepared by our general staff. The Ukraine manpower pool continues to decline. Their stockpiles continue to decline. According to this assessment, see these front lines. We will have Kherson by October, Kharkiv by December, Odessa by February. Once we cross the Dnieper, their lines will no longer be lines.

With your cooperation, we  will leave a small rump state  around Lviv. Maybe we will not hang Zelinksy in Maidan Nezalezhnosti — I’m joking, of course.

Trump: What about all the Russian casualties? With all the land you already have?

Putin: A mere speed bump. Our technology may not be quite your equal, but we know how to suffer for Mother Russia. We suffered much, much more in the Great Patriotic War. Do you know how to suffer, if war comes to you?

beat

The land is more than part of Russia. It is Russia.

Trump: Let’s keep the World safe between us.

Putin: Between us, not under American domination, where America imagines it runs the whole world. I would rather talk about business deals, where you and I run a part of it together.

Trump: We have partners. No one is excluding you. And from what I’ve been hearing lately, China wants a piece of you.

brief silence, as Trump enjoys the dig

Putin: Your main and worthless partner is NATO, who started this war to prepare the inclusion of Ukraine, who have this convenient fiction, dare I call it a lie, that they are not allied against Russia.

Trump:   Let’s not talk about who started this. Let’s finish it.

Putin:  It’s not too early to talk about what America needs. The only country that aligns with your need to secure raw materials  is Russia. Or do you consider Beenie Babies from China strategic raw materials?

Trump: We’re looking for other partners now. We’re looking for a balance.

Putin: Then why not Russia? Why do you necessitate our Navy’s participation with China against a nation we should not perceive as a threat?

Trump: What about guarantees, like boots from other countries on the ground to keep a peace?

Putin: NATO in disguise. We have a saying, Trust but verify. Trust comes first.

An attempt has been made to make this imagined conversation amenable to analysis. Your first tool is a lawyer joke:

How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?

Your answer?

 

 

 

 

 

You may wish to look at Crime Deterrence; Our Groundhog Day of Slaughter, Part 1.

(CNN) Trump holds news conference and announces mobilization of National Guard troops in DC. Quoting,

Despite Trump’s claims Monday that crime is “out of control,” data shows violent crime in Washington, DC, has been declining since its 2023 spike, with two years of sustained improvement.

The math is bolstered on the CNN mobile site by a short form video with unlabeled axes and pleasant music that does not allow the viewer to index along the time axis. CNN does better  with Fact check: Violent crime in DC has fallen in 2024 and 2025 after a 2023 spike. Quoting,

Of course, one homicide is too many, and it’s a matter of perspective whether one chooses to focus on the startling number of homicides or the decline in that number. But it’s just not true that the number is getting worse.

Unfortunately for our state of mind, humans do not measure hazard on a linear scale. It is more likely logarithmic, requiring a change of X10, or 1/10 to  register as twice as bad or twice as good. There might be eight perceptual categories of crime:

• Statistical; the victims are nameless.
• Victims are known through the media.
• Victims inhabit the same social structure. Ie., you’re a politician and the victim is a politician.
• The crime  is notorious.
• You can identify in some way with the victim; “It could have happened to me.”
• The victim is someone you know.
• It happened to someone you love.
• It happened to you.

This is the truth of  “One homicide is too many.” The political divide is largely along three issues:

• Trend of public perception. Democrats say things are getting better, while Republicans say things are intolerable. They are not talking the same language, because they are not feeling in the same way.
• Culture. Post World War II, the crime rate has fluctuated around a higher mean than prior, subject to random stresses in our society. Sadly, our culture breeds criminals.
• Remedy. Reform the criminal, or punish more harshly? The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, challenging the practicality of the traditional remedy for crime — punishment.

The two parties offer for our consideration approaches most in concert with their political philosophies. Republicans offer punishment. Democrats offer reform.  Republicans are concerned with the victim; Democrats are concerned about  the cycle of poverty that breeds crime. Neither approach has sustained long term political viability, which is limited  by the tenure of party dominance. Neither approach has reduced violent crime to levels typical of other First World countries.

The absence of a viable strategy to make the U.S. a low crime country is an opportunity for both parties. The potential for Republicans is limited, due to their inflexible devotion to the tradition of crime and punishment. The possibilities for Democrats are wide open, though possibly in conflict with their tradition of concern for the dignity of man.

To both, which will it be? Punishment, compromise of dignity, or something new and novel? Both sides must embrace aspects of the other. There is no logic in automatic release of violent offenders, or incarceration without prompt justice.

While you debate, someone is bleeding out.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear President Trump,

Don’t fall for it. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin wears finely tailored business suits, there are no shared values. He is not a Western man in disguise; he is a traditional Russian potentate, the last Tsar. Points of difference:

• Putin does not value human life.
• He does not honor agreements, commitments, or promises, which he makes with intent to violate, as a fourth force additive to coercion, subversion, and military force/threat.
• Putin’s immutable goal is restoration of the Russian Empire, with a follow-on of turning the whole of Western Europe into a weak vassal state.
• With the loss of Western Europe we would lose the greatest concentration of brainpower the world has ever seen, the only counter to the rising intellectual dominance of China. The modern world was invented in Europe; the U.S. technological contribution is not historically proportionate. The manufacture of the most advanced computer chips depends worldwide upon equipment supplied by a single Dutch company.

Was Putin always this way? There is a spread of opinion. My own is that there was an evolution, partly a result of errors of  Western policy after the breakup of the Soviet Union, which does not diminish the current danger. These errors cannot be corrected by conciliation now.

The Russian Apartment Bombings of 1999 are thought by some as affecting him deeply.

Others may point to the gradual deterioration of his relationships with politicians, finalizing in the criminalization of dissent.

The ease with which Russia seized Crimea in 2014, with tepid reaction in the West, may have convinced him of loss in the West of “manly values” of  combat, leaving Russia as the only power capable of waging war. Perhaps he read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, in which the degenerate Eloi are farmed and eaten by the subterranean Morlocks.

From the very start Putin’s  rule relied on co-opting corrupt elements, oligarchs blending into mafia. His reliance on skilled balancing of these forces made personal rule indispensable, and unlikely to survive without him. When Putin began to suffer from diseases that will eventually end his life,  he sought a replacement power structure, turning to Russian nationalism. This was marked by the (Aljazeera) firing of the entire “Russian government.” Some assert he actually became “religious”, seeing himself as “preserver of the realm”, the last Tsar. Or perhaps the religious element is a simple scheme to meld nationalism with the state religion.

This explains Putin’s indifference to loss of human life. He is God’s Russian messenger. It also explains why you can’t bargain with Putin. You can’t bargain with the Divine.