zerobudgetgamer said:
This has been a thought that's rested at the back of my head for quite a while now, and suddenly came back to bite hard at me today. If you've never seen the series Full Metal Alchemist, there's an episode where they enter a supposedly empty research facility and find that it's not only in full operation, but that they've been using inmates from a next-door corrections facility to perform experiments. As draconian as this may sound, it's nonetheless an interestingly controversial subject to consider.
Most death row inmates, AFAIK, have no chance of parole, and sit in their cells for years waiting for their own personally sterilized lethal injection (ironic). Now, while some of these inmates are possibly innocent, most have probably openly admitted to performing unspeakable acts that they cannot or will not possibly atone for within their lifetimes. What I'm wondering is, could we not use these inmates for various experiments, such as testing cures for diseases or maybe just using them for incredibly dangerous procedures a la Aperture Science? Obviously, all necessary measures would have to be taken to ensure the safety of those involved, and to make sure the inmate can't escape.
IMO, these are people who are just taking up space in prisons across the country/world. If we really intend to kill them, why not make their deaths meaningful/beneficial in some way?
EDIT: OK, for the record, I'm not insisting we go out right now and take some of the people on the back of the line of death row, kicking and screaming, and inject them with a dozen diseases "For Science." Obviously, consents would have to be given, considerations would have to be made, and some laws would have to be changed. My point is they're not going anywhere, and appeals aside some death row inmates are simply sitting because the line is massive and they only go through so many injections a day. Again, they're going to be killed anyway, so why not give their deaths some meaning?
EDIT2: Since so many people seem to immediately shout their opposition of the Death Penalty, allow me to add an extra clause: Should people who have been given a Life Sentence (or more) in prison be allowed to consent to experimentation? For those who don't know, depending on where you live in the world, a Life Sentence can be anywhere from 15-30 years before having a chance at parole, with some places having a max sentence of as little as 25 to as many as 50 years. The Consent would come with a small payment that would go to an outside source, and possible consideration of early parole. And obviously, the experiments don't HAVE to be life-threatening, even for the Death Row inmates.
To be honest, I have few real problems with what your suggesting. Just as I have no real problem with making inmates work without pay during their time in prison. There are people, largely left wingers, who complain about "inhumanity" or "slavery" but themselves seem to be fairly detached from reality.
Some of the referances your getting are also rather faulty, but it's not surprising given the political slant of the current educational system. Josef Mengele or the Japanese "Unit 731" didn't perform their experiments on condemned prisoners, the big issue was tied to the ongoing genocides, and the simple fact that they used prisoners of war (ie captured soldiers) as opposed to criminals. There are some important distinctions involved in that. Using some guy who is a prisoner condemned by a jury of his peers, and using say some family of Koreans you abducted off the street of their hometown just because they are Koreans (there was a Manga called "Island" inspired by that, and it included a section explaining the real events including photos of what the Japanese were up to).
See, I'm a big believer that the penelties faced for committing a crime are supposed to act as a deterrant. One of the reasons the US has with crime is that few people are afraid of the system itself, your typical person is more afraid of having to deal with other inmates (and say being raped) than they are of the actual sentence itself. The death penelty isn't all that scary when it takes decades to kill someone, and when it happens 99% of the discussion about it is to make it as humane as possible. Likewise I have no issue with people in prison being forced to work, having them sew, operated mechanical presses, etc.. helps cover the costs, and also helps teach them productive skills.
When it comes to protection against cruel and unusual punishment, I think we really need to dial that back substanially and simply trash a century or so of hippy, liberal precedent. If you look back to the records post 1776 and how our founding fathers interpeted what they wrote, you'll find that this did NOT in any way mean that you couldn't hurt someone or make them suffer. It was intended largely to prevent the development of professional torturers and to create a consistant system of punishment throughout the entire nation, they key word being that the punishment has to be both cruel AND unusual together in order to be prohibited. Meaning that they did things like hangings, flogging, the stocks, tar and feathering, pressing, and all kinds of things, and that was all fine. The guys who wrote the constitution would be probably laughing if you suggested that what they meant was to say ban the use of the lash or stocks because as you can see from their own actions, tbey most certainly did not. The law was to say prevent some guy three towns over from developing his own, special forms of punishment for people. Where say in Boston, Mass. you might wind up being pressed to death for a crime (putting a board over someone, and then putting rocks on top of it a few at a time to slowly crush them to death), but in Hartford,Conn. some guy invents a special flaying machine that keeps someone alive for three days of constant agony that people are subjected to for the same crime. To the way of thinking of our founding fathers the pressing was fine, the flaying machine was not, and the flaying machine was banned because it was not standard practice, and was defined as being cruel in comparison to the already horrendously painful methods being used which were viewed as being sufficient punishment. I mean being pressed to death is horrible enough, that is going to scare the crap out of people, there are worse ways to die, but do you really need them?
In the case of using prisoners for experimentation, I have no inherant problem with it, of course there would have to be some oversight involved in this. Testing a disease cure on someone seems horrible, but fairly reasonable. Vivisectioning someone while they are still alive to play with their active organs and learn more about anatomy isn't called for especially with our level of technology.
Basically you'd have to view it on a case by case basis, I wouldn't recommend a policy where condemned prisoners could just be used for anything scientists want to do, but I could see them being used for a lot of things.
Overall though I do believe it would have to be a policy adopted by the US as a whole to really work within the spirit of the constitution.
I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this... but hey, it's increasingly difficult to get someone sent to death row it seems, and when your dealing with situations where some dude might have raped, tortured, killed, and eaten little girls or whatver, I'm low on sympathy and see no reason why we should be warehousing these schmucks for decades.
The question of "well, what if they are innocent" is going to apply to any prisoner of any level, and at any level of punishment. In the USA at least we already have one of the most liberal court systems to ever exist, our "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" requirement already arguably makes the US legal system something of a joke internationally, and contributes to our crime problems. I pretty much feel that if you get the death penelty in the US, under our system, and with all the limitations in place, it's pretty unlikely that the person is innocent no matter what someone might try and claim years after the fact. If you sentence someone to death, you should just do it instead of wasting tax money.
... we also have these things called aggravating and mitigating circumstances that contribute to the death penelty. In general when someone gets the death penelty it usually means there are aggravating circumstances without any mitigating ones to begin with. Heck, in most states I think that is even a requirement. As a result the guys we're talking about aren't some dudes who just killed someone by accident, or in self defense. Unlike the movies you have to be convicted of something pretty intense to wind up on death row.
An example would be this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bruce_Ross
When I took Criminal Justice, my instructor was a former head of the Connecticut State Police who was involved in this case. Apparently the whole reason Michael Ross got the death penelty was because he apparently killed two of the girls at the same time, and made one of them watch him kill the other one, which was considered an aggravating factor.
This guy spent 18 bloody years on Death Row going through all these appeals after raping and killing his way through New England (8 victims is a lot IRL). Honestly, it might make me a bad person but feel that's kind of ridiculous, and honestly I sort of think using him to say test a new cures for things like malignant testicular cancer, ebola virus, anthrax, and/or other things would have at least caused something positive to come from all of this, and really I don't think it could happen to a nicer guy.
