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Meanwhile in the usa… Our very own real estate fraudster with 91 felony charges is the pick of 50% of the country to be president.
That was bizarre to type. I can’t believe this is reality.
You didn’t even mention the raping
Trump has more felony charges than Biden has years of age
~50% of the voters*
I think people like her deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no crime, no matter how severe, deserves a death penalty.
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.
The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.
Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can’t.
I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that’s eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can’t be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a “confession”. I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn’t get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.
I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out–like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he’s finally safe–is terrifying.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 1•3 months ago
It is a deterrent. For instance, we wouldn’t have insurrectionists working in the highest levels of government if we actually had effective laws and enforcement.
It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?
It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.
The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 1•3 months ago
I think your logic is flawed. Obviously the death penalty is a serious deterrent. It’s not going to stop everybody, but it will most certainly stop many people.
I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 1•3 months ago
I’m just talking about deterrence, it was obvious that you were reaching tenuous conclusions based on your dislike of the death penalty.
I don’t believe these things happen because of great work or investigations, she must have stepped on someone else’s toes or something, that’s the only way influential people go down…
You must be from VN to know that thing. That’s for real though
Finally some good fucking news!
Now if only we could do this to blackrock execs in burgerland
I’m usually not fond of the death penalty, but these are the kind of people it should be reserved for.
Vietnam continues to win.
I read the article and I know her fraud was extensive but - anyone else feel like the death penalty for fraud is a bit over the top?
12.5 billion in fraud? Nah.
It’s not just “fraud.” She cost people’s livelihood, broke up families, and made people homeless directly through her actions. Even speaking as a marxist, banking isn’t all intangible made up stuff. There are real individuals suffering consequences, and most of them aren’t just rich people doing rich people things.
Personally, I don’t think she should ever be allowed to die until she pays back her debt to society. Death is too easy.
Whether the death penalty should exist at all is a separate question, but Marxists generally recognize Engels’ conception of social murder.
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
A death sentence is always excessive.
Fraud should be punished heavily though. Someone or several someones probably already died as a consequence of that money missing in the system. I’m not sure if a long jail sentence would be much better, with her being 67 it’s a death sentence either way.
In my opinion they ought to follow the money. It’s impossible for these amounts to just disappear or to have been used by her. It would make sense to keep her alive if there’s any chance of recovering more of that lost money. But maybe that’s the point.
I don’t think anyone should suffer the death penalty, but I also think that there must exist some amount of generalized damage that is enough to cause surplus deaths
Assuming we’re okay with the death penalty at all, no. As the other user said, this isn’t just “fraud”. The reason I suspect you are feeling this way is because it is hard to directly see the impact of their actions as violence against people in the same way as a murderer. But with crimes like this, which are typically given a monetary fine if that in other countries, there are potentially millions of people harmed by their actions. Their health, finances, personal and social relationships, employment, etc all may be impacted by “white collar” crimes. It can easily be argued that they deserve worse punishment (under a punishment-centric system) than murderers because of the scale of their actions. People just don’t make that connection because they’re not literally pulling a trigger.
Absolutely.
sucks to be a criminal billionaire in a socialist-ish country
I don’t support the death penalty, but I do support harsh punishment for this kind of massive scale fraud.
Wait, so in other countries… fraud has consequences?
…negative consequences?
1 down, 2780 to go.
Let’s keep the kill streak going!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Lan and her family established the Van Thing Phat company in 1992 after Vietnam shed its state-run economy in favor of a more market-oriented approach that was open to foreigners.
She had started out helping her mother, a Chinese businesswoman, to sell cosmetics in Ho Chi Minh City’s oldest market, according to state media Tien Phong.
Van Thinh Phat would grow to become one of Vietnam’s richest real estate firms, with projects including luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping centers.
She indirectly owned more than 90% of the bank — a charge she denied — and approved thousands of loans to “ghost companies,” according to government documents.
In November, Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam’s top politician, said that the anti-corruption fight would “continue for the long term.”
The original article contains 621 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
death penality is for weak countries
They do love their state murders in Asia