What I really, but really didn’t see coming, though, was you flipping this on a dime and turning it into a *really* great post on values. Kudos to you. I was thinking at one point while reading the “death penalty section” that maybe this was a guest post from Fake Tim Brownson, a bit like Fake Steve Jobs. :-)

In retrospect though, I should have suspected you would lead into values territory with this. Because what made me see through the first half of your post is precisely that it really didn’t match up with what I knew (from reading your blog at least) about your values. I mean, a guy leaving a high-flying sales job to become a life coach, suddenly making a mostly *economic* argument for the death penalty? And a guy who’s in the business of helping people change suddenly making generalizations about how criminals can’t be reformed. Doesn’t sound all that credible when phrased plainly like this, does it? :-) I mean, at the very least, a life coach who doesn’t believe people can change is like… say, a surgeon who faints at the sight of blood: really, but *really* in the wrong line of work. :-)

Gotta go, Glen Beck is on. ;-)

Yeh there have been enough cases of innocent people being put to death it makes me shudder. The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was disbanded after they fitted up the ‘Birmingham 6′ pub bombers in the 1970′s after 2 bombs killed 21 people.

All 6 guys were later released but would have been undoubtedly put to death if capital punishment had been available to the prosecutors.

This post reminds me about the brilliant ‘Mistakes were made (but not by me)’ which handles the topic of beliefs, and how they control the way we perceive the world. The book also focuses a lot on cognitive dissonance – the state of being when one of our strong beliefs is being violated.

In that book there is also a lot of talk about police and the prison system. When it comes to death penalty, the big problem – at least in my eyes – is that the judicial system is not infallible. Many innocent people have been sentenced to death and executed, and this will continue as long as the death penalty exists, or until we can remove the human element from deciding whether or not someone committed a crime, and come up with a way to find out the 100% absolute truth.

According to the book quite a many prisoners have been committed because they confessed to a crime. Confession was seen as the holy grail guaranteeing that the person is guilty. However, it is possible to implant false memories on people, and when the interrogation practices of police were examined it was found out that quite often they caused such mental stress to the suspects that they would have confessed anything – be it true or not.

//sami

BTW, who did you do your training with?

When we talked about beliefs, a lady (around 40 years old, I think) piped up and said she still believes in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. She knows that they aren’t real, but she still believes in them.

Then she went a bit deeper, and we discovered she believes that because it aligns with her values, by “staying in touch with her roots” and “being connected to her people’s culture”.

I thought it was a really cute example :)