For me, this kind of thing is still very surreal. I'm old enough that I grew up in a "not connected" world. We used pay phones and land lines. It was considered rude to do anything significant over the phone.

I'm still having trouble with people being laid off over a video call. A capital trial with the death sentence being a possibility happening on a video chat just seems like I've jumped into some dystopian sci-fi.

If we're being honest, you have. The future is here, just not evenly distributed.

Dystopia isn't guaranteed; don't go gentle into that good night.

Highly recommend reading "On Tyranny", it's a great small, pertinent book for $10 at most book stores.

Edit: to be clear China's social credit system is extremely dystopian to me and is already taking shape, but I trust most/all democratic societies (including US) to fend it off.

Pretty sure Governors delayed or not delayed executions over the phone at the eleventh hour pretty regularly if Hollywood has taught me anything.

But for some reason I also see this as different.

That's a good call-out. People did use phones for significant things when there wasn't a reasonable alternative.

But you wouldn't break up a relationship over the phone, for example.

I wonder if there might be a dehumanizing effect on everyone involved, and maybe a lower level of seriousness overall.

Is a witness possibly more willing to lie, exaggerate?

I would suppose that dehumanizing effects are intended and are in fact necessary in a system where someone decides that someone else will be killed.

Sentencing someone to death shouldn’t be easy.

Some would say it shouldn’t be possible at all

Trend of using Zoom/variants seems to be following the progression of any similar type of conduit where unfamiliar use case eventually becomes the norm. For example, when texting/SMS took off in early 2000s, boyfriends and girlfriends started calling quits to their relationship via text, followed by husbands and wives decision to divorce. I won’t be surprised if there’s an emoji for such references nowadays ️. Oh the humans! We’ve definitely done a lot of physical evolving since inception...but bulk of our social evolution has seemed to have happened over the past 100 years.

There is a Unicode symbol for divorce, but only Samsung has implemented an emoji for it.

https://emojipedia.org/divorce-symbol/

looking at it without being told I would never guess that is what it means. I would have a hard time guessing what that ment even in context.

I guess it mostly makes sense in a family tree, not as part of a text message

Looks like handcuffs. Maybe they should have used it as the marriage symbol instead? :)

Does it really matter if your death sentence is read over a video call or a phone call or in a room?

On the one hand it shouldn't matter. The facts of the case are the facts of the case. If those facts warrant the death penalty then that should be the case regardless of the medium through which those facts are presented.

On the other hand, humans aren't rational and they might change their decision by seeing another human in person vs seeing them on a screen, even if the facts are the same.

Since it has the capability to affect the outcome, for fairness it should be the same for every case. Either do all cases over Zoom or none. Otherwise you might have some people arbitrarily assigned the death penalty when they might not have otherwise or vice versa.

The better solution would be to do away with the death penalty altogether since such a dire outcome shouldn't be implemented by an inherently flawed and fallible system.

It matters if sentencing you over a video call makes it more likely that you'll be sentenced to death.

I think there's a good chance that people are more willing to sentence people they haven't seen in person to death.

Both things can be true. People can be racially biased and also find it harder to sentence someone to to death while looking them in the eyes.

I know it would matter to me. That would at least help make the case that the person being condemned is a human being, not a few pixels on a screen, nor a number in a system.

Modern militaries use systems whereby they directly kill people who are represented as pixels on a screen.

So, what is a little digital sentencing.

Usually governments give more rights and privileges to citizens than they do to enemy combatants.

They tend to kill a lot of non-combatants treated as combatants when vaguely represented as pixels on a screen though...

Yes it does.

Sentencing anyone to death (or anything really) is the maximum expression of state power on a person.

A person should have the right to face the person sentencing them, and Justice should be served by the state facing the person.

Without this face to face interaction, there is no real distinction between justice and a bureaucratic process.

I think so yes- what about the possibility of the use of a deep fake, for instance?

If the system can't figure out your judge is actually a puppet by the time the appeals process (which is being sought) starts or is denied then I don't think the problem is really "deepfakes".

How many defendants go up to the judge before sentencing and tug on their face to make sure it isn't an imposter wearing a latex mask?

it doesn't matter but I can understand that this can be very subjective.

I would expect it to matter to Zoom.

Zoom this, zoom that. Is zoom paying journalists to name drop their product everywhere?

Kinda like how ESPN gets "Twitter comments", instead of calling it general internet comments

I'm gonna say that Zoom isn't paying anyone to associate their brand with sentencing someone to the death penalty.

Zoom blew up as the video conferencing solution of the pandemic. And in this case they are using the product.

But ultimately it's just become the parlance for it.

It's incredible to me how Microsoft was able to blow that chance with Skype. Just a while ago Skype used to be the generic trademark. "I'm skyping with my girlfriend"

Yep. Like make a Xerox of that, or I need a Kleenex or a Band-Aid

what's the "generic" term for bandaid?

Adhesive bandage.

It looks like it really is Zoom in the screenshots (but yes if it wasn't Zoom and someone called it Zoom, I think that would be terrible).

I literally just saw a Snickers commercial that ended with, "I thought we were doing the zoom thing"

Is that the best worst thing or the worst best thing to happen to your company?

It probably means your company was successful enough that you can retire and do whatever you like for the rest of your life. Would be a good thing for me, although probably a bad thing for the company as a whole.

I'd call it a best worst thing - one of those problems where it's bad, but the only way to have the problem is to be really successful.