I was listening to the radio on the long trip from Phoenix, and there was naturally much coverage of the Scott Peterson verdict. This thread is not about that verdict, but about capital punishment in general.
Once upon a time I was in favour of capital punishment. I believed it was a deterrent, and I felt that murderers should be treated to the same outcome as their victims. But many years ago I started thinking about the issue. I’m now (generally) opposed to capital punishment. Why?
First, what is the purpose of punishment? Is it to ‘teach a lesson’? Is it to remove dangerous people from the general population? Is it vengence? Is it rehabilitation? I believe that the purpose of punishment for a crime should be to rehabilitate people who are able to be rehabilitated. It should be to remove dangerous people from society for as long as they are a danger to society. There should be an element of punishment as a negative incentive for wrongdoing. But revenge seems out of place to me.
Someone who is committed to life in prison without the possibility of parole is removed from society, and can no longer harm society. Capital punishment does the same thing; but it requires what is, after all, homicide. So killing a prisoner and keeping him locked up until he dies both accomplish the same thing. The difference is that the latter does not require the premeditated killing of someone.
One may ask what the point of rehabilitation is, if the presoner will never be released. I’ve seen documentaries on Death Row inmates who have been awaiting execution for many years. Some have found religion, to which CP supporters might say, ‘He found religion? Then jerk him to Jesus!’ But some have had the time to evaluate what they have done. Someone who was under the influence of drugs, committed a murder or murders, and was convited and sentenced to die is probably not the same person after sitting in contemplation in a relatively drug-free environment for several years. I was a different person 20 years ago than I am now. People change. If, psychologically, a person is not the same person who committed the crime, then it seems wrong to me that he should be executed.
Someone who has changed in prison, though he will never be released, can serve a valuable function to society. He can serve as an example to others as to why they should think about the consequences of their actions. Certainly one could point to an executed criminal and say, ‘See what happens if you commit this crime? You’ll be dead!’ But I think it’s more effective to have the convict himself deliver the message.
I think the idea that capital punishment is an effective deterrent is overblown. California has over 600 inmates on Death Row. Only about ten have been executed over the last 15 years. I’ve heard that there’s a 50% chance that a death sentence will be overturned on appeal. If the death penalty stands a good chance of never being imposed, then it’s meaningless. If you’re going to do it, then do it; otherwise stop the expensive, court-clogging, time-consuming appeals and abolish capital punishment.
Okay, I’ve just said ‘If you’re going to do it, then do it.’ Anyone see the problem with that? Aside from the visceral discomfort of executing two prisoners a day in California alone, there is the problem of executing an innocent person. How many people have been sitting on Death Row, and have been ultimately found to be innocent? A few. Some people say that’s too bad. They object to the idea that ‘It’s better to let 100 murderers go free, than to execute a single innocent person.’ They misunderstand the idea. It’s not ‘letting a murderer go free’; it’s not killing him, but keeping him locked up for life. That is, ‘It’s better to keep 100 killers locked up for the rest of their lives, than to execute a single innocent person.’ Not ‘let them free’. And for some, death may be a release. I think it would be worse to live with the memories of the crime, knowing that you’ll never breathe free air again, than to just end it.
And one must ask about the number. Is saving one innocent life worth not killing 100 absolutely-100%-no-doubt-about-it vicious killers? Or is it one in a thousand? Or one in ten? Where do you draw the line? I think that no innocent life should be taken by the State. Again, the guilty ones are already removed from the general population.
My whole life, when I thought about it, I’ve said that I would not kill someone who was not attacking me or someone else. If someone was coming at me with a weapon, or, in some cases I can think of, without a weapon, I would use deadly force to defend myself. If someone else is being attacked, I see no problem with using deadly force to stop him. But the idea is to stop the person, not to kill him.
Now let’s say I’m on a jury that is hearing a capital case, and the person is convicted. We sentence him to death, and the sentence is carried out. What this means is that I have participated in the premeditated killing of someone who was not attacking me. That violates the beliefs that I stated in the last paragraph.
But some people ‘need killing’. Suppose there is someone who is Timpthy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot all rolled into one person. Let’s say that this person is The Worst, Most Dangerous Criminal In The History Of The World. If I were on the jury, I would vote for the death sentence. That makes me a hypocrite, since I’d be participating in the premeditated killing of someone who was not attacking me. It makes me a hypocrite because of all of the things I’ve said earlier.
And when I hear of someone being executed, someone whose guilt is without any doubt and whose crime is heinous, I don’t really have any qualms about it. That makes me a coward, because I will have condoned the actions of a jury for doing something that I would not have done. Yeah, I’m a hypocrite and a coward.
I think there’s also a ‘creepiness factor’ as well. It gives me the willies thinking about someone who has exhausted all of their appeals, sitting in a cell and knowing the day and the hour of his death. It creeps me out to think of the final walk to the execution chamber, and knowing that the prisoner knows that he’s spending his last minutes alive. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were like the old days, when the crime is fresh and the convicted is ‘the same person who committed the crime’ (though a day or a week after conviction is still a long time in one’s head); but it’s still creepy.
And then there’s the idea of the State killing someone. While most people on Death Row probably deserve to be there, it seems to me to be too convenient for the State to execute people for political reasons. Should the Rosenburgs have been executed? I don’t think so. I think that their executions were political killings. Should Bruno Hauptman have been executed? There seems to be evidence that he was just ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’. He may have been innocent. But the public were outraged at the crime, and they wanted blood – anybody’s blood. While not political in the same way as the Rosenburgs, it does seem to have political overtones in that the execution may have been carried out to placate outraged constituents.
So I’m somewhat ambivalent. I agree that some people just ‘need killing’; but I do not agree that this ‘need’ should be met at the expense of a small number of people who may not have committed a crime. What it comes down to, for me, is this: We can execute people, or not. If we execute people, there must be absolutely no possibility that they are innocent. There must be no mitigating circumstances. The crime must be particularly heinous. There’s the rub. What’s ‘particularly heinous’? The attacks on September 11th would, in my mind, qualify. But where do you draw the line? Is ‘particularly heinous’ the killing of 100 people? 50? Ten? Two? One, if there is torture involved? The display of callousness? ‘Having a sharp tongue’ (as was demonstrated recently in the Middle East, when a 16-year-old girl was hanged)? People will ‘draw the line’ in different places, and any line will necessarily be arbitrary. If it’s arbitrary, then I feel that it’s not valid.
So yes, some people deserve to die at the hands of the State. Nevertheless, I am opposed to capital punishment. The ‘line that must not be crossed’ must be arbitrary. We can point to extreme cases and say, ‘Yes. Death is a fair punishment.’ We can say that in certain cases drawing and quartering, the body fed to hogs, and the head mounted on a pike would be the only suitable punishment. But most cases are not extreme, and we’re back to where to draw the line.
Thus, I think we should abolish the death penalty. There are too many variables to make a ‘one size fits all’ law that we Americans are so fond of. There are too many possibilities for a mistake. There are too many opportunities for politics to enter into the equation. And it’s creepy.