No doubt I’d feel pretty crummy. But I suppose I should have thought about that before I robbed that 7-11 and murdered the clerk.
Marc
The state’s also taken away the citizens’ right to punish thieves by chopping off their hands, and the citizens’ right to punish traitors by hanging, drawing and quartering.
Guess the state better get going on those punishments too.
The thing that seems to get missed so easily in a discussion about capital punishment is that it isn’t about their humanity, it’s about my humanity. I don’t kill people (unless, I guess, it’s a life-and-death situation). It’s an ethical absolute. Why should I give a murderer the power to force me to violate my morals? This just compounds his list of crimes.
But there’s a lively BBQ pit thread about this at the moment in which I feel that I’ve said all I want to say. So I’ll leave it at that.
pan
A couple of points I’d like to make:
(1) a lot of people seem to have a very eye-for-an-eye attitude… McVeigh killed 168 people, so the correct punishment would be to kill him 168 times in a row, if possible. By this logic, though, if I steal someone’s wallet, the correct punishment is for the government to steal my wallet? Not that I don’t see the appeal… if it were up to me, and if I had magical powers, I would make McVeigh live two or three hundred consecutive average lifetimes, in the middle of each of which a loved one was suddenly and tragically killed.
But my point is that there’s no logical reason why the appropriate punishment for a crime should be the eye-for-an-eye approach.
(2) Another statement that many people seem to be making is “murder is murder, no matter what. If we kill McVeigh we are lowering ourselves to his level”. I disagree. First of all, killing someone in self defense is not murder. I would also argue that a soldier killing someone in war is not murder. So not all killing is equivalent. If you want to argue that the government killing someone after a trial is morally equivalent to someone murdering in cold blood, feel free to so argue, but simply saying “murder is murder” won’t do it
(3) Another frequently made statement is that we’re the only “civilized” country that still executes criminals. So? I don’t see what relevance that has one way or another. Arguments for or against the death penalty should be strong enough to stand on their own, not depend on what other countries do.
(4) Finally, the primary argument against the death penalty seems to be that the government doesn’t have the “right” to kill. I say, why not? Who defines what rights a government does or does not have? Unless you happen to believe in a higher power (I don’t) and that higher power lays down a precise set of commandments specifying limitations on secular authority, I don’t see how anyone can say what rights a government does or does not have. I can’t say I know much formal philosophy or anything, but here’s how I see it: all the “rights” that we love so dearly, the right to free speech, the right to vote, etc., are not absolute at all. There’s not some mathematical proof with which one can start out with no assumptions and end up proving that people have the right to free speech. So where do these rights come from? They come from the government. And what is the government, at least the US government? It’s the embodiment of the will of the people, as laid down in the consitutional convention. So does the US government have the right to execute criminals? Of course it does, because that’s what the constitution says. Is that fair? Well, it’s hardly a secret that the death penalty exists. It can’t have come as a surprise to McVeigh that one of the likely outcomes of his actions was his execution. And, to be a bit flip about it, someone who doesn’t like the particular contract that exists between the people of the US as a whole and each individual citizen (ie, you pay your taxes and obey the laws and you will have courts, police officers, the FDA, etc. provided for you) is free to live somewhere else.
Whew! That ended up longer-winded than I’d hoped…
(btw: my personal opinion is that nothing would be worse than executing someone who was innocent. So I would reserve the death penalty for special cases where guilt is completely clear, like McVeigh, or people who have been convicted on more than one occasion for completely unrelated incidents… the odds of someone being wrongly convicted by a jury of their peers beyond reasonable doubt are very very very small, but still not quite negligible. But the odds of it happening twice to the same person?) (I’m also quite concerned about the potentially racist ways in which the death penalty is applied in the US today, but that’s a separate issue)
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- The death penalty as sentence is not IMO any means of revenge for anyone. It is the only way of ensuring that someone who has proven themselves to be willing to kill people can never do so again.
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- The death penalty is also a deterrent; it is very much the best one. That’s why most police officers the world over carry guns. You don’t hear about too many criminals being apprehended at mace-point.
~ - I do feel that the execution should have been delayed until his lawyers could have gone through all the information in the lost & found documents, simply on the principle involved. Not doing so doesn’t exactly encourage the FBI (or any other police agency) to maintain good work habits, and it gives like-minded “patriots” another rallying point they don’t need. - MC
If the death penalty is such a great deterrent, then why is the murder rate in Europe so much lower than it is here? Are you suggesting that there’s something about Americans that makes them naturally murderous? If that Pit thread kabbes linked to is any indication, maybe you’re right.
Well, since this thread is veering a bit anyway… Yes. I think there is something inherently violent about Americans. I don’t think it has anything to do with the availability of firearms. (Indeed, I have somewhere around 20 guns – I haven’t counted recently.) I think it has to do with our society since its inception.
Our early settlers were people who fled persecution. You can think of fleeing persecution as getting away from people who are telling you what to do. Other settlers were granted lands that they would farm or exploit. If they were fortunate, they would become wealthy – and the wealth would flow back to the Crown. Eventually we said, “Why should we pay money to the Crown? Let’s revolt and keep it all!” (Actually, we weren’t even paying our fair share – but hey, it’s money!) So we had a little revolution and set out on our own. Now we had a country to “settle” – i.e., kick out the people who were there first and take their lands. People left on their own sometimes take matters into their own hands rather than follow the established legal system. Between the aboriginal Americans, wild animals, and the human predators of their own culture, the settlers had to have a certain amount of violence in them. When the law wasn’t available, people had to take care of their problems themselves.
Taking care of matters personally was a way of life into the 20th Century. (When did Arizona become a state? 1912?) People had to fend for themselves for so long that is became an ingrained part of American culture. The European feudal systems and monarchies that had existed for hundreds of years and the people who chose not to make the arduous journey across the ocean were brought up in a culture that included constables, burgermeisters, representatives of the monarchy, etc. Their system was well-established and the people were comfortable in it. They didn’t have to contend with the same things the people in the unsettled American West had to.
The Asian countries are similar. People had their places in society and that was that. In America the people were free to make of their lives what they could. In Japan you were what the society said you were.
In conclusion, the peoples of Europe and Japan were “bred” to be non-violent (or at least less violent than Americans are perceived to be) and to accept the governments that ruled them (please pay no attention to that pesky French Revolution). In America many people lived under laws much more loose than those under which their counterparts in other countries lived, and under conditions that rewarded independence and the ability to protect that independence.
Therefore I think Americans of the United States variety do tend to be more violent than Europeans or Asians.
IMHO.