Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Illinois has officially banned the death penalty (although it hasn't had an execution since 1999). The Soros crowd are cheering this as evidence of a national trend. I've mostly thought about the death penalty in order to refute arguments that the death penalty is unconstitutional. That, I think, is just untenable -- but if you disagree, please jump in.
But if you agree that the death penalty is permissible under the Constitution, is it good policy? I've always thought that retributive justice is rooted in natural law and in some cases, death is the appropriate measure of retribution. But the fact that we humans can make mistakes -- and that death-penalty mistakes are irrevocable gives me pause. Am I being too fainthearted, or do others share this practical concern about the death penalty?
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Nov '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
According to Amnesty International (ok, not the greatest source, but it is hard to misreport these stats) since 1973 ocer 130 people have been released from death row on the basis of wrongful convictions. It makes one wonder how many get put to death, because they don't have adequate representation, or a dishonest witness didn't recant in time, or prosecutorial/police misconduct wasn't held to account.
Life in prison without parole should be enough.
May '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I was raised a Catholic, so that informs my views, but I've always felt uncomfortable with the death penalty. If killing is wrong, killing is wrong.
Aug '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
The only trend that became apparent was that Illinois had the worst corps of prosecutors and public defenders in the country.
Granted, evidence rules are horrible, but getting better with DNA matching. Illinois was facing a wall of liability that would further bankrupt it's shaky future . So let's fire up the base with a popular subject. Look: George Soros money !!
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the decisions in Illinois rarely have much to do with questions of grace, salvation , and the milk of human kindness and this might be "all about the benjamins".
Why would they need a death penalty in Chicago, with only 15000 murders in the last twenty years, chances are the killers are getting it anyway.
Edited on Mar 11, 2011 at 3:24pmOct '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I am as conflicted as I read you to be. Retributive justice is totally appropriate, and I like the deterrent effect of the death penalty, too. When airliner hijackings began back in the 70s, I thought the best response would have been to grab the miscreants, call in the TV and print press, set up a firing range underneath a wing and mow down the bad guys.
We will make mistakes in less clear sets of circumstances - just look at all the people being exonerated by the use of DNA. For that reason, I support a very high bar before carrying out a death sentence.
Gerald Loughner should be eliminated quickly. Ditto Maj. Hasan. No doubt in either case.
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I know I am often considered the resident wimp on this site, but I definitely have a problem with it. Like you, I believe it is certainly constitutional. But I have qualms about it for a number of reasons. You mention one -- the ability of man to be fallible -- but another is that I believe a human can still repent, improve and even be of service to society while serving life in jail.
Then again, the toughest part is thinking of how a victim's family might get some peace of mind. I suppose if someone slaughtered a child of mine, I'd have a hard time sleeping -- ever. again. -- if that person remained alive, even in solitary confinement. But perhaps that's a weakness of mine. Perhaps that would be the ultimate test of forgiveness, and God wouldn't give me that challenge unless it was for some good reason.
Feb '11
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Many share your concerns.
I think a theory of retributive punishment respects the dignity of human freedom, whereas other theories I am aware of (to create disincentives for the criminal, to create disincentives for others, to reform the criminal, …) do not.
We do indeed mistakenly convict innocents, and a death penalty is indeed irreversible. So, however, is life imprisonment.
To rob an innocent person of freedom for any time is unjust. To allow the guilty to go without a punishment proportional to the crime is unjust as well.
Suppose that there was a high percentage of false convictions. Suppose, further, that, for 50% of these false convictions, five years after execution, the mistake was discovered; after 7 years, 60%; after 10, 63%; after 50, 64%. Those numbers would convince me that we should give people an extra 10 years to prove their innocence before executing them.
But suppose that nearly all false convictions were not discovered for 50 or 60 years after the sentence was carried out. Then I would see no dispositive difference between false convictions for life sentences than false convictions for death sentences.
Sep '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
The technology and legalisms exist to ensure that the problems encountered in Illinois would not occur again. DNA testing and special death penalty review panels, are key to ensuring that the problems of Illinois could not occur.
Review panels tasked with reviewing the evidence in a death penalty trial and allow only those cases where two or more pieces of evidence showing the incontrovertible guilt of the accused to move forward. In many cases, particularly in Illinois, people were convicted and sentenced on one piece of strong evidence that was later overturned as untrue. This would end with the review panels.
Life without parole is the nose under the camel's tent in terms of allowing back in the lenient practices of the past with regard to murder convictions. In states where life without parole is a reality, corrections professionals are already discussing how to deal with elderly inmates, including letting them out of prison and into halfway houses or other facilities. Conveniently, and usually after the loved ones of those murdered are either dead themselves or incapable of calling the corrections bureaucracy to account. This type of thinking violates the social contract by rendering meaningless the lives of murdered
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Dennis Prager on Capital Punishment:
http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2006/12/12/capital_punishment_--_another_argument_for_it
I tend to agree with Prager. He spent twenty years of his life teaching the Pentateuch, in night or weekend classes, translating as he went, verse by verse. So, I tend to believe him when he says that capital punishment is not only an available punishment in civilized society, but the proper one for callous premeditated murder. I also understand the Catholic position, but I think people underestimate the opportunities that convicts have to murder each other, and their guards.
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Here's the view of one Mormon. First, the Church's position is decidedly ambivalent: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment."
I favor capital punishment in circumstances involving particularly egregious crimes (and I believe most American Mormons -- though certainly not all -- agree with me). Del Mar Dave mentioned Loughner and Hassan as deserving capital punishment--I completely agree.
I believe that reasonable people can argue where the line should be drawn (or even that capital punishment should not be allowed). However, I believe that some crimes must fall on the capital punishment side of the line.
To me, it's quite simple: as a society, we must have a line that, if crossed, the criminal pays with his life.
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
In a class on behavioral pathology, the professor posed the following hypothetical:
A person has confessed to first degree murder and has been sentenced to death. Subsequently, it is learned that his actions were the result of a chemical problem in his brain, a problem that can be corrected, effectively making him a normal functioning member of society thereafter. "Do we still demand our pound of flesh?" the professor asked?
As it happened, just days earlier a man had pointed a pistol directly at me and threatened to pull the trigger. So I was in a definite "retributive justice" state of mind when I answered the professor's question. I know many states have provisions for insanity defenses and the like, but how much weight should the retributive position carry?
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
As for "mistakes." It's the nature of government, even honest government, to make good-faith mistakes. If you remember, in 2007, a bridge over the Mississippi collapsed at the peak of rush hour. The cause: the 1961 engineer who designed the bridge didn't provide enough margin for natural corrosion and overstress. A government office then approved the plan. They made a mistake that ended up unfairly killing or injuring several people. That's the nature of human institutions. You try to make life as fair as you can, but you make good-faith mistakes. It's not any reason to shirk from responsibility.
Jul '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I was in favor of the death penalty for many years. I am not any longer, for many of the reasons cited above. But the clincher for me was the realization that the death penalty has an awful effect on the people who carry it out, from the officials who give the word to the guards who escort the condemned to his fate. And then there is the executioner. He is following orders, of course, but that explanation became tainted by events in the last century.
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Nobody is ever required, as a condition of employment, to execute murderers. They're all volunteers. And in cases where more than one person "pulls the lever," one active, others not, it's more to protect the anonymity than to protect the conscience. The conscience part is already settled, or they wouldn't be there in the first place. That's today. I don't know what happened in years past.
Feb '11
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I haven’t quite decided how to deal with the problem of mental illness wrt retribution, but here is the best I have been able to come up with so far: I ask myself, if I were that person, would I believe myself to have been morally responsible for the crime? It seems to me that if I knew what was going on, even if the temptations were very strong (ie, I was overcome with rage), then I am fully responsible, morally. If I was having hallucinations or believed I was saving a life rather than murdering, then of course, I am not responsible for the crime.
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
I find the argument for the death penalty that it deters other criminals from committing other capital offenses to be very weak. Either the punishment fits the crime or it does not. I think if there is incontrovertible evidence and a person who has no history of mental illness, is not diagnosed by an independent psychiatrist as having a mental illness and confesses and admits that the act was wrong then that person should get the ultimate penalty. I believe everyone has a right to an appeal; to be given an opportunity to introduce new evidence or show how they may have been poorly represented by counsel.
I do find it especially abhorrent and obscene that certain murderers, those who murder children or the elderly because they are less able to defend themselves and those who murder for money are allowed to live out their lives at the taxpayer's expense or ever be considered for parole. Once you are contract killer you have communicated to society that murder is a commercial enterprise as legitimate as any other business. A society that permits that attitude to prevail devalues all life and it, rather than the murderer, will pay the price.
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Adam, as I think these responses illustrate, your qualms are a lot more common on the right than you might think. I share them too.
While I'm generally a hard-liner on criminal justice issues -- and am emotionally inclined to support the death penalty -- I've never found a satisfactory intellectual rationale. In wartime, killing (within certain moral parameters) is an unfortunate but necessary element of national self-defense. Ditto individual self-defense in cases where one is in serious physical danger. But when we've already removed someone from society? I don't see it.
Retributive justice to the level of execution strikes me as the strongest argument, but I'm wary of conflating its inherent emotional appeal with natural law status. Deterrence has never struck me as a particularly strong argument (assuming the alternative is life in prison), as I doubt that the psychology that leads to violent homicide can be defused by a marginal change in incentives. Add to that the possibility of executing the innocent and the tremendous costs in both time and money (especially in places like California) and it's a tough case to make.
May '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
The irreversibility of the death penalty and its extraordinary legal costs make me highly skeptical of it. I couldn't care less if it was unconstitutional or not. The imperative question is one of efficacy. A particular course of action should be judged by its costs and its benefits. The costs of capital punishment are exorbitant and the benefits are widely disputed and hardly demonstrable. Are there alternative methods of legal retribution that are cheaper and more effective with regard to deterrence? We should be giving credence to statistics on this issue; empirical evidence should be the ultimate arbiter.
Edited on Mar 11, 2011 at 4:59pmDec '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
If life in prison without any possibility of parole was a certain alternative I might consider abolishing the death penalty. Another requirement I have is that a convicted murderer, torturer, and rapist of a nine year old girl not live a life free from the pressures and responsibilities that all other law abiding citizens must deal with. Prison should not be a form of early retirement on the taxpayer's dime. Those sentenced to life without parole for murder should still be required to work and earn the cost of their incarceration, including world class health care, for the rest of their natural life.
Unless I am assured of and certain of these things, I will continue to support the death penalty. My only problem with the death penalty is in assuring the guilty party is truly guilty. There are many cases where there is no possible rational doubt. I think rational doubt is a higher standard than "reasonable" doubt.
The issue of free will versus "I just couldn't stop myself" is an entirely different matter.
Jun '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
Any prison guard will tell you that there is only one reason for the death penalty, some individuals should not be allowed to live. There is no justice, retribution, or peace to be found in the death penalty.
May '10
Re: Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed to Die?
And as an unsolicited precaution, it doesn't avail to endorse capital punishment merely because contemporary liberals oppose it. Disharmony with modern liberalism won't suffice.