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Returning to Support For the Death Penalty
I supported the death penalty for many years. It seemed only just that a man convicted of a truly heinous murder deserved death, and therefore the state, reflecting the collective conscience of the community, had the right to avenge the brutal death of a murderer’s victim.
Then, about 20 years ago, I read Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, and I changed my mind … though still with a sense that there were many flaws in the arguments against capital punishment. In The Idiot, the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, describes an execution by guillotine he had witnessed, and makes an impassioned case that executing a man, even with swift efficiency, was profoundly wrong because, in the moments before he died, the condemned man lost all hope and was driven to insanity. That made sense. It still does in the abstract.
A number of years later, the state of Montana executed one Duncan McKenzie. This loathsome human monster had kidnapped a young school teacher named Lana Harding, beat her, repeatedly raped her, and finally lashed her to a junked car with barbed wire and left her to die. The morning after Mckenzie’s execution, the sun shined a bit brighter and there was a sense of peace in the air. Mckenzie got his due, and so did Lana Harding and her family.
That morning I regained my belief that capital punishment for truly vicious killers like Mckenzie is supremely just.
I do a lot of pro-life work. For the past three years, I have been the local director for the area’s 40 Days for Life campaign. I’ve spoken at many pro-life events like the local March for Life, which takes place on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. I’ve worked with high school students in the movement, and written much on the issue.
And I have determined that capital punishment is pro-life.
Many of my compatriots in the local pro-life organization disagree with me. Some see my position as poppycock. Their argument is that anytime a life is spared—even the life of a vicious killer—the cause of life is strengthened. Some call me a hypocrite. I take that in stride and remain firm in my belief that sometimes a killer’s death is the only way to ensure that life is seen as truly precious. The victim’s life, I argue, is affirmed by the execution of her killer. To leave so cruel a killer as Duncan McKenzie alive is an outrage. Mckenzie sought not only to kill Lana Harding’s body. He sought to destroy her soul. That is the very definition of an evil man.
My friends on the other side of the capital punishment debate argue that my position is wrong because it is grounded in the desire for revenge.
Well, yes. That is how it should be. The first and overriding function of any system of criminal justice is retribution. The community restores justice by exacting revenge on the criminal. If retribution were not the first principle of criminal justice, there would be no justification for punishing anyone.
So, I ask my abolitionist friends, if retribution is not the cornerstone of punishment, how can it be just to punish anyone? The usual response is that punishment is designed to rehabilitate the criminal and to protect the community, and that capital punishment obviously cannot reform the killer. Besides, I often hear, sentencing the killer to life in prison offers full protection for the community.
My reply is “who cares?” A killer like McKenzie has committed so great an outrage against his victim and the community that it is irrelevant that he cannot be rehabilitated or that he can be taken out of society by life in prison. Lana Harding’s death cried out for justice. That, for me, is the end of it.
The usual fallback position among my abolitionist friends is that innocent men may be executed, and that such an injustice trumps the community’s need for retribution.
My reply is that the assertion that it is “better that 100 guilty men go free rather than that a single innocent man be put to death” is nonsense. To send 100 Duncan Mackenzies back into the world would be like releasing a deadly toxin into the air. To release 100 sociopaths is to risk condemning 100 innocent lives.
Besides, virtually every action by the state requires the balancing of risks and benefits. All human action carries the risk of error, but the community must still have the power to condemn barbarians.
But, my abolitionist friends respond, Christian teaching compels society, as a matter of mercy, to refrain from executing even a guilty man.
Really? The family of a brutally murdered loved one suffers horribly from the loss. It is a hard task to bear the pain and loss of a murder victim while the killer is still up wandering around. I can scarcely imagine the dread Lana Harding’s parents must have endured, not just at her murder but at imagining the fear and despair of their daughter. Her father must have awakened every day and berated himself because he was not there to save his child. The victim’s loved ones deserve the mercy of justice far more than does the psychopath who robbed his victim of her life and her humanity.
I’m a Roman Catholic, so I stand in fear and trembling when I make these arguments. The Church, however, has never held that capital punishment is intrinsically evil. The Catechism provides that execution is still an option as a matter of justice (the word used is retribution). The question of whether alternative punishments are available to satisfy the needs of the community is a prudential judgment. So, until the Church formally decides to disallow capital punishment, I’ll remain in my position — because to completely abandon the death penalty would cheapen life by granting immunity from death to those who brutally kill. The community would have effectively declared that a cold blooded killer’s life is of greater worth than the life of his victim. This would trivialize murder, and by extension, would trivialize innocent life.
Published in General
That’s not a particularly Libertarian argument. In fact, Practical Mary, our anti-libertarian, just made it.
It may be the first time Practical Mary and I have been on the same side of a Ricochet debate.
I have no principled opposition to capital punishment. I don’t even oppose it on the grounds that the state cannot be trusted with such power. What I oppose is our current capital punishment regime. It’s inefficiency and inconsistency rob it of much of its deterrent effect. Develop a better system and I’d be wholly on board for capital punishment, even on an expanded scale.
Agreed. When the deterrent effect of capital punishment is undermined, then really what’s the point?
There’s stuff that could enhance the deterrent effect that we may not wish to go back to. Past practices of turning execution into a public spectacle and imposing slow, painful deaths like live disembowelment, drawing, and quartering may have added much to deterrence. (Though I suppose you also could argue that a public coarsened by treating painful death as a spectacle might actually become more prone to violence and brutality.)
But if we can find a way to increase the deterrent effect of capital punishment in a manner consistent with other vital values, we should. The more a criminal’s execution warns others, the more meaning his death has.
Well, the four common purposes of criminal punishment are retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. You obviously cannot rehabilitate a dead man, so that doesn’t apply in the context of capital punishment. Retribution seems to be the main justification for our current capital punishment regime. I’m not opposed to retribution being the basis for punishment, but we apply capital punishment so arbitrarily that I think that justice is undermined.
I think executions should be conducted in a humane fashion, but I do strongly feel that executions should be public. If we as a society are going to undertake to impose so severe a punishment as execution, we should be willing to do so in the open.
Neither do I James; I support the death sentence only if it is allowed to be conducted on a timely basis to rid society of its most dangerous parasites without the endless, taxpayer sponsored years on death row and pathological novels by Truman Capote.
Deterrence and incapacitation I get. And as you say, rehabilitation doesn’t apply to capital punishment.
Is retribution a real thing, though? Or is it a convenient emotional shorthand applied to acts that promote deterrence and incapacitation?
Why do we need to wait until cryogenics works to freeze them?
That is a very dangerous position to take. To take that position makes you responsible for the millions of babies that have been and continue to be slaughtered in this country because you have chosen to passively protest their murders.
Is it that justice is undermined? Or rather that there is not enough justice when some escape paying the ultimate price for their crimes?
I think retribution is a real thing. Punishing wrongdoing is important whether or not it deters future wrongdoing. Part of respecting human autonomy is holding people to account for their wrongdoing even if there is no other societal benefit for doing so.
A key part of justice is treating like cases alike. After a great deal of wrestling with this question I’ve come to the conclusion that the injustice resulting from the arbitrary application of capital punishment outweighs the justice meted out by the executions which do occur. My own preferred solution would be to expand the use of capital punishment, but I don’t think that is likely to happen.
OK. So I’ve spent a lot of time today trying to write a comment to clarify my argument re retribution. Then I got bored with myself and took the wife out to dinner.
Anyway, here’s an article by Edward Feser on the issue. It’s long, but Feser is never boring.
10 bucks says the link doesn’t work.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/09/4033/
I think that if we get to appoint the next SCOTUS justice or the one after that, the states will likely be freed to return to sensible execution guidelines, and that some states will operate efficient, relatively widespread, capital punishment. The surveillance state, particularly private security cameras and police badge-cams, is improving at an astonishing rate; the more likely we are to have clear footage of horrific crimes being committed, and the wider it is disseminated, the broader public support for justice will become.
Capital punishment just needs to survive until then.
OK. Please list your names as my creditors all ye who bet that the link would work.
Because Bond villain schemes are often hard to sell to the voters. Also, freezing conscious convicts as a form of execution is probably Unconstitutional. I detest Kennedy’s controlling 8th Amendment jurisprudence, but the Amendment does have some meaning.
But James, cryogenically freezing a bunch of criminals does sound like a Bond villain scheme.
It’s not so long, and it’s pretty good, although it eliminates the incapacitation benefit to punishment, which I think to be the strongest argument for the death penalty.
*strokes cat, then throws it in frustration* Darn it! Just as I was making my laser beams attached to sharks plan sound reasonable!
There are two kinds of deterrence, general and special. General deterrence is that the example of the punishment deters others from committing similar offenses. We’re pretty sure that doesn’t work. Special deterrence prevents the same offender from repeating. I’m pretty sure the death penalty works for that.
We live in the post Constitutional era so we’re going to have to let go of that argument. If you don’t believe me that we live in the post Constitutional era and the past few century hasn’t convinced you, check in with me in a few more decades and I guarantee it’ll be clear.
But that is an argument for treating all cases alike. Eliminating the few instances where the victims and society finally get a bit of justice (executing people who’ve committed horrible crimes against their fellow man) will result in less justice. Just like with socialism, the prisoner’s outcomes will be equal but none of them will match their crimes.
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/377649/execution-assisted-suicide-wesley-j-smith
Societies that believe that abortion and partial birth abortion are okay (some even until 2-3 years old), help ‘useless eaters’ kill themselves instead of helping them to live, where an individual is viewed only as private property and can rent out or sell themselves or body parts (or buy others, and if that society doesn’t believe individuals can own private property but all is the government’s), where it’s becoming the norm to believe it’s wasteful to not harvest body parts ‘for the common good’…Yes, I can see an increase in executions…
Examine your understanding of humans and follow it to the logical conclusion instead of utopia.
Jesus warned against harming children in the most severe terms. When he was on the cross, the thief next to him admitted that he himself deserved his death sentence. That really and truly sums up the difference between the two, and why equating abortion with the death penalty is completely wrong. The thieves of the world make their choices. Abortionists want to deny millions of children even having the chance to make choices.
It’s like taking the car to the mechanic. That sound goes away every time. You can put me on the list.
I am pro-executions and pro-mercy.
We can execute the people that deserve it to the best of our knowledge, and we can be merciful to the people who deserve that as well.
I would also like to see our executions being a state wide pre-empt TV sort of affair so that we all can witness what is done in our names. As long as the death penalty is an abstraction done in the shadows, witnessed by few, and out of our public consciousness it loses some of legitimacy.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, my criticism of the endless appeals allowed for a death penalty sentence are based not only upon taxpayer expense, but most importantly, the compromising of the effectiveness of this punishment as a deterrent. The media frenzy that most certainly would ensue a televised execution would all but make this a non-option in the penal system. Why give Al Sharpton yet another platform?
I do believe- particularly if you analyze the demographics of most juries and most defendants today- that the death sentence is not imposed lightly and not without scientific evidence. If anything, it may not be imposed as often as it should- see OJ Simpson.
I don’t care about Al Sharpton or any half-baked charlatan out there. I want American’s to witness and internalize the things that are done in their name. I want them to hear what the person did, and the evidence against them, and then watch as this person’s life ends. Hopefully feeling an odd combination of satisfaction and horror.
If you want a just application of the death penalty from beginning to end, than the people have to know the truth of thing, and not just the abstraction.
You should. You think an execution would be reported and publicized in any objective manner? No way.
It’ll become America’s latest “reality show.”
Who cares about the reporting?
I am talking State of the Union preemption of the TV broadcasts. The governor explaining the crime, the evidence, and then we watch the man fry. If he doesn’t want to explain to the people what is about to happen, he can commute the sentence and explain that.
If all the Monday morning quarterbacks want to argue and call it analysis all the better. We should also be faced with the case that what they just saw happen was injustice as well.
You want to make every one of them a movie star? I support the idea of webcasts, or broadcasts on CourtTV, but I don’t want my TV pre-empted by anything on a weekly/ daily basis, let alone some two bit child murderer in some town I’ve never heard of.