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Death Penalty: Let’s Be Honest
Jonah Goldberg has an excellent piece today on the dishonesty of the opponents of the death penalty. He highlights two points: (1) opponents create the situation (costs of litigation and associated administration) which they argue should be a basis for discarding the death penalty, and (2) they call it “unconstitutional” when the death penalty is actually written in the constitution (see 5th Amendment). They also point to the numbers of individuals on death row that have been determined to be innocent prior to their delayed executions. That is not an argument against the death penalty unless you really believe we cannot do a better job in investigating and adjudicating the innocence or guilt of people. Is it better to house an innocent person in jail for the rest of their life than to execute them? After all, eliminating the death penalty may actually reduce support for post-conviction innocence proceedings.
One can have a principled argument against the death penalty — but none of the ones put forward are actually that. The real question in my mind is one of relative value: Is the accused’s life of more value than the victim’s? If your answer is “no” you cannot be against the death penalty. You can be for better investigative and prosecutorial rules — eliminate practices that evoke false confessions, make the prosecutors focus on justice instead of political favor — you can be for limiting the penalty to those cases only where a life is taken, and you can be for quick and relatively painless executions, but you cannot be for the eliminating the death penalty altogether.
Remember that the alternative to a broken criminal justice system is not a more humane justice system — it is a system of private revenge and self-help. So if you break the system with unprincipled arguments you get private action. You cannot consistently value the life of the killer over that of the killed and maintain a justice system that is the sole purview of the state.
Published in General
Michigan and Chicago are living nightmares.
It was not intended to be a comprehensive list, but rather an illustration about how differing goals for punitive measures can result in differing types of punitive measures.
Personally, I believe both that the death penalty is just and that outside of the most open-and-shut cases (e.g. perpetrator was arrested at the scene of the crime) I don’t trust the government enough to have gotten the right person to risk killing someone who may be innocent.
Y’know, I’ve often thought that a return to some physical punishment that does cause lasting impairment might not be a bad idea. Much cheaper than incarceration. And it could serve to prevent recidivism by putting potential victims on immediate notice of the perp’s crominal past. Convicts used to be branded on the right palm so if they took an oath their credibility was instantly at issue. Convicts today are just as well and truly branded: ok, you can’t see it at a casual glance, but they are barred from any occupation that requires a license, there are many places they can’t live, in some states they are disenfranchised, they can’t own weapons…also why do we think long term incarceration is not a physical punishment?
This is usually countered by the argument that the US Const. prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishment. Well, all punishment is “cruel” ; otherwise it wouldn’t be, uh, very punitive, now would it? And ” unusual”? I don’t think physical punishments were at all unusual in the 1790s when the Constitution was being drafted.
But o’ irony: a sexual offender can’t be physically or chemically castrated as punishment, even on his request, last time I checked. That would be cruel ‘n unusual. Yet anybody can get the mayhem done just by claiming they don’t feel comfy with the organs they were born with. Funny ol’ world!
Deliberate murder is a heinous act against G-d, and G-d is the ultimate judge.
Capital punishment acknowledges that truth, and sends the murderer on to the only judge who can examine hearts and sort out the situation.
I sometimes think our social fear of the death penalty is because we usurp G-d’s role as the ultimate judge. Or that we no longer believe that G-d is the ultimate authority.
The death penalty simply sends the party in question to their ultimate destination-the same as they did to their victim.
When we no longer believe that G-d is the ultimate judge, the death penalty takes on a different, and distorted, spiritual function. And we should rightfully be afraid.
As should anyone on a jury. The death penalty is a serious and final decision. It is not to be taken lightly.
Really excellent, @amyschley, concise and precise. Of course “the goal” is what everyone’s disagreement is about.
I started to say this is an unprovable assertion – but then I realized that it was just a wrong statement: What Texas has to show, is a few less murderers.
It wasn’t just this one case that has been called into question because the theory of arson has been changed. There have been two or three hundred cases. (I’m sorry that my Google search cannot prove this figure right this minute. I’m seeing a lot of cases, but not the number in the hundreds I saw a few months ago.)
Even shaken baby syndrome has been questioned:
I’ve seen much “science” debunked in my lifetime.
I also know we don’t understand mental illness very well, and deciding whether someone is mentally ill or incompetent is not a reliable way to assign guilt or innocence.
The Patriots player Aaron Hernandez case was interesting. If he was guilty of the murder as the police and prosecutors described it, it was the craziest crime. The things he did in the days surrounding it were so stupid that when I read the first police reports in the newspapers, I laughed. Who would do this? This was just plain stupid. As his trial went on, I began to think that there was something wrong with this man. He had a great life, and everything he did surrounding this murder destroyed that. He didn’t have to murder this man–the victim was not a threat to Hernandez in any way. It was completely irrational for Hernandez to build a $2 million home one day and pursue this murder the next. Some say that he tried to cover it up, but in my opinion, he did that too so badly that it was ridiculous. He is not stupid, but he has not been thinking clearly at all–that is, he has not been acting in his own best interests for a while.
So I was not at all surprised to see that I am not the only person to see this case this way. After his suicide this past week, his brain was turned over to scientists for study. Of course, they are looking at the football helmet concussion possibility (which was, frankly, my first thought), but it is more likely that it is a complicated picture, compounded by explosive rage syndrome issues. That’s a hard thing to diagnose, like blood pressure that spikes only under some circumstances.
Science is in one place today, another tomorrow. That’s why there is a danger that we are executing innocent people.
Maybe we aren’t so far removed from “primitive” people that performed periodic human sacrifices to appease the gods.
I also, like you and Aaron, have wondered whether it would be beneficial. The very thing that makes it more humane to the criminal in the long term (letting him get on with his life) might weaken its effect as a deterrent; but on the other hand, periods of locking people up, where so much time passes in which to unlearn how to be a functioning citizen and learn how to fit in among other criminals and adapt to being captive rather than free, impose more than just opportunity costs, and that’s on top of their opportunity costs being considerable!
For what it is worth, I wonder about the following scenario:
Imagine an armed person with two prior felony convictions pursued by police while committing a third felony. If apprehended in a `three strikes and you’re out’ state he knows he will get life. If that is the greatest punishment he can receive, won’t he have less reticence in using lethal force against the police in order to possibly avoid apprehension?
I don’t think that deterrence needs to be absolute to be of consideration: at the margin it could mean the world to someone.
I agree with Stina. Probably no murderer while believes they are going to lose their own life if they do this – unless its some bizarre form of suicide. Whenever I read of an execution, seems like it’s always for premeditated murder or the most casual, unconcerned murder.
Execution should be swift, and I don’t care whether you call it justice, revenge, retribution or punishment. It fits the crime.
While you’re googling, google up “general” and “special” deterrence.
The death penalty is only used for first degree murder, which is, by definition, premeditated.
That’s also true if he knows he’s going to get the death penalty.
But to me it’s immaterial. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed; For in the image of God He made man.”
And in public, so shame is involved.
Ever read some of Thomas Jefferson’s proposed punishments? They include nose-slitting. And if you cut out someone’s tongue brand them, or otherwise disfigure them, your punishment would be the same. Take a gander at #XIV and XV:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jefferson-the-works-vol-2-1771-1779?q=sodomy#Jefferson_0054-02_899
@rightangles, I can’t tell from the notes whether this was (a) Jefferson’s ideas or simply his editing of Committee work, and/or (b) intended by clarity in language to confront the potential adopters with a revulsion to what they were considering.
It was a proposed law drafted by Jefferson and some other Virginia state legislators in 1776.
I haven’t had time to read all the comments in this interesting post, but I do not find the death penalty to be a deterrent because nobody ever thinks they’re going to get caught. Having said that, maybe it’s more visceral than intellectual, but I have no problem with the state executing murderers when there’s zero chance they might be innocent. In the case of Susan Smith of South Carolina, who murdered her two small sons because the guy she was dating didn’t like kids, when they didn’t give her the death penalty I didn’t even understand why they have it on the books. She’s eligible for parole in 2024. Sorry but I do not get that.
She strapped those children into their car seats and pushed the car into a lake and watched their terrified little faces as they went under. She did it, and she admitted it. I don’t understand why she shouldn’t have been executed. Same for Charles Manson and others of this ilk.
Every one of the Manson family should have been put to death.
I’m not positive, but the Manson murders might have happened while the death penalty was unconstitutional.
http://babylonbee.com/news/cecile-richards-thanks-ancient-god-molech-continued-government-funding-planned-parenthood/
Yeah, I don’t buy the “no deterrence” notion. It’s easy enough to see extreme examples of societies where punishment is swift and ferocious (Arab, for example) where crimes of all sorts are much less prevalent.
This is not advocacy that we should be more like the Arabs. I’m simply pointing to evidence that harsh justice can, indeed, affect behavior.
G-d absolutely forbade us to give our children up to molech. Read Leviticus 18:21, Lev 19:12, Lev 20:2-3, Lev 21:6 and many more passages forbidding sacrificing your seed to molech.
Impending doom concentrates the mind. I’ve never understood why we have to give someone 50 years to repent.
I also do not believe we are ever able to imprison someone for life with zero risk to the prison population, let alone the population at large should a murderer escape or have his sentence commuted by a sympathetic bureaucrat.
Like everything else on earth, there are tradeoffs. It seems to me that most people could agree to a standard in which capital punishment is rare, but is held in reserve for those who torture their victims or commit mass murder — especially when the evidence against them is substantial. Think the Orlando night club murderer, or the guys who raped and tortured the mother and daughter before burning them alive.
Without inflicting any pain or distress on them, of course. (Sarc)
I agree.
My arguments against the death penalty:
1.) The problem of making mistakes. Yes, it is better to keep an innocent person imprisoned for life than to kill him. Better for whom, you ask? That brings me to #2
2.) Executing a defenseless person exposes the executioner and all involved with the act to moral injury. It’s all very well to say “we should kill that guy” but WE don’t have to do it. A particular group of individuals has to do it. Presumably, people have to be trained how, which means there must be teachers. Physicians, nurses and EMTs, understandably, don’t really want to have anything to do with it. Drug companies don’t either. There’s a reason for that. It’s hard enough managing a prison population in a reasonably humane way and before you say “why does it need to be so freakin’ humane? ” let me ask you: do you wanna be the prison guard in an inhumane prison? Do you want your children to grow up to be executioners?
3.) This one is a long shot but… for the family of the victim, statistically speaking, the death of the murderer doesn’t seem to bring “closure.”
Nothing brings closure, probably, since closure is not a particularly useful concept when it comes to mourning, but never mind.
The one thing that might make their burden just a smidge lighter is the knowledge that the person who killed their loved one understands what he or she has done, and is truly remorseful.
Don’t hold your breath. Still, I have, personally, known cases in which the genuine (if admittedly partial) reformation of a perpetrator brought ease and comfort to the victim and/or the family.
Weirdly, there are a lot of good Christians who don’t seem to believe in reformation. Didn’t George W Bush refuse to stay the execution of a woman who had found Jesus and been born again? So does it —New Life In Christ—mean something or doesn’t it?
I do think that there is a big difference between an 18 year old idiot kid who shoots someone and the forty-five year old he will eventually become. The forty-five year old might actually understand what the eighteen year old could not, and might even be able to communicate that understanding in a meaningful way… but not if he’s dead.
And maybe for people who prove too dangerous to manage in a prison setting without keeping them under constant observation and in constant isolation— essentially, torturing them in perpetuity? Which is also (see my comment at #88) a brutalizing and dehumanizing experience for the prison staff.
I think I have to disagree with you here.
The state is not Christian. The state is amoral in many ways. The state cannot forgive. Also, the state isn’t good at differentiating between a believer and an actor. Pardon one person and others are liable to say whatever they think will get them out of their punishment.
That being said, I could be convinced on your other points. I am not sure if the death penalty is worth the trouble. I suspect it is, but I can be convinced either way. I think it is more about removing the lawless and protecting the innocent than retribution.
So, while my opinion of the death penalty is complicated, the idea that a president should pardon someone because they “Reformed” I think is impractical. Especially with the death penalty. Life in prison, maybe. Death penalty, not so much. The reason is that the harsher the penalty, the more strictly (as in by the book) it should be enforced. I wouldn’t want an accused to want to get the death penalty so that they have a better chance of being pardoned after “reforming”. Basically, I think that whatever benefits society gives to the worst criminals, it give at least as much if not more to all lesser criminals. Thus, if you are willing to limit the punishment of someone on death row because they reformed, you should also limit punishments on all lower crimes as well. We may do some of that, but the precedent of a president getting involved doesn’t sound like a good idea as they would then be obligated (IMO) to get involved with every effectively in prison for life, or for more than … oh, now it just means everyone.
Also, from a Christian standpoint, is it really so bad that a “reformed person” gets executed. Their soul has been saved, so what is the big deal. Their crime was still a crime and the punishment was decided. So while it is great that they have been saved, the state must still do its duty and carry out the punishment by default. Of course, if it wasn’t such a bad crime in the first place, then they shouldn’t have had the death penalty anyways, but that just goes back to how we decide the death penalty in the first place.