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Your Daily Reminder That the Death Penalty Is Both Moral and Necessary
Noted moral philosopher Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) issued a statement last week regarding the Catholic Church’s updated position on the Death Penalty:
Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme means of safeguarding the common good, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes; Consequently, the church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
The irony of all this is particularly bitter, given that the Pope could be credibly accused of having a conflict of interest on this issue when considering yesterday’s new revelations of a vast and heinous conspiracy of child abuse among the Pope’s employees.
In contrast to the incredibly anodyne and sterile language which the Pope used here to describe the worst manner of offenses against humanity I present you with this case from Colorado:
A Frederick husband and father is behind bars in the Weld County Jail, booked early Thursday morning, in connection to the disappearance of his pregnant wife and two young daughters.
Two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation told Denver7 investigative reporter Jace Larson that Watts had confessed to killing Shanann Watts, 34, and their two daughters — 3-year-old Celeste and 4-year-old Bella — and that officials believe they know where they can find the bodies.
Think about that: Shannan Watts was pregnant with the couple’s third child, and Chris Watts murdered them all.
What can society’s just response to such wanton evil be, aside from denying this mass-murderer his own life? Here we see a situation where a man murders four people — people whom he had a direct hand in either bringing into this world or had sworn to care for in sickness and in health — and the Pope’s response to that is to claim that it is a greater moral good for society to feed and house this monster in perpetuity.
I can think of little which would be more offensive to the notion of basic decency that Chris Watts will get to keep his life under any circumstances while Shannan and her children lost theirs.
So, let’s briefly recount the arguments against the death penalty:
- The State shouldn’t be killing people;
- It’s expensive;
- You could convict the wrong person — or — You can’t un-kill people; and
- Hard cases make for bad law
The first argument is utter nonsense. For people to make this argument credibly, they also have to argue for disarming police, who can serve as judge, jury, and executioner in extremis. If the police can kill people in the course of enforcing the law in a far less controlled or legalistic manner … how can it be “worse” for people to be executed after innumerable appeals and substantial quantities of due process? This argument is incoherent.
As to the notion that execution is costly … the very people who complain about its cost are the same people who make it costly in the first place by fighting so strenuously against its use. The objection is the equivalent of complaining that there’s a leak in your canoe because you shot a hole in it. Most of the legal wrangling about such cases is process-related and has nothing to do with new facts emerging to exculpate the accused. That process should be streamlined with a special set of courts of appeal designed to handle such procedural objections. That would significantly reduce the time and cost of such processes.
If you truly believe the first half of the third objection, it becomes hard to morally justify things like “prison” in the first place. If the deepest injustice is being falsely imprisoned to begin with, how can you justify taking the risk of jailing anyone? The system could be wrong, after all. Admittedly, sometimes it is, and people are sent to prison for lengthy sentences for crimes they didn’t commit. However, sensible people would likely concede that such cases tend to be extraordinary and few would probably be willing to stake that the criminal justice system is more wrong on balance than not.
Financial compensation can only do so much to make whole the people who’ve been wronged in this fashion but the same argument works on the side of the victims of crime. Particularly when those victims have been deprived of the most fundamental of rights: their lives. This, in my opinion is the strongest argument against the death penalty. In situations where there is any reasonable doubt as to the complete moral culpability of the intended recipient of such punishment, that should place extreme caution in the minds of those contemplating it. You can, after all, regain your freedom, but not your life.
Lastly, we arrive at the somewhat ambiguous notion that such cases are extraordinary or rare and this, therefore, means that we shouldn’t do anything extraordinary about the situation. What poppycock. It is precisely the extraordinary nature of these situations, and the wanton evil on display in them, which justifies extraordinary punishment.
What will we as a society gain by killing a monster like Chris Watts, who murdered his entire family? To be honest: Very little. But what we lose by keeping him alive is the notion that such infamous crimes will result in the ultimate price being extracted from their perpetrators.
The still-warm blood of these children cries out from the ground for justice, and their calls deserve to be answered.
Published in General
John Lott tried to analyze it. He found there is a deterrent effect, but with a huge margin of error. Each execution prevents between 8 and 28 murders.
I would be fascinated to see this study.
EDIT: Found an archived article about it.
Right, that’s why I stipulated first degree murder.
What about this scenario: a drug dealer begins selling his product on a block claimed by a rival gang. A young man hoping to be initiated into said gang carefully monitors his daily route, then one day drives up behind him, shoots him in the back, and drives away. Clearly premeditated and in cold blood.
Does this deserve the death penalty? Why, or why not?
Probably, but I’m open to the idea that there needs to be aggravating factors beyond premeditation to be death penalty worthy.
My argument would be that it ought to be on the table in those specific conditions. Of course, all such killings are different, and juries are going to interpret them differently as well.
Here is the law in Oregon on the use of deadly physical force:
This law applies to police officers, and private citizens. It has nothing do with being judge, jury and executioner. Obviously a shooting situation occurs in an uncontrolled situation. The officer is placed in the position of having to react to the actions of the perpetrator. The perpetrator is in control. If the situation was under control there would be no reason for the officer to shoot.
Ed Feser:
Capital Punishment Is Consistent with Human Dignity
My reason for opposing it is your first: I don’t want the state killing its own citizens. I don’t want police killing people either. I do not have to endorse disarming police in order to oppose the death penalty.
(But if we are going to kill people, we’re killing the wrong ones. We should terminate the lives of the criminally insane, or of people too mentally defective to understand that they did wrong. Those people can never be rehabilitated, never be released. Yet those are the ones who don’t even stand trial.)
so put fewer people in prison for victimless crimes, or crimes against property, let them make restitution and be monitored while doing so. Then we’d have room to lock the murderers away for life or pending possible rehabilitation.
The debate here about different degrees of murder and different circumstances sows we recognize that for some people, a killing could be a one off, they could be rehabbed never to do it again, but for others it’s a way of life, dictated by their inheritance both genetic and social.
Then the death penalty isn’t “necessary”, it’s “preferable.”
If you have no claims as to its effectiveness, then what is left? What you happen to prefer?
Awfully nice of you.
That would be true of all crimes. Maoist China had a low recidivism rate for opium possession, thanks to the death penalty.
I agree with Joseph that the two situations are not comparable: The police officer who shoots a spree-shooter dead is acting less in his capacity as law-enforcement than as a protector of the peace. He is saving lives, not exacting justice or punishment.
Murder is unique in that it’s (almost definitionally) impossible for the victim to receive apology or recompense, or to become whole again in life: After all, they’re dead.
When it comes to the most egregious murders, capital punishment provides a public service by removing the desire of taking personal revenge against the murderer. Being able to tell the family that the man who murdered their loved ones will not be able to live a full, natural life adds a lot to their feelings of justice and removes the need they would otherwise feel to take justice into their own hands.
Bloodfeud was an incredibly destructive (and ubiquitous) force in human history that’s worth some sweat and blood to prevent. It’s a pragmatic argument, but I think it’s founded in a philosophical principle that the murderer’s untimely death is the only way to reestablish justice.
The problem for me with the death penalty is two-fold. First, “the State” doesn’t kill people. People kill people, which is to say that a human being must perform the act of killing another, defenseless human being.
It is one thing to say, as @franksoto does: I could do it. I’ve said the same thing myself, usually in the lukewarm version of “hot blood” that the story of the crime elicits. But in real life, I don’t have to do it. Executions are dehumanizing to the executioner(s) and all who must have a role in the death—medical personnel, prison guards, chaplains, senior management, the governor etc.
Police officers who have killed people are generally not happy to have been put in a position to have to do so. Even when the offender “deserves it,” the preferred outcome for LEO is that a living, breathing person is apprehended and goes to prison. This is a good thing, a feature not a bug in our criminal justice system.
So anyway, objection #1 for me is the effect the death penalty has on the people who have to make it happen.
Objection #2 won’t sound as practical, I suppose…but the one really healing thing that a victim’s family could receive is not the death of the perpetrator. That brings—at best—a kind of finality—“at least I don’t have to worry about the possibility that he’ll hurt someone else”—but it seldom (in my experience) confers a sense of justice. As has been noted, being executed isn’t the same as being murdered. There is control, there is a chance to offer “last words,” you get to say goodbye and maybe have a last meal. Your death is meaningful, in the sense that you know why it is happening. All very, very different, and believe me, families are aware of the distinction.
No, the best thing that could happen for the family is that the perpetrator experiences, by some means, an inward transformation that allows him to truly grasp the enormity of what he has done, and to feel true remorse. Obviously, this is not a common phenomenon, but it isn’t impossible. It has happened.
If you eliminate the murderer, you also eliminate the chance of this happening.
These are not necessarily arguments for eliminating the death penalty. I do recognize the problem of a prisoner who continues to be dangerous to fellow prisoners and COs. Sealing someone up in a plexiglas box, and feeding him through a slot in the floor —torturing him for years—isn’t a whole lot more moral than just killing him and being done with it. Guarding such a prisoner would have to be pretty dehumanizing for prison personnel too, right?
So I suppose that, if I had to choose, I’d probably get rid of the death penalty, but without any illusion that this makes everything simple and easy.
While I’m sensitive to this argument, I’m also looking at the bottom line. We dispatch LEOs with lethal weaponry to restore the peace in the case where individuals have run amok and the possible outcome of that situation is the death of that perpetrator. Obviously, police aren’t acting as a judge and issuing a proclamation against the perp in the event that they’re forced to fire on them, but the net effect is that we allow killing as a price of maintaining the peace in a fashion which has very little in the way of process surrounding it. All the process stuff comes as after-action assessment.
Yet, the incongruity of saying that after careful deliberation (as opposed to the heat of combat) it becomes impermissible to deprive somebody of their life in retaliation for extraordinary acts strikes me as being difficult to explain.
We can be deprived of our liberty, property and even our lives provided due process of law.
Agreed in part. Personally, I think our current methods of execution are deeply mistaken. Making it a semi-medical procedure is downright strange and appears to do no one any good. A scientific hanging or a firing squad is much more humane to the condemned than a series of injections. Hell, there’s even a case to be made for the guillotine.
Also, there was a long tradition — continued to the present — of issuing one member of a firing squad (unbeknownst to him) a blank or wax bullet as a gesture to obviating his personal responsibility for the death and emphasizing that it’s a collective thing.
Again, a gesture, but a worthwhile one.
Again, it strikes me that a police officers’ sidearm is a defensive weapon designed to stop and protect (others) with lethal force. Any justified killing by a police officer should really be a variety of self-defense or defense of a citizen whose life was in danger.
Though execution may contain an element of defense, it’s primarily not defensive.
When the Dallas police shooter was blown up by remote control bomb, it was essentially an execution of a suspect who refused to surrender to obviously superior forces.
I don’t have a problem with how that was done in the sense that it likely saved lives over the other method of trying to charge and corral or capture him.
Not in a useful sense. The Dallas suspect needed to be apprehended and there was simply no way to do that without serious risk to the officers. I’d no more call it an “execution” than if someone had taken a headshot at him.
The key point in my mind is that he refused to surrender. He was still armed and dangerous.
If on the other hand he had surrendered, and after he was disarmed and handcuffed a police officer walked up to him and shot him in the back of the head that would be an execution.
Are you arguing that solitary confinement is a fate worse than death? It may depend on the prisoner. Do they get to choose?
At any rate the death penalty is obviously not necessary since many states and countries don’t have it and get along about as well as the states and countries that do. I don’t have to make an argument against it. Reality is the argument against it.
I’m pointing out that if you respond to the question with long term solitary confinement, you need to understand you are ordering serious psychological torture. Do not dwell overly on the point, it simply needs to be acknowledged.
In a shooting situation not only does an innocent private citizen have the right to their own life, so does a police officer. If I confront someone hacking at people with a machete I don’t have to go to the trunk of my police car and get my issued machete out of the trunk of my police car. I’m shooting to stop the immediate threat. Once the subject is no longer a threat I stop pulling the trigger. If he survives great, if not that’s too bad.
In the Dallas incident just think of the bomb as a bigger bullet. There is no moral justification in sending 10 police officers to try and get close enough to fire a gun, knowing that you might lose 5 of the 10 officers in the attempt.
If you want to eliminate the death penalty in your state then legislate removing the power of a governor to pardon someone who has committed murder. If you do this then a life without parole sentence is meaningful, if you do not then there is no such thing as a life without parole sentence.
If you can stop a criminal with nonelethal force I think you have to do that, otherwise you can’t put them on trial. You can’t allow the police to use lethal force just because they think someone richly deserves it. This is what I mean about so much of the justification for the death penalty being emotional congruity. We can’t help but feel some people should die, but it strikes me as an Christian to hold that view.
As to the question of God having sanctioned death for some crimes in the old Testament. That seems like faulty reasoning. The old testament laws are for the ancient Isrealites. They conform to the limitations of their society, the most clearly articulated rules from Jesus that bare on the subject of the death penalty would seem to put it in a troubling spot.
To me it seems in older societies where jailing long term was both cruel and impractical because of resource limitations death was a merciful perscription, assuming it was not induldged with torture (which sadly it was, for the same emotional reasons people favor death penalty today). Our society can afford to do better, and I think in general we must try to do so. It would be vain of us to put our personal emotional satisfaction a head of our moral duty to be good Christians. Christianity calls on us to forgive people who have greatly even irreparably harmed us. Once forgiven what good does killing them do? If you can keep them from harming others you have satisfied the need for public safety. All that is left is our lesser instinct, and because we are not animals it is our duty to struggle to rise above them.