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Thinking about the death penalty compassionately

Thinking about the death penalty compassionately is a challenge because those convicted are probably (more on that later) guilty of a heinous crime, and their victims and the victims’ families’ feelings need to be considered along with the more general concerns of society.

Certainly, sentencing that allows a murderer to be free within a decade is wrong. However, most states do have laws that allow for a sentence of life without parole. Furthermore, if we contemplate changing laws (as some propose fast-tracking executions), we could simply make life without parole a possibility in all capital cases.

By the way, many strong arguments, both in favor of the death penalty and against the arguments of death penalty opponents, may be found at http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/DP.html.

It might be simple and make sense if we could structure our law as Supreme Court Justice Scalia has suggested: “You kill, you die.” However, I see four strong arguments against the death penalty.

The first is perhaps the most theoretical: when the state executes someone, it is done on my behalf. I believe it is wrong to kill people, so I don’t want to do it, even by proxy.
The second, some might say, is overly considerate of a murderer’s feelings: the process of execution, including the repeated appeals, reprieves, and delays, brings a human being, again and again, to expect that he or she is about to die. And then he doesn’t. Also, no method of execution has yet been guaranteed to be quick and painless in itself. So every execution is a kind of torture -- a cruel and unusual punishment (which our Constitution outlaws).
The third imposes reality to refute Justice Scalia’s vision: the death penalty is imposed arbitrarily and capriciously in practice. Rich people with good lawyers can avoid it, poor people may not. A 1990 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, cited by Amnesty International (http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/racialprejudices.html.) found “a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty.” According to that report (and other studies support its conclusion), the single most reliable predictor of the imposition of the death penalty is the race of the victim. If the purpose of the death penalty is justice, only white victims and their families are likely to get it. The Amnesty site shows that the conditions our Supreme Court mandated for the imposition of the death penalty have not been met: "Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." --Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Feb. 22, 1994
The fourth argument, I believe, trumps all else. We cannot restore life to someone who has been killed. Our justice system is operated by people with all their human frailties. The possibility of executing an innocent person will always exist. In Illinois in 2000, after thirteen death penalty convictions were overturned, the governor, still at that time an advocate of the death penalty, put executions on hold. One of those convicted had spent fifteen years in prison awaiting death for a crime he did not commit. He was freed, not by the workings of a system keeping itself from committing a grievous error, but by a college class. Sister Helen Prejean has written convincingly in The Death of Innocents of the executions of two innocent men.
We will never have an error-free system; we will never be able to be positive that every single person convicted of a capital crime is guilty. How many innocent people is it acceptable for the state to kill in the process of executing the guilty?
I say the answer is none.

Comments

Garden Faerie said…
These are all good reasons. Thank you for speaking out on this issue.

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