USA Today has an article about the death penalty. I think it does a pretty good job of covering the subject. Some of the main objections to the death penalty are: sometimes the innocent die, it’s unfair to minorities, it doesn’t deter crime, and (unmentioned in the article) is it’s immoral.
Guess what – any system designed and executed by man is not going to be perfect. You cannot reject the good because it’s not perfect. If we stop the death penalty because it’s not perfect, why not end life imprisonment – surely there are those who are wrongly imprisoned. Ah, but we can correct lesser sanctions, although I doubt the resources will be devoted to investigating the merely incorrectly incarcerated that are devoted to investigated those slated to die. But we really can’t correct the lesser sanctions – we can’t give someone back 20 years of life spent behind bars. You can let them out, but you can’t return to the status quo ante. Frankly, if you stand on this principle, the entire edifice of government comes crashing down because nothing it does is perfect.
If the death penalty is being applied unfairly, isn’t the remedy to apply it fairly, not scrap it altogether? Is there something intrinsic to the death penalty that means it will be applied unfairly, but simple imprisonment won’t? Nope. The stand here seems to be it’s not okay to unfairly kill someone, but it’s fine to lock them up until they die unfairly.
Does it deter crime? Some view murder as a crime of passion or insanity, and so obviously it won’t deter crime. But what about pre-meditated murders? Certainly having some penalty deters crime; the question is does the death penalty deter murder more than life in prison. And frankly, I find the newer studies where going back to the death penalty lowered murder rates more persuasive than the older ones that compared states with and without the death penalty. But as Robert Blecker points out, don’t certain crimes simply demand the death penalty, whether it deters or not?
And that brings us to the moral aspect. One strand of thought is that the state morally is the same as an individual. You won’t hear this pronounced as such, but it usually takes the form that if it’s wrong for me to kill someone, it’s wrong for the state. The problem with that view is that it’s wrong for me to lock someone up in my basement until they die of old age, but these same people don’t question the morality of imprisonment of prisoners, since the alternative offered to death is usually a life sentence without parole. So we’re left to balance the state’s moral duty and status as a state to punish evil, or if you prefer, wrong behavior. And I think many of us know of a case that we say to ourselves, if anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s this guy. Jeffery Daumer perhaps. The killer of Barbara Jo Brown for Robert Blecker; the killers in Valley Park who burglarized their neighbor’s trailer, then worried about her identifying them, led her with her hands tied behind her back and a towel around her head to a nearby railroad bridge where they pushed her off to drown in the Meremac River for me. And to me that’s the crux of the issue – do certain crimes demand the death penalty. People will arrive at their own answer to that question – one I’m still grappling with.
