The death penalty in America

The interesting issues are the hard ones, such as whether or not America should have the death penalty. And what makes such issues hard is that there are so many intersecting and conflicting aspects that it is difficult to decide which ones should be the basis for a decision – at the core it is the task of deciding which of all these many aspects ought to be the overriding ones that shapes the decisions, and also what makes the whole issue so difficult.

No matter what anyone may say, vengeance is certainly one of the aspects to this decision. It is all very well to pontificate from a distance about the immorality of putting a murderer to death so long as it was not our own dear ones who were murdered. But I will readily admit that if someone raped and murdered my spouse or one of my children or grandchildren, a large part of me would ache to see them very, very slowly and painfully put to death, and I suspect I am not alone in this feeling. Polls have consistently shown a substantial majority of Americans in favor of the death penalty, at least for the most inhuman and vicious crimes.

Nor is religious morality really any help here, since despite their words and writings (or perhaps because of them) the world’s major religions have shown no hesitation through history to putting to the sword or rack unbelievers and heretics and anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Indeed the nightly news overflows with people killing other people in the name of religion.

Nor is killing humans really the issue, since in other contexts we do it all the time. Every country trains its soldiers to kill, and whatever the morality of the political decision to go to war, for the soldier in the front line killing the enemy is the only way to survive. Nor do we expect our police to face armed killers unarmed. And of course we condemn humans to death all the time when we make the political or economic decision not to intervene in an ethnic cleansing or not to attend to a famine somewhere in the world or not to make a medicine available to the ill in some poor nation. These are pragmatic decisions – we couldn’t solve all the world’s problems even if we tried – but nevertheless these decisions doom some people to their deaths just as surely as if we put the noose around their neck or gave them the lethal injection.

The argument that the death penalty deters others from committing murder has no convincing support. Indeed, it would appear that most people who commit murder do so either from passion (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent) or because they are sociopaths with no empathy for their victims (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent).

In the end, and after years of thinking about the issue, I think I am against the death penalty for two primary reasons:

1) It is not reversible, and there have been too many innocent people executed because of failures in the judicial systems – ambitious prosecuting attorneys, poor representation, prejudice, unfair media coverage, sloppy forensic work, and the like. If the accused is still alive and in jail when these failures are finally uncovered, there is a chance to make at least some amends.

2) A friend of mine gave me the second convincing argument: if the perpetrator is really guilty of a heinous crime, such as cold-blooded premeditated murder or distributing drugs to masses of people and ruining their lives, then a quick, fairly painless death isn’t nearly enough punishment – spending the rest of their lives in a dreary prison cell seems far more fitting.