When I read Jay Hutchinson’s post about Why Capital Punishment is wrong I could not sit still without sharing the opposite perspective so that some people can recognize that the issue is not one sided or clear cut. I am not one who believes in excessive punishment and I would not argue that a justice system without an option for capital punishment is inappropriate, but the longer I live the more I recognize that I have never heard an argument against capital punishment that did not ring hollow on some level.
When Jay speaks of the “hypocrisy” of a government killing to prove that killing is bad he both makes a very poor argument and misses the point of capital punishment entirely. The shallowness of that argument is apparent when we recognize that government has a legitimate position of authority with regard to society and thus has some limited permissions not available to society as a whole. For his argument to work you would have to be able to argue that a father was being a hypocrite for making a rule that his child could not use matches when he uses matches to light the furnace when it goes out. Another example would be trying to argue that police departments are hypocritical for enforcing speed limits on the population while they and other emergency workers regularly exceed the speed limit in the course of their work. The use of capital punishment is not to show that killing is bad, it is meant as a consequence of certain actions as a way to demonstrate unacceptable behavior through the punishment and as a way to remove future threats to society. That certainly does not mean that capital punishment is the only way, or even necessarily the most desirable way to meet these goals, but it is not simply to show that killing is bad.
Of Jay’s three official arguments, two of them hinge on far from common occurrences – the change of heart and the wrongful conviction. That these are not true in the majority of cases does not mean that they are not legitimate concerns, but governing based on exceptions is a very dangerous practice. The fact is that most of the time the person convicted is the guilty party and of those convictions that are overturned a sizable number are overturned on technicalities, not necessarily because the defendant was innocent – nothing we can do in our justice system will ever make it 100% accurate, but we do fairly well. Jay gives exactly one exceptional example of a change of heart while claiming that “people often have a change of heart on death row.” I’m not sure how we could determine “often” since no metric, including professions of innocence, can accurately draw a line between those who have a change of heart and those who don’t. Even if we could draw that line accurately part of a change of heart for those who are guilty is an acceptance of the consequences of their actions. If society has determined that death is the appropriate consequence for our actions then a real change of heart would include coming to terms with that punishment for our actions. (After all, just because Bernie Madoff changes his heart about defrauding millions of people out of billions of dollars and promises never to manage money again does not mean that he should not face the consequences of his previous actions.)
His third argument is not dependent on the exceptional case – the financial cost of capital punishment is almost universally higher than the financial cost of life imprisonment. Like governing based on exception however, governing based on financial considerations alone is dangerous. Besides that, there are things we can do to change the equation (considering that the vast majority of appeals result in no change of sentence one option would be to reduce the number of available appeals).
For those who are still convinced that capital punishment is just wrong please consider the alternative and see if we are not stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I suspect that most people, especially those who oppose capital punishment, have never stopped to consider the realities of life imprisonment and what that means to society. As far as I can see there are two potential perspectives which are equally distressing and dangerous for society.
The first perspective I will explore is that life imprisonment is cruel. It does not take very long to recognize that to be locked up for the rest of ones life is essentially to be treated like an animal, not free to make any choices, barred from opportunities to improve and grow. Even where we allow life-term prisoners to gain an education or pursue a hobby their life is meaningless as they have no opportunity to be released and rejoin society. The second perspective is that life imprisonment is not cruel. In this case it is a free ride on society rather than a punishment or a negative consequence of heinous crimes. The difference between these two perspectives is nothing more than the attitude of the criminal in question. Most of those who have a change of heart would probably prefer death to, for example, 15 years of meaningless existence inside prison walls.
Regardless of which of these perspectives the majority of criminals might take, the non-financial costs to society of life imprisonment are enormous. First of all, our prison populations are already too large, mostly because we send people to prison who should pay their debt to society in other ways more closely tailored to their crime. Second, keeping people with life sentences or allowing virtually endless appeals for those with death sentences each result in the housing of individuals who have nothing to lose while they are in prison – this increases the likelihood that they will have a detrimental effect on the prison environment for guards and other inmates. Keeping these permanent inmates also increases the opportunity for less extreme criminals to rub shoulders and learn from more hardened criminals.
Removing the possibility of a death penalty has the effect of broadcasting to any would-be criminals that the worst society would do to them would be to lock them in a slum and give then all the necessities of life without demanding anything in return. What kind of a message is that when a substantial portion of our criminals already live in slums?
Just a final reminder, I am not arguing that the death penalty is some sort of panacea without drawbacks or failures, only that it is a legitimate decision to be made by society and one that has no pleasant alternatives.
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