Capital Punishment:
Our Duty or Our Doom?
By Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez
About 2000 men, women, and teenagers currently wait on America's
"death row." Their time grows shorter as federal and state courts
increasingly ratify death penalty laws, allowing executions
to proceed at an accelerated rate. It's unlikely that any of
these executions will make the front page, having become more
or less a matter of routine in the last decade. Indeed, recent
public opinion polls show a wide margin of support for the death
penalty. But human rights advocates and civil libertarians continue
to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in the U.S.,
the only western industrialized country that continues to use
the death penalty. Is capital punishment moral?
Capital punishment is often defended on the grounds that society
has a moral obligation to protect the safety and welfare of
its citizens. Murderers threaten this safety and welfare. Only
by putting murderers to death can society ensure that convicted
killers do not kill again.
Second, those favoring capital punishment contend that society
should support those practices that will bring about the greatest
balance of good over evil, and capital punishment is one such
practice. Capital punishment benefits society because it may
deter violent crime. While it is difficult to produce direct
evidence to support this claim since, by definition, those who
are deterred by the death penalty do not commit murders, common
sense tells us that if people know that they will die if they
perform a certain act, they will be unwilling to perform that
act.
If the threat of death has, in fact, stayed the hand of many
a would be murderer, and we abolish the death penalty, we will
sacrifice the lives of many innocent victims whose murders could
have been deterred. But if, in fact, the death penalty does
not deter, and we continue to impose it, we have only sacrificed
the lives of convicted murderers. Surely it's better for society
to take a gamble that the death penalty deters in order to protect
the lives of innocent people than to take a gamble that it doesn't
deter and thereby protect the lives of murderers, while risking
the lives of innocents. If grave risks are to be run, it's better
that they be run by the guilty, not the innocent.
Finally, defenders of capital punishment argue that justice
demands that those convicted of heinous crimes of murder be
sentenced to death. Justice is essentially a matter of ensuring
that everyone is treated equally. It is unjust when a criminal
deliberately and wrongly inflicts greater losses on others than
he or she has to bear. If the losses society imposes on criminals
are less than those the criminals imposed on their innocent
victims, society would be favoring criminals, allowing them
to get away with bearing fewer costs than their victims had
to bear. Justice requires that society impose on criminals losses
equal to those they imposed on innocent persons. By inflicting
death on those who deliberately inflict death on others, the
death penalty ensures justice for all.
This requirement that justice be served is not weakened by
charges that only the black and the poor receive the death penalty.
Any unfair application of the death penalty is the basis for
extending its application, not abolishing it. If an employer
discriminates in hiring workers, do we demand that jobs be taken
from the deserving who were hired or that jobs be abolished
altogether? Likewise, if our criminal justice system discriminates
in applying the death penalty so that some do not get their
deserved punishment, it's no reason to give Iesser punishments
to murderers who deserved the death penalty and got it. Some
justice, however unequal, is better than no justice, however
equal. To ensure justice and equality, we must work to improve
our system so that everyone who deserves the death penalty gets
it.
The case against capital punishment is often made on the basis
that society has a moral obligation to protect human life, not
take it. The taking of human life is permissible only if it
is a necessary condition to achieving the greatest balance of
good over evil for everyone involved. Given the value we place
on life and our obligation to minimize suffering and pain whenever
possible, if a less severe alternative to the death penalty
exists which would accomplish the same goal, we are duty-bound
to reject the death penalty in favor of the less severe alternative.
There is no evidence to support the claim that the death penalty
is a more effective deterrent of violent crime than, say, life
imprisonment. In fact, statistical studies that have compared
the murder rates of jurisdictions with and without the death
penalty have shown that the rate of murder is not related to
whether the death penalty is in force: There are as many murders
committed in jurisdictions with the death penalty as in those
without. Unless it can be demonstrated that the death penalty,
and the death penalty alone, does in fact deter crimes of murder,
we are obligated to refrain from imposing it when other alternatives
exist.
Further, the death penalty is not necessary to achieve the
benefit of protecting the public from murderers who may strike
again. Locking murderers away for life achieves the same goal
without requiring us to take yet another life. Nor is the death
penalty necessary to ensure that criminals "get what they deserve."
Justice does not require us to punish murder by death. It only
requires that the gravest crimes receive the severest punishment
that our moral principles would allow us to impose.
While it is clear that the death penalty is by no means necessary
to achieve certain social benefits, it does, without a doubt,
impose grave costs on society. First, the death penalty wastes
lives. Many of those sentenced to death could be rehabilitated
to live socially productive lives. Carrying out the death penalty
destroys any good such persons might have done for society if
they had been allowed to live. Furthermore, juries have been
known to make mistakes, inflicting the death penalty on innocent
people. Had such innocent parties been allowed to live, the
wrong done to them might have been corrected and their lives
not wasted.
In addition to wasting lives, the death penalty also wastes
money. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it's much more costly
to execute a person than to imprison them for life. The finality
of punishment by death rightly requires that great procedural
precautions be taken throughout all stages of death penalty
cases to ensure that the chance of error is minimized. As a
result, executing a single capital case costs about three times
as much as it costs to keep a person in prison for their remaining
life expectancy, which is about 40 years.
Finally, the death penalty harms society by cheapening the
value of life. Allowing the state to inflict death on certain
of its citizens legitimizes the taking of life. The death of
anyone, even a convicted killer, diminishes us all. Society
has a duty to end this practice which causes such harm, yet
produces little in the way of benefits.
Opponents of capital punishment also argue that the death
penalty should be abolished because it is unjust. Justice, they
claim, requires that all persons be treated equally. And the
requirement that justice bc served is all the more rigorous
when life and death are at stake. Of 19,000 people who committed
willful homicides in the U.S. in 1987, only 293 were sentenced
to death. Who are these few being selected to die? They are
nearly always poor and disproportionately black. It is not the
nature of the crime that determines who goes to death row and
who doesn't. People go to death row simply because they have
no money to appeal their case, or they have a poor defense,
or they lack the funds to being witnesses to courts, or they
are members of a political or racial minority.
The death penalty is also unjust because it is sometimes inflicted
on innocent people. Since 1900, 350 people have been wrongly
convicted of homicide or capital rape. The death penalty makes
it impossible to remedy any such mistakes. If, on the other
hand, the death penalty is not in force, convicted persons later
found to be innocent can be released and compensated for the
time they wrongly served in prison.
The case for and the case against the death penalty appeal,
in different ways, to the value we place on life and to the
value we place on bringing about the greatest balance of good
over evil. Each also appeals to our commitment to"justice":
Is justice to be served at all costs? Or is our commitment to
justice to be one tempered by our commitment to equality and
our reverence for life? Indeed, is capital punishment our duty
or our doom?
(Capital punishment) is . . . the most premeditated of murders,
to which no criminal's deed, however calculated . . can be
compared . . . For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty
would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim
of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on
him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at
mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private
life.
--Albert Camus
If . . . he has committed a murder, he must die. In this
case, there is no substitute that will satisfy the requirements
of legal justice. There is no sameness of kind between death
and remaining alive even under the most miserable conditions,
and consequently there is no equality between the crime and
the retribution unless the criminal is judicially condemned
and put to death.--Immanuel Kant
For further reading:
Hugo Adam Bedau, Death Is Different: Studies in the Morality,
Law, and Politics of Capital Punishment (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1987).
Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment (New York: Basic
Books, 1979.)
David Bruch, "The Death Penalty: An Exchange," The New
Republic, Volume 192 (May 20, 1985), pp. 20-21.
Edward I. Koch, "Death and Justice: How Capital Punishment
Affirms Life," The New Republic, Volume 192 (April 15,1985),
pp. 13-15.
Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad, The Death Penalty:
A Debate (New York: Plenum Press, 1983).
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