Ax the Death Penalty

Are you for the death penalty? What would you say to a pollster who asked? If the answer is ‘yes’, would you actually vote to impose it? If so, could you give the order to do it? Would you watch?

The death penalty is carried out in our name. But could you, would you, actually do it? Could you kill? What if the law allowed it? What if the law commanded it? Could you pull the trigger, drop the blade? O.K., let’s make it easier. Could you recruit someone else to do it?

By nature, only a small segment of society can kill. In war, combat troops undergo special training to prepare them to do what is against their nature to do. Troubled veterans home from war are a sad testament to what the business of killing does to its production workers. And this is true even when killing is an act of necessity or self-defense or an act of heroism. Some of the actor dies with the infliction of a mortal blow. I dare say if you eliminate the psychos and the criminals, it would be difficult to find a willing executioner.

This difficulty is illustrated by modern execution protocols that make it difficult to identify the person who actually delivers the death blow. Today, executioners’ push buttons, pull levers, throw switches, make pinpricks and release fluids. That’s all. And those who write execution protocols together with those who carry them out, sooner or later become repulsed by what they do and begin looking for a new, ‘more humane’ way to do it.

First it was the guillotine, then an improved and scientific method of hanging, then the chair followed by the chamber then the needle all for the purpose of making executions more humane. I ask: for whom? I suggest the answer: for us. From the blade to the rope to the chair to the chamber and now to the needle, we are always looking for ways to hide the horror of executions.

There are three justifications for capitol punishment: incapacitation, deterrence and revenge.

The first two are compelling. Society has the right to incapacitate brutal killers. This right is an extension of the right of self-defense. But it is constricted by the iron laws of decency and humanity. For example, could society incapacitate the criminal through lobotomy or amputation? Such actions offend our basic sense of what it means to be human, to be civilized.

Deterrence is also a relative of self-defense although a distant relative. Society has an interest in discouraging the commission of crimes if by showing the harsh consequences that ensue, the would-be criminal forbears.

Modern sentencing and prison security guarantee incapacitation of the murderer. And using executions to deter crime is a chimera. The death penalty deters nothing.

So let’s assume that the condemned prisoner is guilty; that the state has the legal right to execute; that there are no moral laws prohibiting execution; that there are no ethical principals violated by capital punishment.

Does not state-sponsored killing nevertheless violate evolving standards of decency, the quintessence of our humanity and our basic sense of what it means to be civilized?

Is it time to give the death penalty the ax?

537 words
October 17, 2008