Galvanic Ink

The Death Penalty – the ultimate ‘Not In My Backyard’ stance – is an archaic and disturbing practice of state-sponsored murder aimed at people the justice system has decided it doesn’t even want to bother with anymore.

I’m against the death penalty, if you hadn’t noticed. Not because innocent people may be put to death for crimes they didn’t commit (Brian Terrell comes to mind among hundreds of others) or even because the methods of execution are sickening at best and often don’t work immediately leading to minutes (if not hours) of agony, torturing the convict before they finally die (Arizona is notorious for this). While both of those are very real situations which are certainly major factors in why a person should be against the death penalty, my position is harbored for a different reason.

I’m against the death penalty because I am against death. Period. Murder shouldn’t be one of those ‘gray area’ topics. Especially not when the gray area has a reach so broad that cases can be ethically debated over. I shouldn’t be alone in saying that when it comes to state-sponsored murder, we should pretty much all be in agreement that the person put to death actually deserved to die.

But who deserves to die? How can we make that distinction? I won’t stand here and claim that nobody ever deserves to die under any circumstance. I might be an optimist, but I’m not naive. Some people genuinely deserve to die. But when do we decide to draw the line between someone who can still be rehabilitated and someone who is so far gone that they can never truly resemble a civilized human being again?

Should a person be put to death because they killed another person? A group of people? What if somebody shot and killed a judge? A government official? Get ready for the unpopular opinion of ‘no’. A person shouldn’t be put to death because they commit any of these offenses. To understand this stance, we have to figure out one thing:

What is our end goal? This is the age old question of discipline vs punishment. Are we hoping to catch someone for a crime so that we can punish them? Or should we hope to live in a world with as little crime as possible and thereby disciplining those who commit crimes so that they don’t reoffend?

Certainly, the enactment of the Death Penalty rules out discipline as, by definition, discipline leads to a period of time past the sentence in which the offender can demonstrate that they have changed and the Death Penalty doesn’t have the wiggle room for someone to live life beyond the sentence. This obviously leads us to the conclusion that it is purely punishment. As detailed in the article: Discipline vs Punishment, punishment is used to satisfy some loss to a person or a collective of persons.

But what satisfation is truly gained by sentencing someone to death? It’s important to note that the Death Penalty is only used in cases of murder, treason, and kidnapping of a sitting member of one or more of the three branches of federal government. I only clarify this so that we can understand the true gravity of the premise. There is no Death Penalty handed out for drug use, rape, kidnapping or theft. You aren’t even handed the Death Penalty for attempted murder say, blowing up a hospital, provided nobody died from their injuries.

Many cases of murder, most in fact, won’t be tried with the Death Penalty as an option (I suppose it goes without saying that we are exclusively referring to the murder cases in states that actually allow the Death Penalty). It is reserved only for the most heinous cases of murder such as premeditated murder or when the murder is coupled with another felony, i.e. kidnapping and murdering another person.

So, picture the worst of the worst that you can imagine… that’s who we’re talking about. And now understand that I am still advocating for no Death Penalty. Punishment as a deterrent has never worked to curb criminal acts. The only reason to use such a punishment is to satisfy loss, as previously mentioned. But this doesn’t happen. There is no proverbial weight lifted from the soul of the populous after a murderer is executed. They still feel the loss.

The streets were no safer on the night after John Wayne Gacy was executed than they were the night before. Killing people for their crimes against nature sounds like an appealing goal. But what does it actually accomplish? We have actual cases which go to court where people have only commit their crimes in such a fashion that they might be sentenced to death on purpose. These people are hoping for the Death Penalty. Using it as a punishment in some (albeit, not many) cases has encouraged the crimes which permit it’s use. Crimes which may otherwise have fallen short of murder now include it because the offender doesn’t want to serve a lengthy prison sentence and believes that if they are given the Death Penalty, they can avoid true justice.

It has no basis in the concept of crime prevention, rather it seems to have little to no effect at all on crime rates (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/deterrence, https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/act500062008en.pdf, https://www.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/the-death-penalty-doesnt-reflect-our-national-values-why-is-the-biden-administration-still-pursuing-it ). Beyond that, it provides a misdirection from the important question of whether the original crime was inevitable or forseeable to begin with.

It’s imperrative to understand that most people don’t commit these crimes on a whim. Ricky Ray Rector didn’t wake up one day with an optimistic smile on his face and think ‘You know what? I might just kill a bunch of cops today.’ Ted Bundy didn’t just have the odd hobby of kidnapping and killing women. Every one of the thousands of execution victims in America were brought to the point of their crimes by some factor that we may or may not understand.

This, of course, assumes that each person was truly guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. But if they were truly guilty, by sentencing them to death, we are saying that they are beyond redemption and rehabilitation. More importantly, we are absolving ourselves of the responsibility we may bear for the crime. We are literally saying that a person who commit the crime worthy of the Death Penalty was brought their of their own accord solely because of some wiring issue in their head and therefore the only way to rectify the situation is to put that person to death.

We are avoiding the possibility that the offenders outcome could have ever been prevented and if it could have been prevented, then it could also be corrected. The Death Penalty absolves us as a community of all responsibility for how a person may turn out. Every murder could be avoided if only we allowed ourselves the capacity to self-reflect. Even if that reflection leads us to enacting some measures of prevention, such as therapy for someone showing early warning signs.

This is clearly not a new or original concept. While the idea has been toyed with in the United States for a several decades now, other countries have long since implemented similar procedures and have accomplished the goal of dissuading a high amount of criminal acts by preventative means. (This topic, as well as the prevetion of crimes in general, is explored more deeply in the Crime Prevention article and other articles under the Criminal Justice Reform category)

With all of that said, I find it hard to believe that the Death Penalty should still on the table anywhere in America. Crimes of this nature are surely not one-sided. If an offender has failed us to such an extreme, than certainly we would have failed them at many different stages before that. Ignoring this reality does nothing for us.