Sitrring the Pot, Chapter 3: The Death Penalty

As part of my continuing exercise in publishing all my positions that make my totally unelectable, let me now comment on the death penalty:

I'm totally against it.

It occurred to me to write about it today because the Supreme Court refused to re-hear a case which banned the death penalty in child rape cases where the child survived. The original case spurred a lot of strong reactions because part of the logic of the 5-4 majority was that there was an evolving consensus against the use of the death penalty.

Now, it's not exactly clear to me how evolved that consensus is, but I certainly agree with the end result. There are a lot of arguments against capital punishment, including that there's not a clear body of statistical evidence to suggest it functions as a deterrent to crime, that the amount of appeals process you have to put in place to make sure you don't end up executing an innocent person makes the cost of the capital punishment process greater than the cost of simply imprisoning the person for life, and that even with those processes in place, innocent people end up getting executed anyway, as demonstrated in recent years by the impact of DNA testing on previously tried and adjudicated cases.

Whew. That's a lot of argument against, but these are all utilitarian arguments and to me they obscure the truly important reason:

We are our judicial system, and when our judicial system makes a judgment to take a person's life, we as a society have made a collective, premeditated decision to commit murder, and I believe that decision diminishes us. We as people have to make choices about what kind of society we want to live in, and I believe we should choose wherever we can to live in a society with less violence.

In the past, when I've argued with folks about capital punishment, there is usually a point where someone says, "Well, what if there were a nuclear bomb ticking in Grand Central, and you found the guy who had the shutoff switch, and he swallowed it, and there were only 30 seconds left until it was about to blow, and so the only way you had to get the kill switch was to shoot the guy, rip open his gut, and pull the kill switch out? That's a premeditated act of murder. Are you saying you wouldn't do that??"

This kind of example is lame on so many levels. Among them are:

1) The premise is lame. By that I mean, if we as a society actually wound up in that situation, we just had a massive, systemic failure of our intelligence services, and a lot of people should lose their jobs.

This is akin to the 9/11 situation: since then, the government has massively expanded its powers using the logic that it needs to do so in order to keep us safe. But the problem with 9/11 was not that the govt did not have enough power to do its keeping-us-safe job properly, the problem was that it didn't have enough competence to do it properly. That lack of competence is largely, though not entirely, due to the Bush administration's total lack of interest or ability to find people capable of governing competently. Competent governance would, of course, be evidence against the neoconservative belief that government is always the problem. And neocons don't want to see any evidence they're wrong. And that's why electing neocons to any office is counterproductive. But I digress. Back to reasons why the bomb example is lame.

2) Obviously, if I'm put in a situation where I have a binary choice between an option where one person is killed, and an option where thousands of people are killed, I'll take the option where one person is killed. But that option is still consistent with my original principle of living in a society with less violence. I took the path of least violence.

"Aha!", they usually say, "You're willing to commit murder in order to protect society. That's all we're doing with capital punishment- protecting society from known dangers."

The problem with that perspective is- in real life there's always the option to imprison someone for life without parole, which serves the same purpose of protecting society from future acts by this individual, punishes them for previous acts, and doesn't involve an act of violence. Plus, if evidence is discovered later on that exonerates the person, you can at least partially undo what is now an obviously unjust act, which is having imprisoned the person for something they didn't do. That option is off the table if you executed the person.

Of course, the other major argument people use for capital punishment is that it provides "closure" for the victims and/or their loved ones. Capital punishment cannot possibly provide "closure" to people who have suffered from crimes of the severity that we normally reserve capital punishment for. All capital punishment can provide is sanctioned revenge. And I think it's unhealthy for us as a society to be organized around revenge. There's no answer to the pain of victims, least of all revenge.

This is one of those rare issues on which I agree totally with the Catholic Church's position, so from time to time I think about the issue just to remind myself that they aren't wrong about everything. Their position is consistent with their culture-of-life philosophy.

Last point: one of the single most intellectually irritating strains of people is the strain which simultaneously is militantly pro-life, sanctimoniously lecturing everyone on the importance of not killing fetuses because they're human beings, while in the same breath being militantly pro-capital punishment. That's so inherently contradictory it gives me a headache. For the record, I'm pro-choice, as I noted in a previous installment of Stirring the Pot, but want people to choose to have fewer abortions (choose less violence), primarily by not having unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

So there you have it- another personal opinion that makes me totally unelectable. Ah well...