The State Must Not Kill

I recently had the pleasure of reading Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean. Based on the title, I initially expected it to be about Bob Dole's presidential aspirations. While that humor may have failed, Sister Helen definitely was successful in claiming that the death penalty should be abolished. Although I was initially skeptical, Sister Helen ultimately persuaded me as she methodically shot down the strongest arguments for capital punishment. Yet, in doing so, she remained sensitive, empathizing with the pain of the victims' families.

Retribution for a crime against these families and society as a whole, is the most powerful argument for the death penalty. Murderers deserve to pay for their crime. As the Rev. William Barnwell, an advocate of the abolition of the death penalty, wrote last month in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "We must never be sentimental about the murder itself or the one who committed it. Like the families of the victims, we must let the full horror of the murder fill our souls."

Nonetheless, if we accept the premise that murder is wrong, it is improper to allow 12 jurors the power to deprive someone of their right to life just as it is improper for one individual to kill another. We do not live in a society that literally believes in "an eye for an eye." For example, if a husband beats his wife, we put him in jail instead of hand-cuffing him and allowing the wife to assault him back. Regardless of how reprehensible a murder may be, a criminal is fundamentally still human.

Even if one believes that jurors should have the power to vote for the death penalty, what about the executioner himself? He (or she) has the responsibility to kill another person directly. One could maintain that he is comparable to a soldier following orders and thus, by killing the criminal, he is simply fulfilling his duty to a higher authority.

Yet, if it is this simple, why during executions by firing squad (such as the one last month in Utah), does one of the guns contain blanks, not bullets? No one shooter definitively knows if he fired the fatal bullet. If the job of an executioner were morally justified beyond doubt, there would be no need to lift off any individual's shoulders the responsibility for the execution.

A second argument for the death penalty is its deterrent value. However, no causal relationship between the death penalty and fewer murders has ever been established. Logically, do you think someone irrational enough to consider murder actually weighs the implications of death versus life without parole?

A common misperception is that putting someone to death saves the greater economic cost of housing them in prison. However, due to the extensive legal fees of the appeals system, the death penalty costs more than three times as much as life imprisonment. One could maintain that the appeals system should not be as extensive. Yet this claim introduces the most powerful and most common, argument against the death penalty.

It is possible, though unlikely, that a person will be wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. Given the lack of deterrent value and high economic cost of the death penalty, the risk of murdering an innocent person--regardless if it happens due to an established process--should be a clear call for the abolition of this punishment. Very simply put, once a person dies, new exculpatory evidence is absolutely irrelevant.

In addition, the legal system is biased against the poor. Sister Helen states that a rich person will never sit on death row. This claim is quite believable when one compares O.J. Simpson's defense with one by an underprepared public defender who takes the case of a destitute defendant. And it seems especially unfortunate that when one has counsel that is incompetent in actuality (but not legally), potentially exculpatory evidence can arise too late for its acceptance by an appellate court due to temporal technicalities.

Yet, one could argue, can't a governor grant a pardon to a criminal if truly astonishing evidence surfaces at the twelfth hour? Absolutely. But the chances of a governor granting a pardon, and facing the political repercussion of appearing "soft on crime," is minimal. Moreover, in cases of capital punishment, ethical interests tend to succumb to political ones. For example, Sister Helen claimed that Louisiana's clemency board was a direct extension of Governor Edwin Edwards' power. Granted, Louisiana has a reputation for being more corrupt than most places, but no place is impervious to corruption.

Director Tim Robbins does an admirable job of conveying the complexity of capital punishment in the movie version of Dead Man Walking. The bottom line, in the words of the Rev. Barnwell, is that "those of us who oppose the death penalty must be ready to face head-on the grief and anger of the families of the victims. Those who are for it must be ready knowingly to kill a fellow human being" as though they were the one on the firing squad pulling the trigger.