Death penalty: Time to rethink? :: The Daily Herald, Provo Utah Capital punishment does send a message that society will not tolerate brutal murders. Some killers, certainly, would kill again if given the chance. Even in prison, many sociopaths pose a threat to others. Death may be the only way to ensure that their criminal career is over once and for all. At the very least, death-penalty advocates say it absolutely prevents another crime by one individual. But then, life in prison without parole does the same thing.

…

But is capital punishment really good for society in the long run?

Most industrialized nations have outlawed capital punishment, seeing it as particuarly barbaric and cruel, despite attempts to make execution as quick and humane as possible. Some believe the continued use of the death penalty in the Unites States erodes its credibility when it lectures other nations on human rights abuses.

The deterrent effect is also widely debated. In a 1975 study, University of Buffalo economics professor Issac Ehrlic said that an execution prevented eight murders. But 30 years later, Columbia Law School professor Jeffery Fagan told New York legislators that the evidence is less than conclusive, and that irrational crimes of passion, such as a murder arising in a domestic dispute, are unlikely to be deterred by any penalty. Irrational people simply don’t think about the long-term consequences of their actions.

There is also the matter of accidental executions of innocent people. While the appeals process is designed to ensure that only the guilty die, the system is not perfect. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 122 people on death row have been exonerated since 1973.

In Virginia, Gov. John Warner commuted Robin Lovitt’s death sentence to life without parole after a court clerk destroyed DNA evidence that Lovitt’s attorneys said could have vindicated him.

It is one thing to wrongly jail a person. But an execution is impossible to reverse. No apology can make up for this ultimate mistake. It was this possibility — the chance that even a person could be innocent even when duly judged guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury — that led Illinois to impose a moratorium on all executions.

Quite predictably, the 1000th execution in the US since 1977 Supreme Court decision that ‘execution’ isn’t cruel and unusual punishment (certainly no unusual now) has caused quite a bit of rehashing of the old argument. This column from Utah’s Daily Herald does a very good job of summarizing most of the argument. The ‘message’ argument relying on a particular folk model of social causality is as interesting as it is probably inaccurate.

What interests me is the fact how many people support the reintroduction of the death penalty in those ‘civilized’ Western countries mentioned here. (Certainly an argument against direct democracy if you don’t like the death penalty and for it if you do.) I wonder if it points to some sort of a group need for retribution which might need to be assuaged in some way. Maybe the way to do it is to separate the death penalty from execution. Executions are always unsafe because no amount of evidence can really be enough to justify making that decision. Examples abound: from the differential execution rates of blacks and whites in the US to the ‘monster trials’ in the 1950s’ Czechoslovakia (where the accused confessed on the radio). But maybe society (and I’d be the first to point to the need to unpack this anthropomorphic metonymy) should be allowed to pass the judgement whether somebody’s actions make them deserving of death (or life). That judgement should never be followed by an actual execution. Otherwise, the opponents of the death penalty (who really are opponents of executions) will forever be confronted with the question: “so you think XY deserves to live?” (In the way it recently became an issue in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign where the democratic candidate, who ended up winning, was accused of thinking that Hitler should not be executed. [Personally, I think this rule should apply to all criminals including Hitler and Hussein. Criminals like them, while probably not deserving to live, are often used as too easy a way to escape the responsibility for our own moral failings.])