The death penalty

I used to have no opinion on the death penalty. I didn't support it, but I didn't oppose others from enacting it if they really wanted to do so.

In recent years, though, the possibility of wrongful conviction turned me against it. It's bad enough to incarcerate someone for a crime he or she didn't commit. It's unforgivable to end an innocent person's life. Fallible human beings have no business exacting the ultimate penalty.

What about the idea that the death penalty deters others from committing crimes? Well, as Louis A. Ruprecht notes in a recent essay in Religion Dispatches, it's far from clear that it actually deters people in the U.S.:

... the deterrent value of any law has to do with the swiftness and certainty of punishment, not the severity of punishment. In the United States, the death penalty will never be either certain or swift. By contrast in China in the early 1980s, where there was no equivalent conception of civil liberty or Constitutional protection, 5000 persons arrested for highway robbery were executed en masse; robbery statistics immediately plummeted.

I have to wonder whether the Chinese criminal statistics were gamed: it's the sort of thing one can do in an authoritarian country. Even if that's the case, though, it doesn't undermine Ruprecht's other point, which is that the death penalty in the U.S. is far more expensive to administer than imprisonment for life. The Constitutional need to afford the wrongfully convicted every possibility for exoneration, a need I think not even the most ardent death penalty advocates would dare to deny, guarantees that the death penalty will remain expensive.

Frankly, if the death penalty had a significant deterrent value, I don't think Texas' death row would be quite so crowded. At present there are 321 inmates on Texas' death row, in spite of 475 executions having been carried out since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Ruprecht's piece gives a comprehensive overview of how the death penalty came to be administered as it is in the U.S. Given the tangled portrait he paints, it's hard to argue with the logic of giving up on the death penalty altogether, because it's clear that the only possible counterargument -- "Damn it, some crimes are just too heinous to let the criminal live" -- is rooted not in any rational assessment of pros and cons, but rather, is rooted purely and only in the desire for vengeance. And while we can understand a single person's need for vengeance driving him or her to take a life in the heat of the moment, no such blind rage ever should animate an entire society. (We generally don't excuse the individual person's moment of rage, either.)

And call me a softie if you will, but I am one of those who believes it's better to let a dozen guilty men go free than to take one innocent man's life.