This November, California voters will face a literal life-or-death decision. Proposition 34, titled “Death Penalty. Initiative Statute,” proposes to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
At first glance, the initiative may appear as a referendum on whether our society should have the right to kill those who commit particularly heinous crimes. Some believe that certain criminals deserve the death penalty. And, few will disagree. A Gallup poll shows that around 60% of Americans support the death penalty for a murder conviction with the predominant justification being “an eye for an eye.”
However, the issue is more nuanced. While the death penalty does satiate our primal desire for retribution, we must decide whether we are willing to accept a degree of collateral damage in this pursuit of justice. Consider the dissent from In re Troy Anthony Davis, 557 U.S. ___ (2009), in which Justice Scalia stated:
This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.
In just over a month, when we mail in our absentee ballots or vote at our local polling places, we can embrace or reject Justice Scalia’s vision. If a defendant is convicted and sentenced to death after a fair trial, should we still error on the side of caution and surrender capital punishment as a safeguard? We will have the opportunity to decide whether the benefit of punishing the guilty by way of the death penalty outweighs the cost of killing an innocent. For some, the potential chance of killing an innocent person may be a line that cannot be crossed. They may demand that the criminal justice system be perfect.
However, we can also view the death penalty within the context of our every day lives. For the past three decades, traffic accidents have claimed 30,000-40,000 victims each year in the United States. Certainly, a lot more innocent people die in traffic accidents than from wrongful executions, but we don’t halt traffic until we have an accident-free system in place. According to the Center for Justice & Democracy, the number of deaths from medical accidents each year range from 65,000 to 200,000. Again, we do not suspend the entire health care system until the practice of medicine is free of accidental deaths.
A lot of people die in accidents. It is for each of us to determine how we want justice administered in our system. Are the wrongfully convicted just collateral damage? Are mistakes just a fact of life? Are wrongful executions so far and few between that in the grand scheme of life, there are bigger priorities to tackle?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Your analogies are off the mark. Traffic and health care involve situations where an “innocent” person comes to the occasion which causes his or her death. People DECIDE to drive or DECIDE to obtain medical care, despite the risk that they may be an innocent victim of a traffic accident or medical malpractice. A person convicted and murdered by the death penalty, but later found to have been innocent (DNA or other such evidence) does not have the same factual context. The innocent decedent is scooped up out of his or her life and executed in cold blood by a system that can never be perfect. Knowing this, every supporter of the death penalty is responsible for every innocent death that results. What is so lenient about Life in Prison Without Possibility of Parole that makes it an insufficient punishment for our purposes? The cost to execute a person is astronomical due to the number of mandatory and then discretionary appeals, inadequacy assistance of counsel claims, and habeas petition rights that the person has. But streamlining the process would be draconian and increase the likelihood of murdering an innocent. Get rid of this stupid penalty. We are not qualified to dispense death as a penalty.
It is not fair to say that those who wish to end capital punishment are demanding that the criminal justice system be perfect. They are not; rather, they generally argue that state-sanctioned killing is not right by virtue of its irreversibility.
Presumably, a sentence to life-in-prison without the possibility of parole is still commutable, should the convicted person later be deemed factually innocent. A sentence to death, once carried out, can never be commuted.
Rather than demand that the criminal justice system be perfect, anti-death penalty advocates recognize that it is not. It is provably prone to failure. Innocent men and women have been executed when they were factually innocent.
When we enter a car, we do not expect to die, and when we enter the care of a hospital, we know our caretakers will do absolutely everything possible to prevent our harm or death.. medical professionals tend to follow the Hippocratic oath. The hangman, on the other hand, promises only and always to kill. To take the life of another man, in a cold, detached, premeditated, and by definition inhumane manner.
When we enter the execution chamber, we expect to die. The only accident possible is an unintentional killing, sanctioned wrongly by the state. So – an “accident” in this context is not comparable to a car crash or medical malpractice, since only outcomes that are the opposite of death are strived for and expected. In health care and in our cars, we expect to live, and live better, as do all the professionals involved in the auto industry and the health industry. The capital punishment industry is a professional, state-sanctioned, killing machine, but it can be easily eliminated without any “collateral damage” to our prison industrial complex, let alone our justice system, imperfect as it certainly is. Rather, both would arguably be improved, especially the criminal justice system, which would be more likely seen as fair and impartial, not menacing and dangerous.
Basic principles of morality proscribe the cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder of any human being under any circumstances. To carry the death penalty out, at least one human must be directly involved in just such a morally abhorrant duty, as their *job*, knowing that the system directing him or her, the state, is fallible, because it is comprised of us, human beings, all fallible. This cannot be correct. It is morally wrong and completely unnecessary.
We no longer peel off people’s skin or boil them in oil. As our civilisations’ ideas about capital punishment have evolved, they have tended to move from processes involving long and drawn out torture of the body, the public infliction of spectacular pain and humiliation, to, in modern times, a quiet, painless, abstract bureaucratic process performed by state functionaries. It has become unremarkable, a process that is in fact enforceably not unusual.
State-sanctioned killing should be reserved for only the most *unusual* of circumstances. Accidents. Those circumstances where we *do* as a society agree. These deaths are neither caused purposefully by individuals or by the state. They are accidents. If they are legitimate accidents, the context doesn’t matter, car, hospital, trampoline, pool, jetski, or too much soda or fried chicken…
Car accidents are not “collateral damage” of the car industry… if they were, the primary objective of the car industry would be to kill everyone who gets in a car *and deserves it* and accidents would only be those times cars killed *the wrong person* – someone who didn’t deserve it. Your comparison to the health care industry is even more obviously flawed. Accidental deaths in a hospital could only be considered “collateral damage” if the purpose of the hospital was to do damage to a certain class of people… for instance, if the hospital’s prime directive were to kill everyone who came in and was sick with the flu, but it accidentally killed some people who came in and were not sick at all, *those* people could be considered “collateral damage.”
The only reasonable comparison you could have made with capital punishment would be to the context from which you borrowed the term “collateral damage” in the first place — war.
Not healthcare or driving cars.
Since state action against its own citizenry is not legal war,
I agree that the death penalty is not a good idea. I would venture to say that it is a holdover from our medieval past, and should be thrown out with all the other barbarous, retributive penalties that our ancestors meted out. Far better, I say, is life without parole. I would have no objection to making that life in solitary confinement with no visitors, except counsel. At least, the possiblity exists that new exculpatory evidence might emerge, but, if the prisoner is indeed guilty of the heinous crime, then he or she will have a lifetime of boredom to think about it.