Maybe you’ve found yourself in this position. I’ll admit, I have. More than twice.
After encountering accounts of a particularly horrific, loathsome crime, you sense impending outrage. That’s because there’s something visceral going on. Perhaps a hint of a temper surge. Maybe a trace of teeth gnashing. Conceivably an inkling of a hand reflexively balled into a fist. Possibly something akin to a dismissive expletive about who doesn’t deserve human-species inclusion.
And had that brutalized victim been, say, a member of your own family? Ratchet on up; all bets are off. It won’t be pretty. Revenge never is. The human condition as enabler.
But this is why we have laws, including those that prevent society morphing into an avenging mob. So we institutionalize the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime: death. Or as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said in reference to capital punishment: “It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.”
Over the years, we’ve passionately debated the subject of capital punishment. Typically the overtones are heavily moralistic. The “Thou Shalt Not Kills” vs. the “Eye For An Eyes.”
And there’s always room for those who would agree with the obscenely ironic Orrin Hatch that killing in the context of the death penalty can be nigh on to a virtuous act. “Capital punishment,” the Utah senator has reasoned, “is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”
There’s also the deterrence argument on behalf of capital punishment. While statistics don’t support such a position–because homicidal sorts aren’t thought to weigh consequences before killing–the concept still intrigues. Especially so these days where liberties are routinely taken with definitions of who is “soft on crime.” Indeed, there’s gut-level, zero-sum appeal in the perversely immutable reality that a dead, convicted killer can’t, to be sure, kill again.
Perhaps Woody Allen put it in proper perspective. “Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventative measure if it were administered prior to the crime.”
Which brings us to the most pragmatic arguments against capital punishment.
Start with “convicted.” It’s much more challenging to make the case for society’s “extreme sanction” if it’s more difficult to make the case that “conviction” means what it asserts. Since 1989, 273 defendants have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA-testing. According to the Innocence Project, in most of those exonerations faulty eyewitness testimony was a determining piece of evidence that sent the suspect to prison in the first place. And the more we find out about eyewitness testimony, the more concerned we should be about its certitude–from faulty witness memory to subtle police coercion.
This all came to the fore, of course, in the case of Troy Allen Davis, who was executed in Georgia last week, when it was learned that–among other revelations–seven of the nine eyewitnesses against him had recanted.
Which begs the question: How do you defend not being leery of executing the innocent when you don’t have access to an error-free system? Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan couldn’t. “I am haunted by the demon of error,” he has noted, “error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.”
Victor Hugo put it more existentially. “Three things belong to God and do not belong to men: the irrevocable, the irreparable and the indissoluble.”