On Capital Punishment

It is immoral in principle, and unfair and discriminatory in practice.                                      American Civil Liberties Union

Liberals are divided on the issue but a majority of liberals are against capital punishment.  In a 2013 Gallup Poll 50 percent of liberals opposed the death penalty and 47 percent supported it.  Clearly, the more liberal position is to be against the death penalty.  Earlier in my life I supported the death penalty, but now am irrevocably against it.  There are several reasons why I and the majority of liberals cannot support this practice.  The nature of these reasons comprises both moral and practical concerns.

Morally, I begin with the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right.  To use lethal force against a perpetrator who is actively endangering the lives of innocents may well be justified, but to kill someone in state custody is simply murder.  Also, execution ends any possibility of   redemption for the criminal.  The Dalai Lama says, “My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this.”  John Dear, a Jesuit Catholic priest, wrote of capital punishment, “Behind it lies an illogical maxim: we kill those who kill to show that killing is wrong. If we really believed that killing was wrong, the state would set an example; official killing would be banished."  

In addition, the act of imposing the death penalty does not bring back any victims but only creates more.  It is a simple act of vengeance motivated by the emotions of anger and hate.  Most liberals see these motives as unworthy of a civilized judicial system and as little more than the vestigial relics of a primitive age of barbarism.  In 2013 only 22 countries (out of more than 200) carried out any executions.  The top eight were China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Somalia.  America is the only advanced constitutional nation among them.  It is disgraceful to put ourselves in such company. 

The practical reasons against the death penalty are important too.  Chief among them are that by its very nature mistakes cannot be fixed, the death penalty is invariably applied unequally, and the record shows it does not deter crime.  When someone is wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, once that sentence is carried out there is no way to rectify the mistake.  We cannot know how many of the 1,200 Americans executed since 1973 may have been innocent, but according to the Death Penalty Information Center, over that time 144 inmates waiting on death row have been exonerated.  That makes it almost certain that some people have been executed erroneously.  Police, prosecutors, crime lab technicians, defense attorneys, judges and juries are only human.  And when they make a mistake in this arena, people can be put to death as a result.  There is nothing that can justify taking a risk like that.  

Plenty of studies have shown that the death penalty is applied terribly unequally in our country.  Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, has four times the death penalty cases of Los Angeles or Houston on a per capita basis. And thanks to the legacy of our race relations, a much higher percentage of minority defendants, especially African-Americans, are sentenced to death.  About 14 percent of murder victims are black, yet over 41 percent of death row inmates are black.  A  2011 study in North Carolina found that the chances of a defendant being sentenced to death were 75 percent higher if the victim was white than if the victim was black.  This is not equal justice.   

   

One of the most commonly cited justifications for capital punishment is its supposed effectiveness as a deterrent to crime.  The actual record, however, does not back up this assertion at all.  In fact, states with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than those without it.  Over the last twenty years the murder rate for states that have the death penalty averages 31% higher than states that do not.  If the deterrent effect were there, one would expect those figures to change, yet there has not been one year in the past 25 in which death penalty states had a lower murder rate.  

Given the immorality of capital punishment, the irrevocable nature of its judgment, the caprice and evident bias with which it is applied, and its ineffectiveness in reducing crime, many liberals can echo the sentiments of former liberal Senator Russ Feingold who said, “I oppose the death penalty because it is inconsistent with basic American principles of justice, liberty, and equality.”