My mother always told me that two wrongs don’t make a right. I think that’s true unless of course your older brother won’t share the remote and you leave a piece of freshly harvested shit under his pillow. Most other times though, I don’t think much is accomplished by exacting vengeance. I wish the same were true for the rest of the country. According to a May 2005 gallop poll, 74% of Americans favor the death penalty, and it is legal in 38 out of 50 states.
There was a period in American History, between 1967 and 1973, where the death penalty was ruled cruel and unusual by the Supreme Court. You can imagine how irate Texas must have been, and sure enough, the decision was reversed. Since then, America has sentenced and executed 1,000 people, and since then, 122 people who were sentenced to death have been exonerated, sometimes minutes before they were scheduled to be executed. Clearly, our criminal justice system is imperfect.
Part of that imperfection is due to the fact that 95% of all defendants cannot afford legal representation and are given the court appointed attorneys or, as I like to call them, “Ree-rees”. These “Ree-rees” are rarely up to par in terms of their ability to defend. The fact that we issue the ultimate punishment in a fallible criminal justice system calls the legitimacy of even allowing capital punishment into question.
It is inherently illogical to punish murder with murder and it is a little disconcerting when our laws suggest that justice has not progressed since the days of Hammurabi. By saying that in some circumstances taking another human’s life is okay, this country only gives psychological credence to the purveyors of vigilante justice. The way I learned it, life is an inalienable right and when the law place conditions on that right it brutalizes the minds of those who accept it, which I is apparently 74% of us.
There’ve been some recent studies that support the rational that capital punishment acts as a deterrent. However, as Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan stated in his testimony to the New York State Assembly Standing Committees on Codes, those studies “are fraught with technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failure to consider all relevant factors that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years and the absence of any direct test of deterrence.” When statistical analysis of the deterring effect of capital punishment is controlled for other factors, there is no evidence of deterrence. Some studies even suggest an increase. In Canada the murder rate sure as shit dropped after they abolished the death penalty and states with the death penalty host significantly higher murder rates than states without.
Even if we ignore the numbers, we can look at it logically. Crimes of passion aren’t conducted in a rational manner. When someone murders in the heat of the moment, they are probably not looking very far down the road—they’re probably not thinking “Hey, I might be sentenced to death for this.” But even if these people did think such a thing, would they be any more deterred by the possibility of death than by the possibility of life in prison without the chance of parole? As for those who murder without passion, they are likely beyond the reach of rational behavior and deterrence. However, if someone does commit murder in a temporary state of passionate disregard, when they return to a level state of mind, and consider the fact that if they are caught they may be sentenced to death, there is a good chance that they will be all the more motivated to evade capture—even violently evade capture.
Now, I’m not one to accuse entire countries of belligerent racism, but the numbers tell an interesting story. 80% of defendants in death penalty trials are white. 14% are black. But 58% of those executed are white and 34% are black. It is interesting indeed that the tables shift more in the favor of whites and more in the disfavor of blacks. Perhaps Justice wears white hoods and gallivants around on horses, burning lower case t’s on lawns, and causing all kinds of ruckus. I don’t know. Maybe.
But fuck logic, racism, lack of deterrence, and imperfect punishment. Let’s look at it economically. You might think that it costs more money to keep someone alive in prison than it does to juice ‘em in the chair—“Why should I have to pay to keep murderers alive”. Well, you’d be wrong. And stupid. In a report released by the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury, they found that Death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than the average cost of trials in which prosecutors seek life imprisonment, and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reversed 29 percent of capital cases on direct appeal. It’s not just Tennessee either. The state of Kansas found that the investigation costs for death-sentence cases were about 3 times greater than for non-death cases, the trial costs for death cases were about 16 times greater than for non-death cases, and the appeal costs for death cases were 21 times greater. The state of Florida spent average of $3.2 million per execution. Duke University conducted the most comprehensive death penalty study in the country and found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than the a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment. It costs $25,000 to keep an inmate. An inmate would have to live 86.4 years to cost the state the $2.16 million more dollars that would be spent on his death. Prison gaurds are less expensive than lawyers. So, if money is the only thing that matters for you when it comes to dealing with criminals, then lock their bitch asses up. Don’t kill them.
I’m not suggesting that crime shouldn’t be punished but, I want my country to be able to say that “murder in cold blood is never right.” I want my country to be able to understand that forgiveness is the best revenge. I want to be able to look to my country and say, “My country is the greatest country that ever was.” But it’s tough for those things to be realized when the assumption is held by so many that they always know what is right and just. Its tough to do that when the mentality of retribution is so prevalent. I guess Civility has a lot of progress to make in the good ole U S of A.
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I disagree personally with the death penalty for three reasons:
1) Too much imperfection. There seems to be far too many mistakes in the justice system from investigations to the judicial system itself. I don’t trust it.
2) I agree with the economics argument — eye for an eye is an expensive habit.
3) We are the only Western nation that still pursues capital punishment.
But, on a personal note, I think if someone raped or kill someone personal to me, I would hope they would die a gruesome death. But one imposed by their bretherner in jail, not by the state.
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