Against Capital Punishment

If a person was killed or raped, it would be just for the victim or the victim’s family to seek revenge, to have the satisfaction of seeing those responsible put to death.

If we should have apprehended a criminal guilty of capital crimes, it would be just of us to execute the criminal for the protection of society and for deterrence against further capital crimes.

But not all just things should be done. Anything that we can justify can be considered just. It is the ultimate justice—the justice of a particular course of action when all the good and evil merits are taken into consideration— that should compel us to act.

The human being is not infallible; he may err in knowledge and action. Thus, a jury of men and women are tasked to determine guilt, expecting that a deliberative body might be less prone, as a whole, to making mistakes and showing bias. Then, in reaching a verdict, we ask them to convict only when guilt is known beyond any reasonable doubt, not absolute certainty; we acknowledge that we can never know the absolute truth. Even after a conviction, appeals can be made, resulting in a new trial or a reversal of guilt if innocence can be shown or, at a minimum, the guilt of an individual is dubious from the nature of the court proceedings. Juries and the rest of the justice system treat the accused unfairly, as it has in the past and will, no doubt, in the future. This can be the consequence of any number of things. In additional to the obvious vagueness and ambiguity that may be present in evidence and testimony, there can be corruption, tampering, and interference throughout the process. It is not difficult—rather, it is impossible to deem a criminal proceeding to be without error, nor is it ever certain that there will not be any new, exonerating details after the fact. For any convict, there is always the opportunity for him to prove his innocence, any convict except those condemned to death.

The death sentence ends the appeals and any possibility that the condemned will ever be innocent. We would hope that the many appeals and reviews the condemned always receive might be sufficient to root out the innocent, and that during the intervening time between conviction and execution, any new evidence would come to light—but we cannot be sure. There has never been a dead man exonerated (under the present system), but the opponents of executions are not at a loss to come up with suspect cases, and some condemned have been set free—prior to execution—based on new evidence that has come to light. How can we ever be certain that tomorrow’s forensic technology will not yield new insight? How can we discount the keen ability of time to settle men’s passions and subsequent bias over crimes? How can we say that there will never be a retraction, confession, conspiracy, that changes the way we should have seen the case? We cannot make such definitive assertions—we are only human. An imprisonment for life allows us to be ever skeptical and ready to see the truth; an execution requires that we be as definitive as the sentence imposed.

It would be in the best interests of the protection of the public if the threat of the repeat offender were definitely removed, but we must juxtapose the protective value of an execution against the threat it poses to the potential innocents on death row. We cannot say definitively that an individual in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison would not pose a threat to the public; human error could let him escape, just as human error could convict him wrongly. But could we not agree that the potential for human error is greater, much greater in the emotionally charged, arbitrary proceedings in a court of law than in the brick-and-mortal jail?

The public might also be protected if capital punishment acted as a deterrent against capital crimes. It might act as a deterrent to some individuals under some circumstances, or it might not. How can we tell? Obviously, those who commit capital crimes don’t think about the consequences that would follow in the likely event they are discovered and arrested. The capital criminals could be a special class of delusional people who ignore the inevitable consequences (while everyone else is deterred by them); or, they could also be normal people who would normally be deterred had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances under which they committed a capital crime. How can we justify capital punishment on the premise of a deterrent effect that may or may no exist?

When a person or a loved one is attacked or killed, it is understandable that victim or their loved ones should be enraged. We should alleviate their pain as much as we can. We can find the individual with whom we believe guilt lies, we can try him, and we can punish him. We cannot, however, kill the guilty. Grief is a terrible thing, but it will not kill the grieving. Death of the criminal will not restore their dead victims to life, nor erase the crime that has been committed. We should not, we cannot execute anyone with whom there is any shadow of innocence—which, in human justice, will always be cast. We must give dignity to life, and show respect to innocence.