Matters of Life and Death
On Saturday, outgoing Illinois governor George Ryan, faced with a mountain of doubt about the validity of numerous death penalty cases, issued a blanket commutation of the death sentences of over 160 criminals convicted of violent and often atrocious crimes. In his extraordinary speech announcing his decision, he raised a number of important questions about the death penalty and the criminal justice system that few if any politicians have ever dared to intone in public. These questions were distinctly uncomfortable, not only because they cast doubts on a flawed system of law enforcement, but because they dared to impeach the righteousness of the families of victims, a constituency whose prerogatives in the administration of the death penalty are rarely if ever challenged.
Ryan’s objections about administration of justice in capital cases are nearly beyond debate. Impartial DNA evidence exonerated nearly half the death row inmates in Illinois, and significant procedural questions haunt many others. Governor Ryan issued his order to prevent the wrong people from being put to death, a decision that should require no further defense. Even if the state were prepared to ignore the manifest outrage of executing the innocent (a process known in times past by the impolite term “judicial murder”), there is one very practical problem with false convictions: it means the real perpetrators may still be at large. As a matter of public safety, the zeal to produce convictions in capital cases at the expense of fairness, due process and the truth is not only immoral, it is counterproductive.
On that basis, the problems with the death penalty are simply systemic errors that could possibly be corrected with more attention to detail and better oversight of police and prosecutors. The related issue of inconsistency of sentencing, which Ryan also raised, could also conceivably be addressed under the law. This suggests that the death penalty may not be inherently unjust if it is applied fairly and consistently, in cases where guilt is proven by appropriate means. That’s a big if, but it creates an objective condition for the administration of the death sentence that many, if not most, Americans would agree to.
Those who object to the death penalty often do so on moral grounds, citing the metaphysical sanctity of human life. That’s a position of admirable clarity, especially if it’s held consistently, but it’s not one that can be the basis of public policy in a pluralistic society. Earnest (and not-so-earnest) people of moral character violently disagree on this subject, and convincing religious and philosophical arguments are available to both sides. The authority to rule definitively on the moral question must be regarded as beyond human competence. Therefore, the decision of whether to use the death penalty as a tool of criminal justice is left to be resolved strictly in terms of social utility.
Proponents of the fair and consistent administration of capital punishment usually make several arguments. Some are rebuttable by empirical data, such as whether or not the death penalty serves as a deterrent, or whether it is less costly to execute a convict than to imprison him or her indefinitely at state expense. One thing is for sure, however – putting a convicted felon to death guarantees that person will never claim another victim. When we look at certain people who are indubitably guilty of horrible crimes, we may rightly ask why we need that person around anymore, or what benefit society gains by refusing on principle to administer the most stringent brand of justice available to punish them. The criminal, through his or her actions, has certainly forfeit the right to continue to live among society. Doesn’t this also mean that if the crime was heinous enough, they have also forfeit their right to live, period?
Perhaps. But when a society takes it upon itself to make that decision, it is, in my opinion, cheapening itself in a fundamental way. The Raven wrote in a comment to my original post:
There is the "community catharsis" aspect of executions that restores a sense of well-being to the body politic - that is, when a particular killer commits a truly horrendous crime, he or she doesn't just terminate the life of an individual, but threatens our ability to live in a rational world. Capital punishment restores our sense of balance in the karmic calculus of existence. I tend to think of it this way: If someone raped and murdered the person closest to me, I'd like to know that they were killed in return, and not allowed to play chess, watch TV, read books, get a college diploma, work out with weights, chat with pals, read magazines, surf the Net, write letters, etc., for the next 50 to 70 years.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, I find the idea of a “community catharsis” through the act of public execution utterly repellent. The more emotionally gratifying the spectacle, the more it is precisely to be feared as subversive of “our ability to live in a rational world.” The desire for revenge expressed in the Raven’s comments – which I completely share, by the way – is completely natural. In fact, it’s probably one of the strongest and most fundamental urges in human nature. But it was the inability of the perpetrator to control his or her fundamental urges (in this case, the urge to random violence and/or gratification of sexual desire) that caused the problem in the first place.
Elevating the revenge instinct to the level of formal social policy by the systematic application of the death penalty undermines the rational basis of society in a far more insidious way than the act of a single perpetrator. Simply stated, it puts the public stamp of approval on a primitive and bloodthirsty ritual and makes the entire community complicit in the most essential act of violence. It is no accident that the most irrational regimes – dictatorships, theocracies, and hereditary oligarchies – rely heavily on the death penalty as an instrument of public policy. The continuous spectacle of bloodshed keeps emotions at the forefront of political debate and precludes the dispassionate consideration of important questions, not only of criminal justice but of all kinds of social issues.
Which brings us back to Governor Ryan’s most radical assault on the “machinery of death” – his refusal to concede the therapeutic effects of the death penalty on the families of the victims. It’s a truism that punishing the guilty does not bring the victim back. But Ryan went further than this. He suggested in the most indelicate terms that the idea that killing the criminal may not provide the “closure” that families seek (and, of course, all the more if the person executed turned out to be the wrong man), and that the state might be better off seeking more concrete forms of compensation for victims of crimes, such as defrayment of burial expenses, tax relief, pension extensions or other benefits. In so doing, he tacitly acknowledged that it was unseemly for the state to be in the business of executions simply to gratify the victims’ desires for revenge, and that those desires should assume the form of reasonable demands on the resources of the community rather than asking it to be complicit in an act of retribution. It is, unfortunately, almost unthinkable that any other political leader would follow his example in this day and age.
10:56:47 AM 
|
|
