Ban it

by Nina Medeiros

Created on: April 05, 2009   Last Updated: April 06, 2009

The prolific H.G. Wells said that history becomes a race between education and catastrophe and this statement illuminates the long-standing conflict over the death penalty. Since the first execution of a criminal in 1622, the merits of capital punishment have been hotly contested. It would be misleading to examine the issue without defining the word justice, since this fundamental concept is the cornerstone of cases both for and against capital punishment.

Justice is "the proper administration of the law and the fair and equitable treatment of all individuals under the law." With this definition we can now examine the death penalty in an educated and thoughtful way.

One of the primary arguments for the death penalty has been and continues to be, deterrence. The idea that executing criminals will deter other criminals from committing crimes sounds reasonable enough, and it's hard to argue that deterring any type of violent crime is a bad idea, but the jury is still out on whether or not executing criminals achieves this. In a Stanford Law Review article, "The Ethics and Empirics of Capital Punishment" authors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule deliver research that shows it would be accurate to say that the deterrence hypothesis could not be confirmed.

So, will we execute some criminals in order to show others we mean business? Does a criminal mind even take the penalty of death into consideration? According to Shepherd, "Unless executions reach a certain level, murderers may act as if the death penalty is so improbable as not to be worthy of concern." On the other hand, even if capital punishment has no direct deterrent effect, it saves lives by incapacitating those who would otherwise kill again in the future.

Yet in her article, "Safely Executed," author Christie Davies says, "Among the Western Democracies, America is now the odd one out, for no one else executes" (Davies, 44). The moral examination of the modern death penalty will undoubtedly turn up many cases of wrongful executions. Non-profits like The Innocence Project have "dedicated themselves to national litigation and public policy work that exonerates wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing." In fact, the death penalty has been so often wrongly imposed that Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. said, "the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent."

The very fact that innocent people are executed makes it contentious for The United States to use this form of punishment. It certainly seems reasonable that if we (the state) take the life of an innocent person, than we are in fact accountable to the same standards of punishment as the suspected criminal himself. Is this risk worth any benefits of capital punishment that may exist?

Let's recount that since the early 1970s, "123 people in 25 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence"
Additionally, we know conclusively from research backed by the strongest and most infallible statistics, that the death penalty is applied with bias. It is a war against race and class; poor people are represented by over-worked or incompetent lawyers while wealthy criminals are represented by well paid attorneys who present competent and creative defense. At this point in our history, death spells disaster. The race is on. Will we chose to be educated, or will issues like the death penalty spell catastrophe for the very values and principles this country was founded on?

The death penalty is a flawed method of retribution. It makes the state as much a criminal as the defendant. We owe it to ourselves and future generations as well as all potentially innocent people to uphold values like justice, the fair and equitable distribution of law.

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