Unjust

by Eleanor O'Donnell

Created on: November 12, 2008   Last Updated: August 14, 2010

My Dad spent 11yrs in prison because he killed someone.  If anyone is qualified to write on this subject, then surely I am.

The death penalty that so many people argue is the right and just way to handle severe crimes against society is not really a sentence against the perpetrator. You murder a murderer and suddenly it is not just the victim's family who are left to grieve but the murderer's family also. What does the person sentenced to death care? They'll be dead. It is the grieving family that are ultimately being punished for having done nothing wrong.

My Dad is my Dad no matter what he's done.  He's still the man who kicked a football around in the garden with me as a little kid.  He's the man who made me wear stupid pink frilly dresses to parties because I was his only princess.  He was the man who bought me toys at Christmas and took me horse riding on a Saturday morning.  He's the man who yelled at me for drawing on the walls and praised me for doing well at school.  What he did was cruel and terrible, but it doesn't stop me from being his daughter; it doesn't stop me from loving him.

Sentencing my Dad to death would not serve to undo what he had done, it would have just made it doubly worse.  Instead of one family drenched in grief, there would have been two.

My Dad's crime has not gone unpunished.  He has lost his freedom forever more.  He cannot reveal who he really is to anybody even now he has been released from prison.  He missed out on his grandson's first few years of life, and he missed out on his own children's teenage years.  He has to live with what he's done.  He has to look in the mirror every day and know that he caused irrepairable hurt to his own family as well as the victim's.  He's not proud of what he did and he'd turn back time if he could, but he can't.  Death would have actually released him from the obligation of guilt - leaving behind his family to carry the burden alone.

I fail to see what killing a killer is supposed to achieve in the grand scheme of things. It's a little bit like when you hit a child for hitting; all you're doing is teaching them that it is a way to solve problems afterall. What kind of message is killing a killer sending to society as a whole? We deal with our problems by killing them? That's just not a message I think we should be sending to our children if we want them to grow up in a world where knifes and guns aren't accepted as part of any culture.

It's been proven in America that the death penalty doesn't serve as a deterrent against murder (and other high profile crimes that may warrant the death penalty). In fact violent crimes are committed by a higher percentage of the population in states where they have the death penalty over states where they don't. I have to wonder if that's because too many people grow up believing it's okay to kill "bad" people and that it's an acceptable way to deal with problems.

I also think it's important to appreciate that not everyone who commits a horrific crime is a horrific person. The man who smothers the wife who has had enough of suffering from MS is not the same as the sociopath who has raped and mutilated seven prostitutes; however they are both guilty of murder in the legal sense. The man who kills the lover that his wife of fifteen years ran off with and the woman who stabbed her husband to death because he was raping her teenage daughter are completely different people who acted on completely different impulses. They are again both guilty of murder though; they both reacted to strong emotions, rightly or wrongly, and did not kill in defence but in offence.

Every crime is different the same as every person is different. Even though some people may argue that the death penalty should only apply to a certain level of crime; who is to decide where to set such an important standard?

Some of us may feel that there are certain truly stomach-churning crimes which surely must warrant the death penalty, but there's a big part of me that simply does not believe a sane person could commit those crimes.  What person not affected by mental health issues such as schizophrenia or paranoid delusions goes out and has sex with a four year old?  Yes it's a horrific crime, and yes most people will have the immediate reaction that surely a person who does such a thing should be sentenced to immediate death; but there's a big part of me that just cannot believe such a crime could be commited by a person in their 'right mind'.

Beyond the moral implications and the considerations of how the death penalty actually affects the criminal's family rather than the criminal themselves; there is also the consideration that justice does not always prevail. One of the best known miscarriages of justice is the execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine in Notting Hill, London. After his death it was discovered that serial killer John Christie had actually been responsible. It was too late to resurrect Timothy Evans from the grave though.

My final argument against the death penalty is that I don't believe we have the right to dictate to one another how we should live our lives. Most of us feel that murder is wrong, however that doesn't give us the right to dictate that everyone should feel this way. Some people genuinely do not care about other people's pain and suffering and though we usually refer to these people as sociopathic, what gives us the right to decide that they're in the wrong and we're in the right just because we are the majority?  If they want to live within this society then they have to abide by our rules, but we haven't the right to take away their lives just because we, the majority, disagree with their moral standards (or lack of).

The majority are what make up society and I think it's perfectly reasonable to exclude someone from society if they don't wish to play by the rules. Society simply cannot function without co-operation from the members included. Society is simply the confines in which we live however, it is not life itself. Just because someone doesn't want to play by the rules and be a part of society, it doesn't give the rest of us the right to decide that they have no right to live.

Learn more about this author, Eleanor O'Donnell.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.