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A response to a friend regarding my firm opposition to capital punishment
I posted this in a thread on Facebook about the moratorium declared on the death penalty by PA Gov. Wolf, and thought I would share it here as well.
Mark Kessinger - Steve, I realize not everyone agrees with this. I have been unequivocally opposed to capital punishment for the whole of my adult life. Like Gov. Wolf, my opposition is not grounded in some misplaced sympathy for murderers. To be perfectly honest, there have certainly been cases involving particularly brutal murderers in which I didn't lose a great deal of sleep over their particular executions. But I think we need to look at the entire picture, not just some individual cases considered in isolation from all the others. There are many reasons I am opposed to it. Among them (and in no particular order)::
(1) The most oft-cited rationale for the death penalty is that it is necessary as a deterrent to other would-be murderers. The problem is that there has never been any evidence to support that idea. And in fact, there has been some evidence that suggests that maybe the opposite is true. The website deathpenaltyinfo.org has analyzed crime and death penalty statistics provided by the FBI. They have found that in every year since 1991 when such statistics began to be collected, the average per capita murder rate for every single year has been higher across states that use the death penalty versus the states which do not (see http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without... ).
(2) Capital punishment is unfairly imposed along racial lines -- and not just in terms of the race of the murderer, but just as importantly, according to the race of the victim. Amnesty International has pointed out that while whites comprise 75% of the U.S. population, and blacks 7.5^, the number of murder victims i the U.S. is roughly the same for each. Yet 80% of the cases in which a murdere has been sentenced to die have been cases in which the victims were white. A 2007 Yale study found that in cases where the victims are white, African American defendants receive the death penalty at THREE TIMES the rate of white defendants,. The racial bias is indisputable.
(3) Our criminal justice system is far too prone to both error and corruption to be handing out irrevocable, unreversible sentences. District Attorneys are politicians who must run for office to get, and keep, their jobs. They build political campaigns based on their prosecution stats. Thus there is far too great an incentive for DA's to overcharge defendants, to prosecute defendants who may, in fact, not be guilty, and to push for the harshest possible sentences in every case. We know for a fact that innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes. We also know for a fact that innocent people have been put to death for crimes they did not commit. Since our justice system does, in fact, make serious mistakes sometimes, and since no justice system is ever perfect, I believe no justice system has any business meting out ultimate sentences for which there is no possibility of correcting should the convictions later prove to have been wrong.
(4) Related to #3 above, there is a long-standing principle that has informed Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence, as well as Western, and specifically Judeo-Christian, notions of justice. It is sometimes referred to as Blackstone's Formulation. In 1769, William Blackstone wrote: "the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer." The 15th century English Chief Justice, Sir John Fortescue, wrote in 1470: "one would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally." During the Salem witch trials, Increase Mather adapted Fortescue's statement when he wrote: "It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned." And the 12th century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and legal scholar Maimonides argued that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would progressively lead to convictions merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death."
(5) When all of the arguments made by death penalty supporters have been refuted, supporters typically fall back onto some theory of "retributive justice." But I have yet to hear an argument that credibly explain how 'retributive justice" differs (except in being called by a fancier name) than plain old vengeance and bloodlust, neither of which, in my view, has any place in a civilized society.
(1) The most oft-cited rationale for the death penalty is that it is necessary as a deterrent to other would-be murderers. The problem is that there has never been any evidence to support that idea. And in fact, there has been some evidence that suggests that maybe the opposite is true. The website deathpenaltyinfo.org has analyzed crime and death penalty statistics provided by the FBI. They have found that in every year since 1991 when such statistics began to be collected, the average per capita murder rate for every single year has been higher across states that use the death penalty versus the states which do not (see http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without... ).
(2) Capital punishment is unfairly imposed along racial lines -- and not just in terms of the race of the murderer, but just as importantly, according to the race of the victim. Amnesty International has pointed out that while whites comprise 75% of the U.S. population, and blacks 7.5^, the number of murder victims i the U.S. is roughly the same for each. Yet 80% of the cases in which a murdere has been sentenced to die have been cases in which the victims were white. A 2007 Yale study found that in cases where the victims are white, African American defendants receive the death penalty at THREE TIMES the rate of white defendants,. The racial bias is indisputable.
(3) Our criminal justice system is far too prone to both error and corruption to be handing out irrevocable, unreversible sentences. District Attorneys are politicians who must run for office to get, and keep, their jobs. They build political campaigns based on their prosecution stats. Thus there is far too great an incentive for DA's to overcharge defendants, to prosecute defendants who may, in fact, not be guilty, and to push for the harshest possible sentences in every case. We know for a fact that innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes. We also know for a fact that innocent people have been put to death for crimes they did not commit. Since our justice system does, in fact, make serious mistakes sometimes, and since no justice system is ever perfect, I believe no justice system has any business meting out ultimate sentences for which there is no possibility of correcting should the convictions later prove to have been wrong.
(4) Related to #3 above, there is a long-standing principle that has informed Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence, as well as Western, and specifically Judeo-Christian, notions of justice. It is sometimes referred to as Blackstone's Formulation. In 1769, William Blackstone wrote: "the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer." The 15th century English Chief Justice, Sir John Fortescue, wrote in 1470: "one would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally." During the Salem witch trials, Increase Mather adapted Fortescue's statement when he wrote: "It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned." And the 12th century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and legal scholar Maimonides argued that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would progressively lead to convictions merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death."
(5) When all of the arguments made by death penalty supporters have been refuted, supporters typically fall back onto some theory of "retributive justice." But I have yet to hear an argument that credibly explain how 'retributive justice" differs (except in being called by a fancier name) than plain old vengeance and bloodlust, neither of which, in my view, has any place in a civilized society.
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