From the Huffington Post today: "Thirty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment and approved new sentencing criteria to make it less random, a new report has found that receiving the death penalty is still as arbitrary and unfair as being 'struck by lightning.'"
I am against the death penalty, but not for the reasons you may expect. I am not the guy saying "have mercy on the criminal". I'm not the one telling you that it's cruel and unusual punishment. I leave that to the Constitutional scholars out there.
The fact is, there are some true bastards out there. There are folks who rape and kill. There are people who will burn down homes just to see the pretty colors. There are mommies who will drive a minivan full of kids into a river, or stick a baby in a microwave.
Are these people insane? I would think so, but what do I know? I'm no psychiatrist, I'm not fit to say who is sane or insane. But it seems to me that anyone who decides at some point that any of that behavior is acceptable has snapped on some level. And frankly I don't care if they spend the rest of their natural lives in a prison or a psych ward, just so long as they're removed from the general populace.
When I tell people I'm against the death penalty, I invariably get asked how I would feel if my wife and family were murdered. If I got to choose their killer's fate, would I still be against the death penalty. And while that's certainly a stimulating argument, I would say that in that case, I'm the last person anyone should ask. I would not have it in me to think rationally or objectively. I might agree, in that moment, to torture and kill the bastard as slowly and as painfully as science would allow. Which is exactly why I should not be in charge of making the decision.
There is talk of justice, but there is no justice when someone gets killed. Killing their killers will not bring back their victims. It's just another hole we have to dig.
Which brings me to my first reason for opposing the death penalty: it is not an effective deterrent to violent crime. In states where the death penalty is an option, violent crime and other execution-earning crimes are no less common. If you could say that there was a significant drop in violent crimes in states that offer the death penalty, you might be able to make the case that executing criminals serves some sense of the Greater Good. But this is not the case. Besides, most death-penalty-earning crime is committed because the person is either batshit crazy for life, or else caught up in a moment of passion - or as some phrase it, "temporary insanity". To those people, the ones who are either temporarily or permanently nuts, they're not going to say to themselves "gosh I'd better not kill this hooker - I don't want to go to the gas chamber".
The next reason is strictly a practical one, from the financial perspective: it is cheaper to let them rot in jail for life than it is to execute them. People sentenced to death are often kept in jail for years, sometimes decades, going through the appeals process. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to appeal - I've heard of many cases where a death row inmate was freed decades after being sentenced when somebody ran a DNA test that actually proved they were innocent all along. Inmates on Death Row have a better chance of dying of old age that dying in the execution chamber. And all that appealling costs the states money and diverts resources.
My final reason for opposing the death penalty could be taken as sadistic, but here it goes: prison sucks. In prison, you lose your identity. You rarely see the sky. Nobody bakes you a cake on your birthday, you never have a chance to get promoted or be anything other than what you are: an inmate. You get a number, a uniform, and if you're very lucky, a cellmate that doesn't think you have a pretty mouth. You eat bad food, sleep on a steel bed, wear the same clothes every day and the only new people you ever get to meet are the new inmates. The best you can hope for is that the guards and inmates don't think beating you is a fun way to pass the time. There is no future, and every day is the same as the last. And that's your life. Forever. Unless you do manage to get out years later, in which case you're screwed again: you will completely lost all your skills for living in a non-prison world, and your odds of getting a house or a job or ever being accepted back into mainstream society are slim. This is why a lot of people released from prison invariably pull some stunt shortly after being released that gets them back in prison.
At one point in the 90's, I fell behind on the child support I was paying, and the Sherriff's deputies came to my home and arrested me. I spent five days in the couty jail. Let me tell you, it was no picnic. And that was just county jail, not a state or a federal prison. County jails are usually for people waiting to make bail or else serving a short term sentence (less than a year). You have an assortment of drunk drivers, wife beaters, and general no-goodniks. I had nightmares about that experience for years afterwards. And if I committed some heinous crime and the prosection offered me the chioce of life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, there would no question in my mind: kill me now. So when we have someone who has committed some atrocious crime and we scratch our collective heads and wonder "how can we really make this bastard suffer", I say killing them is not the best answer.
I am against the death penalty, but not for the reasons you may expect. I am not the guy saying "have mercy on the criminal". I'm not the one telling you that it's cruel and unusual punishment. I leave that to the Constitutional scholars out there.
The fact is, there are some true bastards out there. There are folks who rape and kill. There are people who will burn down homes just to see the pretty colors. There are mommies who will drive a minivan full of kids into a river, or stick a baby in a microwave.
Are these people insane? I would think so, but what do I know? I'm no psychiatrist, I'm not fit to say who is sane or insane. But it seems to me that anyone who decides at some point that any of that behavior is acceptable has snapped on some level. And frankly I don't care if they spend the rest of their natural lives in a prison or a psych ward, just so long as they're removed from the general populace.
When I tell people I'm against the death penalty, I invariably get asked how I would feel if my wife and family were murdered. If I got to choose their killer's fate, would I still be against the death penalty. And while that's certainly a stimulating argument, I would say that in that case, I'm the last person anyone should ask. I would not have it in me to think rationally or objectively. I might agree, in that moment, to torture and kill the bastard as slowly and as painfully as science would allow. Which is exactly why I should not be in charge of making the decision.
There is talk of justice, but there is no justice when someone gets killed. Killing their killers will not bring back their victims. It's just another hole we have to dig.
Which brings me to my first reason for opposing the death penalty: it is not an effective deterrent to violent crime. In states where the death penalty is an option, violent crime and other execution-earning crimes are no less common. If you could say that there was a significant drop in violent crimes in states that offer the death penalty, you might be able to make the case that executing criminals serves some sense of the Greater Good. But this is not the case. Besides, most death-penalty-earning crime is committed because the person is either batshit crazy for life, or else caught up in a moment of passion - or as some phrase it, "temporary insanity". To those people, the ones who are either temporarily or permanently nuts, they're not going to say to themselves "gosh I'd better not kill this hooker - I don't want to go to the gas chamber".
The next reason is strictly a practical one, from the financial perspective: it is cheaper to let them rot in jail for life than it is to execute them. People sentenced to death are often kept in jail for years, sometimes decades, going through the appeals process. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to appeal - I've heard of many cases where a death row inmate was freed decades after being sentenced when somebody ran a DNA test that actually proved they were innocent all along. Inmates on Death Row have a better chance of dying of old age that dying in the execution chamber. And all that appealling costs the states money and diverts resources.
My final reason for opposing the death penalty could be taken as sadistic, but here it goes: prison sucks. In prison, you lose your identity. You rarely see the sky. Nobody bakes you a cake on your birthday, you never have a chance to get promoted or be anything other than what you are: an inmate. You get a number, a uniform, and if you're very lucky, a cellmate that doesn't think you have a pretty mouth. You eat bad food, sleep on a steel bed, wear the same clothes every day and the only new people you ever get to meet are the new inmates. The best you can hope for is that the guards and inmates don't think beating you is a fun way to pass the time. There is no future, and every day is the same as the last. And that's your life. Forever. Unless you do manage to get out years later, in which case you're screwed again: you will completely lost all your skills for living in a non-prison world, and your odds of getting a house or a job or ever being accepted back into mainstream society are slim. This is why a lot of people released from prison invariably pull some stunt shortly after being released that gets them back in prison.
At one point in the 90's, I fell behind on the child support I was paying, and the Sherriff's deputies came to my home and arrested me. I spent five days in the couty jail. Let me tell you, it was no picnic. And that was just county jail, not a state or a federal prison. County jails are usually for people waiting to make bail or else serving a short term sentence (less than a year). You have an assortment of drunk drivers, wife beaters, and general no-goodniks. I had nightmares about that experience for years afterwards. And if I committed some heinous crime and the prosection offered me the chioce of life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, there would no question in my mind: kill me now. So when we have someone who has committed some atrocious crime and we scratch our collective heads and wonder "how can we really make this bastard suffer", I say killing them is not the best answer.
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