The Death Penalty Debate

The state of North Carolina has been unable to have any executions in two years -- although there are 163 inmates on Death Row in the Raleigh prison. They can't executive because no doctor will assist since threated by the N.C. Medical Board, which licenses doctors. The blog Ethic Soup a good article on the "execution doctors" controversy. To read, go to:

http://www.ethicsoup.com/2008/11/execution-doctors-unethical-whether-han...

Sharon McEachern

I posted the following on another discussion board, but it seems even more pertinent here:

"The crucial fact of the Addison case is that the defendant offered to plead guilty to a charge that would entail a life sentence. That is, the prosecutors pressed the case forward, and put the state and its people through the anguish of the trial and sentencing hearings, in the sole expectation of taking the defendant's life. It was merely to assert the State's interest and authority to take life. There can be no other reason. They may appeal to "victim's rights", but what they would really mean revenge. Official revenge amounts to official side-taking. That is, the official repudiation of the principle of impartiality. No state or nation has an interest is killing its own citizens. It is hard to see how a nation that "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed" can legitimately take the life of a citizen. Doing so is not doing justice. It is, in fact, a complete repudiation of the principle of consent. It is a radical and revolutionary arrogation of authority."

Justice is not the satisfaction of even reasonable affections of sympathy for the victim or outrage against a criminal. Justice is the duty of the state to prevent the festering of injustice in private (private resentment of the victim or private triumph of the unjust) and to promote civil tranquility. Retributive justice is highly dubious under the most favorable conditions, and surely it never extends to infinity (the death penalty), even if the crime itself is infinite (intentional murder). There is no transcendental authority supporting the prosecution of law. Law is limited because the ability of a human community to create and sustain its institutions are limited, even highly limited, in comparison with the right each of us naturally possesses to equal justice before the law. Taking the life of the criminal does not balance the injustice of the crime, it merely arrogates the injustice of the taking of life to the criminal potential that, in any society, is most able to escape justice. That potential, of course, belongs to the law itself. The death penalty simply hoards that capacity for infinite injustice in the hands of the most capable of evading justice. In the most absolute sense conceivable, the death penalty is pure injustice.

Gary Washburn,
Jamaica, VT.

I’m astonished that so many people support the death penalty. Although I agree that there are crimes that are heinous and beyond comprehension, there are a number of reasons to eliminate the death penalty. The most compelling are

• It is not a deterrent,
• The risk of putting an innocent person to death is real,
• And, it models that, under certain circumstances, it is ok to kill another human being. Essentially, it’s a violent act to punish a violent act.

If you do not want a child to use questionable language, you watch your own. If you do not want a child to hit others, you refrain from hitting him or her. We do not condone murder and, yet, there is support for the state to kill people.

Once again, astonishing!

If someone shows total disregard for human life than why should anything better be given to him? The only aspect of the NH capital punnishment law I disagree with is the fact that it only applies to a law enforcement officer getting killed in the line of duty. Isn't the "common" person's life worth just as much as a law enforcement officer's?

The reasoned arguments against the death penalty, as the ones in the post above, are good and reasonable and correctly point out how it corrupts society and public policies, but the more fundamental reason against it is that it is corrupting of law. The implication of a transcendental authority extending to the taking of life undermines the very meaning of law of any sort, and is lethal to the whole democratic project.

I am a liberal democrat and believe in the death penalty for heinous crimes such as:
- killing police. Convicted people who take the lives of those people who risk their lives every day for the safety of others should not be tolerated or kept alive on my tax dollars.
- rape/killing of children. Nuff said.
Serial killers.

I believe that the death penalty is a deterrant and those that still do not believe that it could happen to them should be stopped for good.

There's just one other point I'd like to make. This reference to, I don't remember the legal name for the concept, but it is a reference to the Biblical law of "an eye for an eye". It strikes me as a peculiarly adolescent interpretation of this primitive tribal concept of justice that takes it to be a minimum rather than a maximum. That is, one of the guests on the show clearly sees it to mean that it is not doing justice to take anything less than an eye, a tooth, a life, when by any mature reading it is intended as a maximum, meaning it is not doing justice to take more than was taken in the crime. As I said, this is tribal law, not civil justice.

I am wondering if anyone has addressed the cost of 50 years confinement vs. the death penalty.
My definition of confinement is isolation, (solitary confinement), no contact with the prison population, only immediate family (no physical contact)and his lawyer.
The death penalty includes lawyers upon lawyers, ACLU (NOT all criminals locked up), and appeals to every court in the land. This expense is truly astronomical and I believe is far greater than the cost of incarceration.
In the Michael Addison case, he had agreed to plead guilty to murder without the death penalty; but was it the thought of headlines that brought the death penalty into the forefront?

Three times Senator Kenney was confronted on whether there was evidence for any deterrent effect of the death penalty, and all three times he did the political dodge and weave of "I believe" without offering a concrete answer. I generally like the way Ms. Knoy handles interviews, but sometimes I really wish she would push harder and say to an interviewee, "You have not answered my question."

Senator Kenney offered two main themes in support of the death penalty, "justice" and "deterrence". The former is very subjective but the latter can be examined more objectively. If there is support for the death penalty as a deterrent, then provide that evidence and not just weak "I believe" platitudes. If there is none, then stand on your only legitimate argument (though one with which I disagree) of "justice"/revenge.

David Lawrence
Middlesex, VT

Lex Talionis is the principle of retributive justice. It is not a rational one, and can only have any meaning at all as a limitation upon the cycle of violence vengeance tends to stir up. But like the notion that official violence deters crime, or that might makes right, and like a bad penny, the notion keeps intruding itself into public discussion because the conservative concept of law is that justice and the legitimacy of law is "immemorial", in a sense that resists human progress or deliberative exposition of the pathological character of some of our most ancient habits of thought. It is hard to understand such persistence except as the expression of the political ambition of its exponents. But it comes at the expense of a dumbing down of public debate. And, I am sad to say, that project seemed to be at work at today's discussion. The matter, insofar as I was able to listen in to it, never rose above the emotional, and teetered near the edge of hysterics.

Book of interest:
The Death Penalty in America, Hugo Adam Bedau, ed.

The ancient punishment of Judaism is stoning. The reason for this method of execution is to unite the people against the accused and to unify the people in the ritual murder. The jury assigns the death penalty. But this input by the jury asserts an authority to the state transcendental to the life-interest of the condemned. It does this precisely by delegating the decision to a group of people who have no more wisdom or authority over matters of life and death than does the state itself. How can "we, the people" make death a principle of our union as a people? Only by repudiating that unity, and the principle of government by the people, is the death penalty expressing the power of the state. And only as the expression of that power is the jury entrusted with the decision. The people cast the first stone, as it were, and so throw away the very meaning of their being a people at all.

I'm opposed to it because it only would work if murderers were capable of rational thought instead of being motivated by alcohol, drugs and testosterone.

Do away with it entirely and spend the savings in ways that prevent murders. Most of the expense is up front at the investigation and trial stage and serves only to let grandstanding prosecutors pander to the public by showing how tough they are.

The death penalty isn't even a blip on the criminal radar screen and hasn't been significant for over a century. During the last 100 years, the most people executed in one year was 198 in 1935. For a nation of 300 million people that is statistically zero and the 50 or so in 2007 is statistically 25% of zero.

The expense of keeping capital punishment is enormous. For example, the state of Maryland figures it has spent $37 Million EACH for the executions it has carried out since reinstating the death penalty. When you look at the costs, this is a criminal waste of the public's money.