Post by Anja on Jun 15, 2006 16:04:19 GMT -5
Death to capital punishment
In administering the death penalty, the US has gone from the gallows to
the electric chair to lethal injection. This was done to avoid the
possibility of cruel and unusual punishment. But now the issue has arisen
whether those injections might also be cruel, due to the nature of the
procedure.
Some charged with carrying out this form of capital punishment have
refused to do so because of doubts about its humaneness.
Since there seems no end to finding the right way to administer capital
punishment - aside from the more basic considerations pro and con - why
not do away with it altogether?
Why should the US be one of the last in the Western world to abolish it,
as happened before with slavery? There are these contrary strains in the
make-up of our country - on the one hand high ideals enshrined in our
Constitution and held up to the world as a model, and on the other those
more brutish tendencies that many in the world view with incomprehension,
if not horror.
Abolishing the death penalty would eliminate a host of vexing questions.
Take its moral justification. Don't we always cite our Judeo-Christian
heritage? While the Mosaic law limits punishment to "an eye for an eye,"
in other places of the Hebrew scriptures, vengeance is considered God's
prerogative. The founder of Christianity taught that God is love and
enjoined his followers to practice forgiveness. He did predict hell for
certain offenses, but never condemned anyone himself.
The irreversibility of capital punishment is another strong argument
against it. Over the last few years, dozens of inmates on death row have
been exonerated by means of DNA evidence. How many innocent people were
executed before DNA testing became available is anybody's guess. But while
DNA is an innocent defendant's godsend, in most cases it isn't even a
factor.
As Voltaire remarked: "It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to
condemn an innocent one."
Then there is the issue of equal protection. According to statistics,
people who murder whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to
death than people who kill blacks. As we know, expensive lawyers are more
apt to get defendants off the hook, or keep them off the gurney, than
court-appointed defenders.
In fact, an article in the Atlantic Monthly exposed the negligence and
downright incompetence of public defenders in capital cases. What gives
one pause is that half of all federal-prison inmates have to rely on these
defenders. This proportion is even higher with state-prison inmates.
That prosecutors have suppressed exculpatory evidence or knowingly
presented false evidence, that witnesses have lied under oath, or that
crime labs have fabricated evidence, may not be common occurrences. But
all such misdeeds have deadly consequences when capital punishment comes
into play.
The question of money - that incarceration for life costs us more than
ending a life - reduces the discussion about life and death to a budget
issue.
Aside from the fact that, apparently, capital punishment costs more, the
tax money spent for running a prison system is the price we pay for
civilized society, to expand on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Finally, the argument that a murderer by his action has cheapened life and
therefore has forfeited his, cuts both ways since sparing his life shows
how much value we attach to it. And we should not underestimate what a
lifetime in prison without parole can do to the way a convicted felon
views his past.
Prisons aren't called penitentiaries for nothing - the word derives from
the Latin paenitentia, meaning remorse, or regret.
(source : The Daily News Transcript -- Peter Dreyer writes a regular
column for The Daily News Transcript)
In administering the death penalty, the US has gone from the gallows to
the electric chair to lethal injection. This was done to avoid the
possibility of cruel and unusual punishment. But now the issue has arisen
whether those injections might also be cruel, due to the nature of the
procedure.
Some charged with carrying out this form of capital punishment have
refused to do so because of doubts about its humaneness.
Since there seems no end to finding the right way to administer capital
punishment - aside from the more basic considerations pro and con - why
not do away with it altogether?
Why should the US be one of the last in the Western world to abolish it,
as happened before with slavery? There are these contrary strains in the
make-up of our country - on the one hand high ideals enshrined in our
Constitution and held up to the world as a model, and on the other those
more brutish tendencies that many in the world view with incomprehension,
if not horror.
Abolishing the death penalty would eliminate a host of vexing questions.
Take its moral justification. Don't we always cite our Judeo-Christian
heritage? While the Mosaic law limits punishment to "an eye for an eye,"
in other places of the Hebrew scriptures, vengeance is considered God's
prerogative. The founder of Christianity taught that God is love and
enjoined his followers to practice forgiveness. He did predict hell for
certain offenses, but never condemned anyone himself.
The irreversibility of capital punishment is another strong argument
against it. Over the last few years, dozens of inmates on death row have
been exonerated by means of DNA evidence. How many innocent people were
executed before DNA testing became available is anybody's guess. But while
DNA is an innocent defendant's godsend, in most cases it isn't even a
factor.
As Voltaire remarked: "It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to
condemn an innocent one."
Then there is the issue of equal protection. According to statistics,
people who murder whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to
death than people who kill blacks. As we know, expensive lawyers are more
apt to get defendants off the hook, or keep them off the gurney, than
court-appointed defenders.
In fact, an article in the Atlantic Monthly exposed the negligence and
downright incompetence of public defenders in capital cases. What gives
one pause is that half of all federal-prison inmates have to rely on these
defenders. This proportion is even higher with state-prison inmates.
That prosecutors have suppressed exculpatory evidence or knowingly
presented false evidence, that witnesses have lied under oath, or that
crime labs have fabricated evidence, may not be common occurrences. But
all such misdeeds have deadly consequences when capital punishment comes
into play.
The question of money - that incarceration for life costs us more than
ending a life - reduces the discussion about life and death to a budget
issue.
Aside from the fact that, apparently, capital punishment costs more, the
tax money spent for running a prison system is the price we pay for
civilized society, to expand on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Finally, the argument that a murderer by his action has cheapened life and
therefore has forfeited his, cuts both ways since sparing his life shows
how much value we attach to it. And we should not underestimate what a
lifetime in prison without parole can do to the way a convicted felon
views his past.
Prisons aren't called penitentiaries for nothing - the word derives from
the Latin paenitentia, meaning remorse, or regret.
(source : The Daily News Transcript -- Peter Dreyer writes a regular
column for The Daily News Transcript)