In recent months, the death penalty system has come under close scrutiny. This was highlighted yesterday when the Justice Department released a report showing that minorities were extremely over-represented as defendants for whom prosecutors sought the death penalty. Only 20% were white. Two days earlier, the Dallas Morning News reported a study in Texas showing that many death row defendants were represented by incompetent court-appointed lawyers. Other reports recently have shown that many innocent people were wrongly convicted and then put to death.
Such gross problems in the system have prompted many to call for a moratorium on the death penalty, until the system can be fixed. Many politicians have expressed concern for the system. President Clinton, through a spokesman, stated yesterday that those "who support capital punishment have a special obligation to do what we can to ensure that the death penalty is administered fairly." And Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) stated, "The way the death penalty is applied is a travesty, and we have no excuses not to fix it."
However, these men seem to miss the larger picture. The death penalty, by its very nature, can never be fair. Even if you somehow managed to take racism, injustice, and unfair trials out of the system, putting a criminal to death by the state still remains both disgusting and illogical.
The main reason to have a death penalty, we claim, is to show how wrong it is to take a life. But the very execution of a death sentence turns us into that which we oppose. When the state kills a person in the name of all the people of the state, it ironically brings those people down to the same level of the murderer. It equalizes us too much and turns us all into barbarians.
Proponents state that killing a murderer is "justice" and "retribution" for the victim's family. But since the eye-for-an-eye philosophy (which "leaves everybody blind," according to Martin Luther King) does not produce anything positive -- only two negatives -- it is really revenge, not justice. And revenge is something based on emotion, not logic. Law, of course, is supposed to be based in logic, but these laws are written by politicians who like to pander to bloodlust, fear, and other emotions of the public who they hope will re-elect them.
Proponents also argue that the death penalty can serve as a deterrent against more murders. One might logically assume that a potential murderer might think to himself, "I might get the death penalty if I murder someone, so I better not do it." However, this logic is flawed. The majority of murders are not planned but committed spontaneously in a fit of passion and/or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. A spontaneous act cannot be deterred, because there is no forethought. And as for murders that are carefully planned, part of the plan is to avoid being caught, so any deterrent therefore fails to deter.
Statistics prove that the death penalty is not a deterrent, because states which do not have a death penalty have a lower percentage of murders. For example, between 1990 and 1994, the homicide rate in Iowa and Wisconsin, which do not have the death penalty, was half that of Illinois which, at the time, did have the death penalty. (Interestingly, a few months ago the Republican governor of Illinois suspended the death penalty in wake of recent reports that innocent people were being unjustly convicted.)
What may be even more alarming to death penalty proponents are statistics which seem to prove the opposite. For example, in 1990, when the death penalty was reintroduced in Oklahoma, the murder rate actually went up. Where is the logic in this? Well, it would seem that, at least according to an article in Criminology, people were more likely to settle disputes lethally, influenced by a culture which "return[ed] to the exercise of the death penalty."
In other words, the state was leading by example, and setting the cultural tone. If the state could solve its problems by killing people it didn't like, then people felt they could do that too.
I believe that our country needs to re-evaluate the concept of the death penalty, not the little details which make it look more ugly than we want it to. Trying to fix the racist and procedural problems will not fix the larger problem of a culture that worships violence. Killing murderers will not bring victims back, nor will it make us a more just society. All it does is give in to our violent nature and feed our bloodlust.
And that dehumanizes us all.