My brother is a wingnut. Many years ago we were talking politics and I mentioned that I had changed my position on the Death Penalty. He responded, "So, you support it now?" As someone who does not carry a wingnut membership card, I must hold the opposite position. I told him, no, my new position is against it. Governor Pataki unseated Governor Cuomo largely on the death penalty issue. Colin Ferguson had shot up the Long Island Rail Road, and not only did I not want this to go to trial, I wanted to flick the switch on the chair! BTW, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to tackle him when he stops shooting to reload.
Now, I still discuss the death penalty with my brother on occasion. We never agree, but he does concede that I win one point- It's irreversible. He will not concede the likelihood that innocent men have been executed, and to date nobody who has been put to death has been adjudicated innocent. However, when Illinois issued its moratorium on the death penalty 13 death row inmates had been exonerated and 12 had been put to death so statistics are on my side (even if I have my numbers reversed).
Let's get a little wonky, and like John Oliver, I promise video of hamsters eating tiny burritos.
From a governmental perspective, there are exactly two reasons to have the death penalty- deterrence and justice. Over the years, many people have cited having the death penalty as a deterrent to some crimes. Among the crimes that it is supposed to deter is terrorism. Dwell on that one for a moment, I'm going to dissuade you from martyring yourself because if I catch you, I'm going to make a martyr of you. In any event, statistics do not bear out the deterrence argument. Violent crimes are not committed in greater numbers in states without capital punishment.
So let us talk about justice. In the wake of yet another botched execution by lethal injection, this one taking nearly two hours in Arizona, a judge not connected with the case suggested that we should just go back to the firing squad. Death would occur with less suffering he reasoned, and it would remove the artifice that executions could be done humanely.
When witnesses to the execution talked about how Joseph Wood suffered for nearly 2 hours, his victims' families talked about how that was nothing to the suffering he inflicted. I don't pretend for a second to understand how they feel. However, wanting Wood to suffer is revenge, not justice. Revenge is not the province of government. We do not try to carry out executions humanely because we feel for the criminal. We do it because it speaks to our humanity.
The guillotine, and the noose were executions held in the public square. As Rachel Maddow pointed out, hangings were a Roman Holiday. The firing squad, while not as public was clearly violent. The electric chair and gas chamber created some distance between the executioner and the executed. Lethal injection was supposed to sanitize it even further. Make it clean, neat, and humane.
Stephen Colbert would tell us that since the pharmaceutical companies who made the drugs that were explicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court will no longer supply them, that the market has spoken and the death penalty should be unconstitutional on economic grounds. When judges in Oklahoma tried to stay executions to determine whether the inmate had a right to know what drugs were going to be used, the governor threatened to impeach the judges. We all know how that turned out.
Why the rush to execute? Since there are no do overs, why not take every step necessary to insure we get it right? There's the old adage of seeing 100 guilty men go free if it prevents one innocent man from going to jail. If one man on death row dies before we kill him is that so bad? And now, as promised, hamsters eating burritos:
http://www.youtube.com/...