This is a new series of articles I'm hoping to write, detailing why I feel that the left is correct on a variety of issues. The second such issue I will be examining is one that many people seem to be misinformed about, and so I invite you to join me beyond the jump for an examination of... THE DEATH PENALTY AND YOU.
There are a lot of myths circulating about capital punishment, and as with many issues, these myths are used as justifications for the penalty's use. I will examine these issues as well as a few others, in my attempt to explain why I feel that the Left is right on the death penalty.
In 1972, the SCOTUS delivered a ruling that declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional under existing laws that governed it, conceding in its judgment that 'the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty... Constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments.' While the politics have changed and this ruling has been reversed, the facts remain the same - and the statement issued by the court is no less true now than it was 36 years ago. We will examine, in detail, why this is so.
The Death Penalty is neither effective nor sensible as a deterrent to violent crime. Most advocates for capital punishment are very committed to the myth of deterrence, but time and again studies have proven it to be completely ineffective in such a role.
To realize why requires an examination of the nature of serious and violent crimes, like murder (and murder is an effective guideline to put forth - since 1930, 99% of all executions have been for this crime). Murder (and other crimes like it) is either pre-meditated, or it is not. If it is pre-meditated, the criminal takes every precaution possible in an effort to avoid leaving behind evidence, because they do not want to be caught. If a criminal is entirely convinced that he will elude capture, no amount of threatening his life is going to dissuade him otherwise.
In the case of crimes without pre-meditation, the issue is even clearer. Crimes of passion are committed in moments of overwhelming emotion, and/or (in many cases) while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. If one is not thinking rationally or clearly when one commits murder, it is a hard thing to argue that one is going to remember the concept of 'capital punishment' as a deterrent to action in that particular moment.
The deterrence argument grows ever more toothless when one examines a variety of data related to the issue, collected from states that allow capital punishment and from states that do not. It is a recognized fact that death-penalty states do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than those that have abolished the penalty's use. During the 1980s, states that regularly practiced the death penalty had an average annual rate of 7.5 homicides per 100,000 population, and those without the penalty averaged 7.4 such homicides in the same period. This is not a significant enough difference to argue that the death penalty increases crime, but there is simultaneously proof that it does nothing to lessen it. This holds true in neighbouring states as well. If you examine Michigan (without a death penalty) and Indiana (which has one), the rates of homicide are virtually the same (with Michigan often having fewer such killings than its death-dealing counterpart).
The last nail in the deterrence coffin is an utter lack of consistency in application. In order for a deterrent like the death penalty to be truly effective, it has to be not only applied consistently, but also promptly. It cannot be argued in any jurisdiction that such a penalty is ever carried out in a 'prompt' or timely manner, and the indisputed fact is that of all criminal homicide convictions, only 2% of these (roughly one in 50!) involve the criminal being sentenced to death.
Some argue that killing murderers is the only safeguard to society - that if they were released, they would simply kill again. While homicidal recidivism does in fact exist, it is not particularly common. After the Supreme Court decision overturned the use of capital punishment in 1972, 553 prisoners on death row had their sentences reduced to life in prison. In all of that time since, only 6 have committed another murder, and in four of those cases, it was discovered that the man imprisoned was in fact innocent of all charges against him.
The Death Penalty is completely unfair and applied in an abitrary, classist, and often racist, way. Numerous studies have consistently shown that minority groups and the poor are in fact the most likely to be sentenced to death in this country, and this is particularly true of blacks in the South. Between 1930 and 1990, 4016 people were executed in our country - and 53% of these were black. During the same period, African Americans made up only 12% of the nation's population. This racism does not extend solely to the supposed criminal - but also to the victim. Statisical studies have repeatedly shown that the average odds of receiving a death sentence was almost 5 times higher if the victim was white.
While women do not make up a large portion of death-row inmates (they are only 1% of those serving such sentences during the early 1990s), a third or more of such women are in that position because they killed men who had victimized them with years of violent abuse. It can hardly be considered fair that a woman is sentenced to die by the hand of the state when she was herself simply responding to violence perpetrated against her by the supposed victim.
More stunningly to me is the fact that approximately ninety percent of those on death row could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried. Ninety percent! Justice William O. Douglas of the SCOTUS himself noted, "One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society."
Errors are inevitable. Unlike any other punishment that could be meted out by modern justice, the death penalty is irreversable. The Marquis de Lafayette famously said after the French Revolution, "I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me." Indeed, since 1900, there have been on average 4 innocent people imprisoned for murder every year. Who knows how many of these innocent men and women were themselves put to death before the truth could be discovered - after all, once a man is dead, few people will bother themselves with proving his innocence afterward.
It doesn't make sense economically. The last issue I'd like to address is one that should have impact on the Right. Commonly, death-penalty advocates will claim that life imprisonment is not a fair burden to put on taxpayers. The truth of the matter, demonstrated multiple times, is that life imprisonment is a great deal cheaper than capital punishment is.
A murder trial almost invariably takes much longer when the death penalty is on the table than when it is not. Such costs of litigation are invariably laid upon the taxpayer's shoulders, and the only way to limit such costs is to hobble our justice system, and that is an unacceptable solution to all but the most totalitarian. In Maryland, a study was done about this very subject, and it was discovered that a death penalty case costs 42 percent more than the same case stripped of the possibility of that punishment. Numerous states have, in fact, thought better on re-introducing capital punishment after they examined the financial costs.
In short, the death penalty is an antiquated horror-show that should be relegated to the dustbin of history, and the best way to make sure this happens is to be informed about the truth. Advocates for capital punishment rely on false figures and urban myths to buoy their claim, and if more people knew the truth about the subject, it wouldn't be a debate at all. Most of the western world outlawed state-murder many years ago, and we are lagging behind where once we led - in the field of human rights.