Pragmatic Reasons to be Anti-Death Penalty

The State of Tennessee recently executed a man after refusing to review DNA evidence that may have exonerated him.

I am a conservative and I am opposed to the death penalty. I don't find those things to be at all in conflict, either. To my way of thinking, there are plenty of great reasons to question the use of the death penalty and very few in favor.

Support for the death penalty usually stems from one of the following:

• It will deter criminals better than a prison sentence alone will.
• Certain kinds of criminals deserve the death penalty. (Sometimes "justice requires it")
• There's no sense in paying to keep someone alive for 50+ years just so they can die in prison.
• We feel better knowing that there's no chance that the criminal will kill again.

For starters, the death penalty is no greater a deterrent than life in prison. Murder is not often committed by people who spend time carefully considering the ramifications of their decisions and many (if not most) murderers assume that they will never be caught. Were the death penalty a real deterrent, we would see murderers committing their crimes in greater numbers in states in which the death penalty is not used. Unfortunately states with the death penalty usually have higher murder rates.

It tends to be cheaper to keep someone in prison for the remainder of their life than to follow the legal process required of the death penalty. Though it seems counter-intuitive, we could keep more criminals behind bars (instead of letting them out at their first parole hearing) if we did away with the executions all together.

Executed murderers never kill again. This much is true. But if we replace the death penalty with the equivalent of a lifetime of solitary confinement (or even a lifetime of sitting on death row), we can be reasonably sure that those people will never kill again either.

Some will argue that in some cases, justice is not served unless the criminal is killed. But murdering the murderer does not bring the victim back. It may make the victim's loved ones feel better, but does that improve or degrade the moral fiber of the country? Does our society's ringing endorsement of murder as punishment contribute to our desensitization toward violence? Is it possible that we could gain any ground by simply saying that, categorically, killing is wrong (for the sake of discussion let's exempt war and self-defense) and that we as a society will tolerate it neither by our citizens nor by our government? If there's even a chance, it would probably serve us well to choose not to indulge our revenge instinct.

And, really, that's what most death penalty arguments come down to. Should we, or should we not validate and encourage our natural lust for revenge? The costs and benefits here are difficult to measure and largely personal, but let's take a closer look at the biggest problem with our current system: killing people who really shouldn't be killed.

One thing that all of those statements assume is that the person convicted of murder is not only the correct person, but that our opinion of their culpability for their actions will not change in the future. It's not always possible to be certain that we have the right guy, and despite strict rules of evidence, burdens of proof, and layers upon layers of review, we still manage to execute the wrong people. This is not a failing of our justice system except insomuch as it is not perfect. Unfortunately, the justice system will never be perfect.

From that perspective, the problem with the death penalty is that when it is administered wrongly it cannot be rectified. If we sentence a man to life in prison and then 25 years later we realize that he was not guilty, we can do nothing to give the man his 25 years back, but we can release him and he can go on with what's left of his life. This may be a small consolation to the person who wasted away into a hollow shell of a man while our justice system let him rot in prison, but it is a consolation that the wrongly executed would have dearly appreciated.

More than just erring on the side of caution with regard to who we choose to punish, it is worth considering that we might not always feel the same way about a crime. Prior to years and years of research in the fields of psychology and sociology certain kinds of mental defects and diseases were ignored and irrelevant to a person's defense. A killing committed today by a person who has a genuine mental illness can result in forced treatment and is a sign that our society is gaining greater nuance in its theory of culpability.

I used to support the death penalty. I disguised a lust for revenge as a practical concern over finances and safety. When those reasons were exposed to me as being faulty I had to think more carefully about why I thought it was a good idea and I've become convinced that our society gains very little from adding to the death toll and does so at great expense, in all manners of speaking.

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