You Should Oppose Capital Punishment, Whoever You Are

Capital punishment has been in the news quite a bit recently. The Supreme Court decided to uphold Oklahoma's risky lethal injection protocol, and Nebraska decided to dump the death penalty entirely (unless the state's bloodthirsty governor has his way).

If you support the death penalty, you shouldn't. No matter who you are, it's a bad idea, and below I will explain why. First, I want to establish my own bias. Formerly, I supported the death penalty. Now, I do not. I have worked on capital appeals for the last two summers for my summer internships (I am a law student), and along with the War on Drugs, I believe that capital punishment is the most inhumane and stupid policy our government prosecutes. I should also note that I am not a bleeding heart liberal. I think there are people who deserve to die. The question is, who should make that determination? Below, I will describe different types of people and ideologies. If you'd like, you can skip to the description that most closely fits you and read why you should oppose capital punishment. Maybe, like I was, you are a mix of several different positions, in which case, please read the whole thing. People's lives literally depend on the American public knowing the facts of the death penalty.

The Death Penalty Saves Lives By Deterring Crime

This is the most common canard thrown out by pro-death penalty advocates, and it has a great deal of surface appeal. What I mean by that is that if you only think about it momentarily, it makes sense that threatening people with execution would keep them from committing crimes. Incidentally, this is the horse Nebraska's pro-death penalty people will ride. It's the 'ol "agree with us or you will die" argument, which was also used to justify the Iraq War and the CIA's torture program operated from 2002 until 2008 (if you haven't read the Senate report on their investigation of this program, you should). Here's the problem. The death penalty does not deter crime, and you shouldn't expect it to either.

Capital punishment in the United States is only used for first-degree murder (or in some states, felony murder that is legally equivalent but morally miles apart). It is unconstitutional, as of 2008, to use it in any other circumstances. When someone murders someone else with what the law calls "malice aforethought" (they planned it in advance-ish), that person is not banking on getting caught. This is actually a general problem with deterring crime. It is shocking the number of criminals who don't know a thing about the law. But let's take the example of the totally rational first-degree murderer who is weighing all of his (it is almost always a man) options.

If you commit a crime that is eligible for the death penalty, your options for punishment are going to be death or life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Most people outside of prison do not care whether or not they serve LWOP or are executed. Why would they? Almost everything I want to do in my life is impossible if I am locked up in prison or if I am dead, so there's little difference to me between the two. In order for capital punishment to deter crime, you would have to have a potential killer who thinks to himself, "I really want to murder my cheating wife, and I don't mind if I spend the rest of my life in a maximum security prison, I just really don't want to be lethally injected." That's not a very likely scenario.

The other problem with deterrence is that most people who are sentenced to death in America die in prison of natural causes anyway because the appeals process takes so long (more on this later).

Are there ways that the death penalty could be structured to deter crime? Yes. We could use it as a punishment for property crimes. Nobody sane is going to spray paint a wall if he thinks he's gonna get the needle for it. The cost-benefit just isn't there. However, do we really want to execute vandals? Also, LWOP would almost certainly deter vandals just as well.

The Death Penalty Saves Money, and I Don't Want to Pay to Feed and House Scum

This is another common argument that cannot survive deep thought. Again, on the surface, this makes a lot of sense. If someone is in prison for life, why wouldn't that cost more money than killing him (we'll assume for the moment that killing people to save money isn't more than a bit creepy)? The answer is Due Process. In America, we accept the fact that sometimes trials don't go well, and sometimes juries make mistakes (and by "we" I mean everyone but Justice Antonin Scalia). Sometimes prosecutors are corrupt, and sometimes defense attorneys are incompetent, asleep, or drunk during the trial. That is why we allow appeals. Unfortunately, the appeals process is VERY expensive for the taxpayer because almost nobody who is sentenced to death has the money to afford an attorney. The Constitution requires that someone sentenced to death get an attorney (Sixth Amendment) and get appeals, and those appeals will be paid for by the taxpayer.

Why? Because innocent people have been sentenced to death. Hundreds of them. And that only includes those we know of as a result of DNA testing, blatant misconduct, or recanted testimony. Who knows how many people we've killed who were innocent but whose crimes involved no DNA evidence or recanted testimony. Courts are very stingy about overturning convictions. Appeals are the only way to reduce the number of innocents we kill as long as we insist on killing people at all.

Therefore, if you want to make the death penalty cheap, you have to reduce the access to appeals of those sentenced to die, which will indisputably lead to more innocent people being murdered by their own government. Even if you decided to shoot defendants out back immediately after their sentencing (which would maximize the number of innocent people executed), the trial itself often will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars because, again, the State will be paying all of  the legal costs, and death cases are more complicated and take much longer than normal trials. It is also important to consider that death trials take plea bargaining off the table because very few people will plead guilty when doing so will get them executed anyway. No matter how guilty you are, if you are facing a death penalty sentence, you might as well roll the dice with the jury and see what happens.

All of this expense might be justified if capital punishment were saving lives, but as I've explained above, it isn't.

I'm a Christian, and My Faith Demands Capital Punishment to Fulfill Justice

No. Jesus (you know, god in human form) had the opportunity to participate in an execution and declined. He told the crowd that anyone who was without sin could go ahead (keep in mind Jesus is the only man who lived without sin according to your religion) and throw the first stone. The Bible specifically calls those who deny their own sin fools. So logically, if you are a Christian you must acknowledge that you are not without sin, and consequently, if you follow Jesus' example and words, you cannot support capital punishment.

Yes, it's true that the Old Testament records that the Jews were told to use capital punishment. You know what else they were told to do? Avoid shellfish and wearing of clothes of mixed fabrics. Jesus trumps Jewish history if you are a Christian. So eat that lobster and stop supporting state-sponsored murder.

Monsters Just Deserve To Die

This one is the hardest to argue with. If you think that the death penalty is right because it is right, your argument is circular (and therefore bad) but not easy to contest. However, even if you think that people sentenced to death are monsters and "deserve" to die in the interest of retributive justice, there are some things you should still consider.

First, juries mess up. The person you think is a "monster" might be innocent. Henry McCollum was on death row in North Carolina for around 30 years, and lots of people thought he was a rapist who brutally killed a young girl (I will spare you the facts of her death because they will ruin your day). However, he was released and pardoned by the very conservative governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, because DNA testing later confirmed that another man (already in prison for raping and killing another girl) was almost certainly responsible. Henry is mentally challenged, and the only evidence against him had been a coerced confession. If Henry had been on death row in Texas, a state that prides itself on how fast it murders its own people, he would almost certainly have been killed.

But let's assume that juries always get it right or that you don't care about innocents being killed by the government sworn to protect them because you are just that bloodthirsty (if this is the case, you may have more in common with those you want to execute than you should be comfortable with). A common question asked by pro death penalty people is: what if it were your daughter who was raped and murdered? Well, I'd like to ask a return question. What if it were your daughter who was convicted of murdering two kids during an armed robbery gone bad and was sentenced to die? Would you want your daughter executed?

The core of support for the death penalty is an inability to empathize with our fellow humans. You wouldn't want your kid to be executed because you know her. You understand her complexities. Well, guess what. Every person has complexities, and the majority of people on death row who are guilty of their crimes are not bloodthirsty psychopaths. They are mostly all people who made really awful decisions before their brains were fully formed (meaning they were younger than 25 when they committed their crimes). Many of them grew up in environments that make Hell look like a playground.

So here is my challenge to anyone who supports the death penalty. Write to a death row inmate; not out of prurient interest, but from a desire to know what you are talking about. Learn about him and then decide for yourself. When you see him for who he is, and you are still willing to tell him to his face (or even in a letter) that you think he is scum and deserves to die, then so be it. But I am willing to bet that you, like everyone I know who actually knows what they are talking about on this issue, will decide that people are people, and we shouldn't be putting down our fellow men like rabid dogs because they made mistakes, no matter how terrible those mistakes were. Every person is more than his or her worst moment. And even if you don't believe that, who are you to decide who should live and who should die?

I'm A Conservative Who Believes in Small Government Except When the Government Wants to Kill Someone...

If you don't see why this is a logically incoherent and stupid argument, then I can't help you. No true conservative can possibly support giving the incompetent State the power over life and death. You don't think the feds can pick a solar power company to give subsidies to, but you think they can devise a system that fairly kills people? C'mon.

Closing Argument

Because of the way the death penalty is administered in America, the average juror on a death penalty jury is very likely to also be someone who thought George W. Bush would make a good president or who thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth or who thinks the world is 10,000 years old. Are you really comfortable giving those people the power over life and death? I'm not.