apital Punishment is one of the hottest issues ever.  Most everyone has an opinion on it, the US is one of the few "civilized" countries on earth that allows it, and it's fraught with problems in the best of cases.

Updates that discussed it in length are archived here.  More recent ones are on top.

October 20, 2003

First up we hear from PAZ, replying to my reply to his initial mail, which was posted in the blog last Thursday. I posted something saying I gleefully approved of a guy who attacked some home invasion people and killed three of the four invaders, and PAZ wrote in to say that he didn't agree with me and thought I was barbaric.  Here is his reply to my reply.

What I meant was American was the death punishment, which I feel is immoral and wrong and has no place in a democracy. obviously, some few million people on your side of the Atlantic disagrees =)

Talking to people that have formerly been criminals can change your perspective. people who commit evil crimes are not necessarily evil, even if the world would be much an easier place to live in had that been the case. It is of course hard to act rationally when someone has "raped your wife and beat your brother half to death", but i don't think revenge is very fruitful. and what, exactly, is the difference of killing someone before or after they end up in jail?

My impressions of the American law system is that it is more based on emotions and revenge than most other western countries. i don't have empiric evidence to back this up, but your jury system invites to such speculations; when you don't know law properly, you are more probable to rely on primitive emotions.

so, what I'm saying basically is that your law system sucks and that you should rely on it instead of making your own judgment. good, eh?

I'm not a big supporter of the death penalty myself, mostly since it's so flawed in practice.  I have written about this a few times in the past, one such update is archived on the appropriate article page. Over my life my opinion on this issue has changed.  When I was a teen I had no regard for human life, and couldn't imagine any reason to not kill evil criminals.  They'd killed other people, and probably would again, if given a chance.  Why waste tax dollars housing them for 50 years in prison when a quick bullet to the head would suffice?  In my college years I slid towards the side of mercy, and thought capital punishment was wrong, and that it was clearly unconstitutional, since if killing someone wasn't "cruel and unusual punishment" then what was? My opinion today is more ambivalent, and much better informed.

Here is my quick listing of problems with capital punishment:

The methods used aren't humane or 100% successful, though I'm sort of unconcerned by this since the people it's being used on should be so loathsome and vicious that a painful death is well within reasonable punishment for them.  Plus we can always devise better and quicker and more painless execution methods.

The bigger problem is that the death penalty is so arbitrarily-applied.  Many studies have shown that it's poor men, mostly minorities, who get the death penalty, especially if the person they killed was white.  Women or people who are better off or white people much less often get capital punishment.  It's not like such people get off free (well, not that often, OJ for instance) it's that prosecutors don't try to get them capital punishment since they don't think they'd be successful getting a jury to go along with that level of punishment.  Plus poor minority defendants have to rely on dumb court-appointed attorneys, rather than hiring themselves a shiny-suited weasel like Johnny Cochran.

Another big problem is that it takes so long. One possible good reason for capital punishment is that it would only be used on heinous criminals who would get life w/o possibility of parole, and logically, what's the benefit of keeping such an individual alive?  They've killed at least once, usually more than once, and almost always have rape, assault, armed robbery, and other such fun things in their past as well.  The problem is that what with all of the appeals and retrials and such, the usual death row stay is something like 7 years, if not longer, and it invariably ends up costing so much extra that it would have been better to just imprison the guy for life at the usual $50k or so a year it costs to house an inmate.

So the solution is just to cut down on the appeals process and the time allowed for that, right?

Well no, it's not.  Which leads to the biggest problem with capital punishment. The biggie is how often people are innocent of the crimes they are convicted of, and how many people in recent years have proven their innocence with new evidence, or by proving their trial was unfair, or by using DNA testing to prove their innocence.

So I don't support capital punishment in its current form, but I'm not opposed to it entirely; I just think it should be used for the worst offenders.  Serial killers or rapists or child molesters, or others who have proven time and again that they will hurt or kill other people, if they are left alive in society, and who have done such awful things that they don't deserve to live, even in the uncomfortable surroundings of a maximum security prison.

Of course the question is then; where do you draw the line?  Who decides who is so awful that they must be executed, and who decided that they are so obviously guilty that there's no reason to give them all of the appeals that would drag it out for years and years?  And I don't have an answer to that one; there will always be cases right on the edge of whatever arbitrary guidelines we draw up.

For another take on PAZ's first email and my reply to it, here's a mail from Ganitas.

About PAZ's email I have to agree with Flux. If someone comes into yout home and threatens the lives of you and your family you have every right to stop them, and you may kill if you must. Besides, do you really think that these people were kind, honorable individuals before this event. And consider the consequences. What if none of them were killed? THEY could have murdered the entire family. And how can you say 1 vs 3 is the upper hand? They could easily have whipped him in a gang fight. Killing one or even 2 of them would scare the other(s) off and prevent harm to the family.

Another thing about criminal handling. Most of these people (criminals) were brought up knowing no disipline or responsibility. Personally I favour much harsher punishment for criminals. Unfortunately disipline can only really be taught when young but still if people were aware of extreme punishment they might think about their actions *COUGH*.

Anyway about the daily blogs I have several complaints. Recently you have been writing a considerable quantity of pet related content and i must say it gets very boring when 1/4 of a blog is about how cute you cat(s) are. I can understand how you would want to write about your new pet but there is such a thing as to much of a good thing. Well ok that's only one complaint. I'm sure your euphoria will wear off with time...

I don't really agree with his whole Republican "criminals were raised evil and are beyond redemption" since as I said in my first reply to PAZ, I think the real focus of our anti-crime efforts needs to be in better education, job training for minor criminals, substance abuse assistance for society in general, etc.  I'm very liberal on the whole "go after the roots of the problem" issue, and idealistic enough to think that intelligent, concerted legislative effort could greatly improve the plight of the vast numbers of poor and desperate people in American society.  It's the ones who would still choose to be criminals and murderers even if they had other options who I think should be punished most harshly.

I didn't address the whole "capital punishment as a deterrent" issue above, since it's way too complicated. I've seen studies proving that the murder rate goes down or is lower when there is capital punishment in an area, and others showing that there is no effect.  I don't know if there is a definitive answer to that issue.  It is pretty clear that most of the Western world has a far lower crime and murder rate than the US, and that virtually all of the Western world has no death penalty, while the US does, so it's obviously not any sort of panacea for the problems it's meant to address.

My human insight shoots that issue down as well, since does anyone seriously think that a person planning a murder thinks, "I wouldn't do this if there were capital punishment, but since I'll just get life w/o possibility of parole I will."  I mean really; it's an absurd argument.  People who murder do it in a moment of fury or passion, or else cold-bloodedly, when they think they'll get away with it.  No one plans to get arrested and convicted of the crime, or they wouldn't do it at all, or would do it in another way that they thought they could get away with.

February 5, 2003

I'm not a real big fan of the death penalty, and there is news that Britain is angry about a man with dual citizenship being executed in Texas.  So I'm thinking that's too bad, and he was born in the UK, maybe they should have just given him life in prison.

He was arrested for taking part in a gang rape and then whipping Joyce Munguia, 18, two dozen times on the head and face with a chrome-plated motorcycle chain that he used as a belt.

His shoe prints were at the murder scene. Two other men, who insisted they did not take part in the slaying, pleaded guilty to rape charges. One received a 10-year prison term, the other 15 years.

Elliott had been sentenced to eight years in prison in 1982 for killing a man in a bar fight, but because of severe prison crowding he was released under mandatory supervision after 4 1/2 months.

The guy is a convicted murderer who should really have still been in prison, and he's out on parole, wearing a chrome plated motorcycle chain for a belt, takes part in a gang rape and then beats the woman to death with his belt.  You've got to be pretty damn opposed to capital punishment to not be quite happy this scumbag is gone.

June 26, 2002

The US Supreme Court has overturned one of their own decisions from just 12 years ago, by ruling that it is unconstitutional for convicted criminals to be sentenced to death by a judge, after being found guilty of murder by a jury.  This effectively invalidates the death sentences of 168 people.  None are going to be released or anything, they'll probably be switched to life in prison, with some being retried to some extent, with a jury deciding if they deserve life in prison or capital punishment.

The decision concerned instances in which juries determined defendants' guilt or innocence and judges alone decided their punishment. The court held that such sentences violate defendants' constitutional right to trial by jury, rejecting the argument that judges can be more evenhanded.

"The Sixth Amendment jury trial right ... does not turn on the relative rationality, fairness or efficiency of potential fact-finders," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for a majority that included an unusual alliance of conservative and liberal-leaning justices.

So this case has nothing to do with the court's approval of execution as a punishment; it's all about the unconstitutionality of a judge alone deciding if someone should get the death penalty or not, after a jury finds them guilty.  This is somewhat iffy, since in many/most other types of crime, the punishment is largely up to the judge, if you are found guilty by a jury.  So the court seems to be drawing a line between a judge picking 20 years vs. 40 years, and life in prison vs. death.  Their decision is immediate law, and is applied retroactively, so everyone on death row now who was put there by a judge's decision alone is somewhat in limbo, but none can be executed without a jury saying that's their fate.

So how about this issue in a more general sense?

Capital punishment is always a hot issue.  I've changed my opinion on it several times over my life, from an absent support as a kid, to opposition in my early twenties, to a sort of ambivalence at this point.  I can remember having to write some sort of a school paper about capital punishment when I was in maybe 8th or 9th grade, and I had no problem listing reasons people supported capital punishment, but couldn't think of any to oppose it, and had to ask my mom.  Her reasons were sort of squishy, as I would describe them.  She held that it encouraged violence in society, was morally wrong, etc.  I don't really agree with those, but I can see them as valid PoVs.

The reasons you most often see for capital punishment are numerous, and virtually all of them have an equally-effective opposing argument.

It would be wonderful if the threat of death were a deterrent to criminals, and that having a death penalty for murder actually made any difference in crime; but since it doesn't, the main reason to have such a punishment is sort of shot down.  People contemplating murder don't think, "I'll do it since I'll only get 50 years in prison, rather than the death penalty."  They think they'll get away with it, if they think at all.  Most don't, most are just random killings during robberies, or in the heat of passion, etc.

The other problem with capital punishment is all of the innocent people we've killed thus far.  Hundreds of people on death row have been exonerated, proved innocent by new technology (DNA testing, mostly), or new evidence in their cases, corrupt prosecutors or judges, etc.  Obviously if that many have been found innocent before they could be killed, lots of others would have been if they weren't dead already.  I don't really subscribe to the theory that killing even one innocent person is too heavy a price to pay, but I can see how some would make that argument, and we've indisputably killed some people who were innocent of the crime they died in punishment for.

There is also the argument that there's no point in giving someone life in prison w/o the possibility of parole, since why pay for them to live fifty years when they'll never, ever be free? It's wrong to put a price on human life, but if the someone is a vicious, dangerous criminal who has forfeit their right to live in a civilized society, why not just be rid of them?  Why keep them alive in prison forever?  The problem with that is that there is such a heavy additional burden of proof on capital crimes, years of appeals, expensive trials, lawyer fees, etc, that it's not really any cheaper to do all that to kill them, compared to a much cheaper trial and then years in prison.  And see the previous paragraph about the numerous wrongly-convicted people, if your suggestion is to remove the right to appeals.

There is another issue with it in the US, and that's the racial aspect of it.  I don't have exact figures in front of me, but as it works out, black men convicted of capital crimes are like 10x more likely to be sentenced to death than white men.  There are similar odds for rich vs. poor.  What it breaks down to is that the rich, or really anyone who isn't really poor, is virtually never sentenced to death, and if you are white you are very unlikely to get that sentence either.  If you are black and so poor that you can't afford a decent lawyer, you are really in deep shit.  Does the fact that black murderers get the death penalty much more often than white murderers mean that there should be no death penalty? It's certainly open to debate.  Another way to look at it is to say that at least some of the murdering scum are being executed, and that it's too bad that more whites who deserve it aren't getting it, but it's not like they're shoveling black car thieves into the abattoir while white rapists get a vacation to Hawaii.  How you look at it is up to you.

What I would do is have capital punishment, but use it only very sparingly, only for the most heinous crimes, mass murder, serial rapists, etc, and only in open and shut cases.  Of course the problem there is who determines if that case qualifies.  I'm not available to evaluate them personally, sorry.

Most of the rest of the Western world has abolished capital punishment, while truth and justice nations like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Russia, and China all use it as extensively as the US.  Puts us in interesting company, eh?

If you're reading this from outside the US, you can feel free to *tisk tisk* my typically-American blood-thirsty barbarism, in daring to think that some criminals actually deserve to die for their crimes.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.