I know she has her detractors, but Hillary Clinton has had a long and distinguished political career and seems to be on the cusp of having it culminate with the ultimate triumph and at least one term in the Oval Office. Yet, I’m still waiting for her to appear on the ramparts anywhere rather than showing up once all the hard work has been done and the streets appear safe.
“I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states,” Clinton said.
As any thinking person knows, the case for abolishing the death penalty does not rest on the idea that no one ever commits egregious crimes. There’s always a legitimate moral argument that someone who takes a life doesn’t deserve to go on living themselves. But what a person in some sense “deserves” is not the point.
If you cannot humanely execute the deserving without doing so selectively, or you can’t avoid executing the undeserving, then you should err on the side of showing mercy to the deserving.
There’s another whole moral case to make about who has the authority to make life and death decisions, and an even stronger one (in my opinion) about the death penalty being detrimental to the morals of the people who have to carry out the sentence. But these are supplemental to the core issue, which is that we can’t devise a system that doesn’t make mistakes and we can’t devise a system that provides an fair and equitable distribution of justice.
We ought to abolish the death penalty for a host of reasons, but the most important one is that we neither want to execute the innocent nor only those who are the least sympathetic or have the least adequate legal representation.
The worst justification for the death penalty is that some people deserve to die. We all know this. Yet, the vast majority of the world has rightly concluded that the state shouldn’t be vested with the authority or responsibility to give those people what they deserve.
I can’t escape the idea that Clinton will come around to this view as soon as the American people first lead the way. I’m tired of watching this pattern repeat itself.
