If you’re like me, your opposition to the death penalty doesn’t come naturally. I think there are plenty of crimes involving torture and murder for which the appropriate penalty is death. And, while I don’t think the death penalty is an effective deterrent to would-be criminals, I do think there are cases where public unrest and calls for justice can be assuaged by using it.
This is probably easier to see in some other countries, or by going back to the settling of this country when the task of getting the population to respect law enforcement and the justice system was often a challenge. The House of Saud understands the utility of public beheadings, but it would be wrong to understand every execution in history as an act of tyranny. Often, they have been precisely what the people demanded, and for very good cause. At other times, they have helped control a population that law enforcement (the lonely sheriff, bailiff, and judge, for example) didn’t have the resources to control in any other way.
But in modern America, we don’t need to worry ourselves that law enforcement doesn’t have the resources that they need. People might get mad if a murderer is spared the axe, but they won’t storm the municipal building and kill everyone inside. To the degree that people obey the laws, they do so more from fear of arrest than to avoid a hangman’s noose.
Basically, we have the luxury to do without the death penalty if we want to do without it.
And we should want to do without it, because in a situation where we don’t need it, it has too many drawbacks. The first is that it is an instrument of tyrannical population control in almost all the other countries that still use it.
The second is that you can’t set a wrongly imprisoned person free if you’ve executed him, and we do put innocent or wrongly convicted people on Death Row.
The third is that the system of justice has consistently had racially disparate results across the board, and that includes in what kind of people wind up on Death Row.
The fourth is that it’s less expensive to keep people alive than to go through all the appeals processes needed to kill them.
The fifth is that we haven’t discovered a humane way to execute people that people can agree to use, although the same basic tactics used in hospice care would work if you ask me.
The sixth and final reason is that the combination of all the previous factors combine to make the death penalty erosive of popular confidence in the justice system rather than serving to calm people, create law and order, and give room for the system to develop and flourish.
In any case, there is no good reason not to have a moratorium on the death penalty, so good for Governor Wolf.
