The Morality of Executions

In the wake of the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh yesterday, Ceej and Rob Rummel-Hudson wrote eloquent entries about their opposition to the death penalty. And the morality of a society which carries out the death penalty is naturally on the minds of many thinking people in this country right now.

It's an issue on which I differ from my liberal brethren in some rather peculiar ways.

I don't really oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, you see. I don't think it's immoral for our government to execute certain killers. I also don't think that by doing so (as Ceej says) it turns us, the citizens, into killers-by-proxy, because the government doesn't represent everyone, it represents a certain fraction of people, as more-or-less encoded in our voting laws.

Basically, I think the government has the right to execute people for the exact same reasons it has the right to tax people: (1) Because it can, and (2) Because there's some societal benefit to it. (Those benefits are arguably fairly modest: They eliminate any risk that the killer will escape to kill again, and they eliminate the tremendous expense of incarcerating someone for the balance of his life, an expense which is not necessarily measured purely in money.)

My opposition to capital punishment is characteristically pragmatic: Taking a human life is a weighty undertaking (partly because the taking of a human life should never be belittled, and partly because it's one of the few forms of criminal punishment which cannot be undone or cancelled later), and I don't believe that our justice system is competent enough to decide who is "worthy" of being executed.

February's Scientific American contained some interesting data on capital punishment:

1. 68% of death penalty cases were found to have serious error on appeal, compared to 15% for non-capital cases.
2. 5% (five percent!) of those convicted are later found to be innocent, and at least 23 people since 1900 have been mistakenly executed.
3. Capital punishment is not a deterrent: The homicide rate is higher in states with the death penalty than without (9.3 murders per 100,000 people vs. 9.0).

Shoving aside that the justice system is very heavily weighted (like everything else in our society) in favor of rich people, I think it does a fairly good job at adjudicating the law for a wide range of cases where the acceptable error margin is large. But I think it does a poor job at properly sentencing people to jail for long periods of time, and an abysmal job of sentencing people to death. Until and unless we can improve it substantially, capital punishment should be banned in the United States.

(The US is also a socially crippled nation in that it places a higher priority on removing criminals - even offenders who commit low-level crimes - from society than on rehabilitating them and making them useful contributors to society. The fact that one out of every 300 people in the US is in jail is a staggering and dismaying statistic. But that's a whole 'nother entry.)

I do agree with CJ that our method of executions is wrong. Executing someone should not be sanitized for the public; the public should see what their government is doing to another human being, even if he does deserve death. I'd be in favor of, for instance, beheadings by guillotine in Times Square. Or on the White House lawn. With full network coverage, during prime time. If society is going to execute people, we should be willing to watch the deed as a society, and take proper responsibility for it.

(Our current lethal injection scheme is so typically American: "I want this dirty deed done, but I don't want to do it, and I don't want to see it. Just tell me when it's over." Like our current President, Americans are such hypocritical wimps.)

Did McVeigh deserve death? Good question. I don't have the answer. He apparently confessed to doing the deed, although I put close-to-zero stock in confessions. People confess to things for very strange reasons, and I don't believe confessions are an accurate measure of culpability. If I ever serve on a criminal jury, I'm unlikely to believe in a confession unless the prosecution can demonstrate that the accused had no ulterior motive to confess in the event that he's innocent. (Boy, that would put a peculiar spin on the trial!)

I don't really believe McVeigh was evil. I think he was a lunatic, behaving as he did for irrational reasons which we may never be able to fathom. (This alone seems like a good reason to disregard his confession.) Did he really do it? Maybe. If he did, then I'd agree that he deserves to be executed, because of the heinous nature of his crime, and the likelihood that he might do something like it again. Imprisoning him for life has no value.

But I don't really know that he did it. And as such, I don't think we (read: the government) can reasonably condemn him to death.

Of course, in this case it's now a moot point.

My position as a liberal is pretty strange. I believe strongly in the value of progressive taxation (we should eliminate the sales tax and have only taxes that tax income, including inheritance) and of social spending (I'm a "New Deal" Democrat). I'm quite radical (for the U.S.) on the subject of abortion (I believe a woman should be able to get an affordable, safe abortion at any time during a pregnancy, and for any reason, including "she just wants to"). I believe strongly in gun control.

On the other hand, I'm not morally opposed to the death penalty, and I'm not much of an environmentalist by some standards (I don't put a lot of stock in global warming, and I find it a bit dismaying that nuclear power is in such disfavor). I have a number of libertarian attitudes, although I've found that the basics of libertarian thought justify liberal economic and social behavior when taken to a reasonable conclusion, which is something I'm sure few - if any - libertarians would agree with.

On an objective scale my philosophies are a pretty strange mix in this regard. Though by US standards, I'm clearly pretty far out on the left wing. But then, the US is a very conservative nation.