A Society Unfit for the Death Penalty
I’ve read the stories. The horrific tales of helpless, innocent people — many of them women and children — tortured and killed by sociopaths in manners inconceivable to any decent human mind. As a society, we often attempt to understand these killers’ psychology, their impetus for mortal violence, but more often than not, we are left in a quandary submitting to the notion that such brutality is beyond the grasp of our moral understandings. What is not beyond our collective reasoning is the acknowledgment that these killers deserve the same fate as their victims — a sentence to death. It is not my opinion that this reflexive desire for definitive retribution demonstrates any moral shortcomings. People who commit crimes deserve a befitting punishment for their crimes and we, as a community of people, are responsible for delivering these punishments in the interest of protecting a moral harmony that upholds our communities. What is more, most of us understand that punishments cannot be delivered indiscreetly and that there needs to be a proportionality to our method — a killer of innocent children is more aptly punished by death than three months in jail. The dilemma we face in our country is not our innate idea of proportional punishment; it is the fact that our historically flawed and immensely complicated society, including our judicial system, makes it impossible to deliver death to those who deserve it in a consistently just manner.
Though it might be a matter of regional zeitgeists, how can we justify the disturbingly lopsided reality that roughly two percent of the counties in America are accountable for the majority of all executions? Can we justify it by pointing to the dictum that punishing brutal crimes like murder with death acts as the most effective and formidable deterrence? And therefore, should we naturally expect these regions with a high propensity to execute to also have the lowest rates of murders? The reality is quite the opposite. Since 1976, the South overwhelmingly leads the rest of the country in number of executions with 1147 (Texas and Oklahoma alone responsible for 639).[1] The murder rate (per 100,000 persons) in the South was 5.3 in 2013, the highest in the entire country.1 In contrast, the Northeast had the lowest number of executions in the country with 4, yet had the lowest murder rate with 3.5.1 So, as a matter of ultimate deterrence, the statistics fail to support what seems apparently intuitive.
The question that might remain in some people’s minds is, “What if we were able to prove a murderer’s guilt beyond the most reasonable doubts?” What if we fine-tune the standards of our criminal justice system and the way we prosecute? Will we, then, be able to bring the death penalty with indisputable confidence to murderers? Once again, this aspiration is not consistent with reality. Since 1973, 150 people on death row have been exonerated with evidence of their innocence.1 This is not a small number and to think that it is would be devaluing innocent life. And this 150 merely represents the cases that were actually given the chance to be re-evaluated and have light shone on the missteps of sloppy defending and corrupt prosecuting. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative portrayed several such cases through tense and heart wrenching accounts in his book, “Just Mercy.” Stevenson’s imperative work highlights the pathology in the criminal justice system, namely but not exclusive to the South, where trials play out like a lock and key situation — hastily convict a man to pacify the public (often with racial motives), secure the lock and throw away the key. It’s truly a buried alive type of scenario. Race and lower socioeconomic status are egregiously intertwined with the death penalty; to suggest otherwise is blatant ignorance of the facts. Multiple studies show that race of the accused and the victim play a prominent role in determination of the death penalty. In a study reviewing influence of race and the death penalty, 96% of the states revealed a pattern.1
The suggestion that the death penalty is unviable in this country is not an admission that our society is incapable of weighing and acknowledging crimes that ought to be punished by death. It is our proven history of judicial fallibility and deliberate unfairness with administering these punishments that render the death penalty not only unviable but also cruel and unusual.
