I catch a lot of flak over the fact that I am opposed to the death penalty.
Sometimes I think this is simply a consequence of living in Mississippi where people elevate the first day of hunting season to the status of Christmas and cherish their right to bear arms as much as they do their children. The idea of killing, and especially killing in the name of “justice,” is in our blood.
Then again, sometimes I think that people just want to argue, which is a huge waste of time. Arguing for argument’s sake does nothing for you, your opponent or anyone else for that matter. A nice, civilized debate though, I can very much enjoy. Which is why I pose to you, dear reader, the following question: What is so inherently wrong with my opinion that we should not allow our government to kill people that society has deemed unfit to live?
Some people will say, “What if someone murdered your family member?” Well, that would be terrible. I cannot imagine the pain and anger that I would feel toward the person who did that. I know that I cannot. If this happened then I would probably be more inclined to say, “Yes, stick that sucker in the electric chair and fry ’em,” but I would be acting on my emotions. If I were a family member or close friend of the victim, should I be allowed to sit on the jury trying the accused? Of course not! I would be biased. Does it not make much more sense to apply the standards that I adhere to when I am level-headed and have full use of a somewhat unbiased mind?
Others might say, “Yeah, but who wants to pay for the life-imprisonment of a ‘guilty as sin’ murderer instead of killing him and easing the burden on the state?” All I can say to that is, check the numbers; you might be surprised. Keeping prisoners in prison for life is actually quite a bit cheaper than keeping them on death row and executing them at the hands of the state. I am not even going to touch the fact that a good portion of the most ardent supporters of the death penalty would say that human life is priceless, except to say, well, is it or isn’t it? You tell me.
The cost of sentencing a person to death is increased greatly by the extensive appeals process. While many people advocate shortening the process, hardly anyone would support eliminating the appeals process altogether. This makes me believe that there is something deeper here. There is something under the surface that I think most people want to pretend does not exist.
Perhaps within us all is a piece of guilt about the fact that we as a nation execute people. The amount of guilt that each person carries is variable, but somewhere, embedded deep within every person’s mind, is the fear that we are sending the wrong people to the chair.
Why else do we allow the appeals process to drag out forever? If we all truly believed that every person convicted and sentenced to death for murder was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, then why are we not demanding that the government end their lives immediately? Why allow for appeals at every turn of the law? Is it because we have the potential to execute innocent people by error of the justice system? We have done it in the past. Who is to say that it will not happen again?
Two independent studies conducted in the late ’80s found that 350 people were sentenced to death during the 20th century that were later proven innocent (exoneration came a little too late for at least 23 of the wrongly convicted). It would certainly ease my conscience to know that the wrongly-convicted were sitting in their jail cell when finally exonerated instead of laying dead in the morgue. After all, what good does exoneration bring to a corpse?
If you want to believe that killing people in the name of justice is a good and honorable thing to do, then by all means, proceed. I am not really doing anything to stop you. I am simply stating that in this day and age when every industrialized nation in the world (save for Japan and the U.S.) has taken this option off the table, then maybe it’s time to come up with something new.
Maybe some of you will feel the same way and maybe the rest of you will quit harassing me for not wanting lots of people to continue dying at the hands of society.