The Other Dead Man

“Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how, in the presence of thousands of spectators, they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defense of that kind of action, and I knew it was done deliberately and intentionally, but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defense of capital punishment are wicked nonsense, and that however many people may combine to commit murder – the worst of all crimes – and whatever they may call themselves, murder remains murder, and that this crime had been committed before my eyes, and I by my presence and non- intervention had approved and shared in it.” – Leo Tolstoy, from ‘What Then Must We Do?’

Troy Davis was executed on the evening of September 21st, 2011.  He was probably innocent, the victim of a judicial and bureaucratic system that seems incapable of halting the slow but inexorable machinery of death once the switch has been thrown and the process has been set in motion.  This travesty of justice has been widely commented upon and has inspired widespread outrage and horror, which is as it should be.

Another man, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was put to death by the state of Texas that same day, within hours of Troy Davis.  This other execution has inspired little comment and less outrage. Brewer’s guilt was beyond question and his crime was horrific – he, along with two accomplices, chained a live man, James Byrd, to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged him for several miles along a rough country road until he was dead and most of the flesh had been stripped from his body.  It’s almost impossible to imagine how a man can do this to another man, and you’d think that only an insane person, or one driven by the desire to avenge some equally horrific crime, could be capable of such brutality.  And yet it turns out that Brewer was just a racist out for some kind of sociopathic joy-ride.  The mind boggles, and recoils, as the stomach turns.

It’s easy to oppose the execution of an innocent, or probably innocent, or even just possibly innocent, man.  It’s less easy to oppose the execution of a sadistic bigot who is unquestionably guilty of a brutal murder, which is what Lawrence Russell Brewer was.  But those of us who oppose the death penalty unconditionally, as I do, must be able to account for our position even when it comes to the execution of monsters.

My position is simple and clear: the deliberate killing of a defenseless human being is always immoral, and the death penalty provides no exception.  This is my belief, but I wouldn’t presume to make my own scruples – however seriously I hold them – serve as an argument in themselves.  We do not have the right to be agreed with simply because we are sincere, or committed, or passionate, or can quote Tolstoy; and we certainly have no right to demand that our personal convictions be accepted as a sufficient basis for making laws.  So here are some reasons to go along with the scruples.

There is very little evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.  90% of law enforcement professionals consider it to be an ineffective deterrent.  Crime rates in death-penalty states are much higher on average than those in non-death penalty states.  Where the death penalty has been eliminated, violent crime rates have not risen; where it has been adopted, crime rates have not fallen.

It is actually less expensive to imprison a person for life than to put him to death. This sounds counterintuitive at first, but once you consider the special facilities and procedures of death row prisons, as well as the legal fees and judicial expenses associated with numerous appeals in the courts over ten or more years, it is easy to see how the total cost of executing a person can be up to ten times as expensive as simply housing him within the maximum security prison system for the rest of his life.

The social costs of having a death penalty must be reckoned not only in dollars, but in innocent blood .  Nobody who has a command of the facts denies that innocent men have been put to death by the state.  In the age of DNA, an average of five men on death row are exonerated each year.  How many were executed before this technology emerged?  What has happened in the past will happen again in the future so long as human beings and the systems they create are fallible, which is to say forever.

In the absence of the death penalty, a person convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to life in prison without parole will never again see the light of day (unless his conviction is overturned because of new developments in the case).  He will not have eluded justice.  He will never again taste freedom.  He will not bask in the sense of having gotten away with something.  He will not roam the streets at night.  You will never have to worry about him, or even think about him.  He will be no less absent from society than if he had been executed.  He will be, as the saying goes, dead to us.

So, what does the death penalty provide, which life imprisonment does not?  What possible social benefit outweighs the social costs in tax dollars and innocent blood?

Vengeance.  That is all.

Wherever there is a death penalty, society as a whole is asked to subsidize the desire of a subgroup of citizens for vengeance – retribution against a person by whom they have never been injured, with whom they have never had any contact whatever, with whom they will never potentially have contact.  It is an abstract, cold, brutal satisfaction, which we are all required to pay for with our tax dollars, and which a few of us pay for with the lives of our convicted loved-ones, and which a tiny minority of us will pay for with our own lives.

Death penalty proponents then demand, “what about the families of the victims?  Do they not deserve justice?”

Yes.  And that is what a fair trial, conviction, and life imprisonment provide.

I can’t deny that execution provides retribution and whatever emotional satisfaction may come with it.  And so, I can’t deny that abolishing the death penalty would mean denying the satisfactions of vengeance to that part of the public that craves them.

But the government should not be responsible for providing emotional relief to certain citizens, no matter how legitimate their grievance and how profound their grief.  This would be true even if the social costs of the death penalty were negligible.  But the costs are far from negligible, and we all pay them, and we are all the poorer for it.

Every execution is a miscarriage of justice.