Capital Punishment: The Rationale

I have been a supporter of capital punishment for most of my adult life. My calculus was simple: I knew that if someone broke into my home and threatened the lives of my children and my wife, that I would kill the invader. I would not deliberate. I would not lose any sleep over the decision. I would kill to defend myself and my family. Because I knew this, I concluded that it would be wrong of me to deny others the justice they seek, their right to kill the destroyer of their lives, their family.

The problem with my thinking was simple enough: Killing an intruder in self-defense is not the same thing as killing an arrested, convicted, and incarcerated assailant five to twenty years after the crime. Do people have a right to retribution? I would want retribution. I would do it myself. I think I would feel better knowing the son-of-a-bitch who destroyed my life was no longer thinking. I think these things, but I don’t know.

A better rationale for support of the death penalty can be reasoned through consideration for a human being’s unalienable right to life and simple deduction. I am a man. I have an unalienable right to my life. Therefore, all men have an unalienable right to their lives. If I take the life of an innocent man, I forfeit my right to my own life. This argument makes sense to me. It is entirely objective and rational. It is the same reasoning I use to determine the immorality of murder. This argument is perfect in a world where the criminal justice system never fails to condemn only the guilty. As long as the vast majority of death row inmates are poor, black and Hispanic, as long as inmates are being vindicated by technology that didn’t exist at the time of their trials, the power to condemn a man to death can be said to be just…in theory.

I’ve probably read more from the side of the argument that opposes the death penalty. Looking for reasons to change my thinking led me to 19th Century, French novelist, dramatist, and poet Victor Hugo. The writer and freethinker was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. In his book The Last Day of a Condemned Man Hugo places his reader in the mind of a man condemned to die for a crime the author never discloses. For Hugo, apparently, the crime is irrelevant. The death penalty in every instance is cruel and unusual punishment. For Hugo “cruel and unusual” has nothing to do with the means of execution, guillotine or lethal injection. It isn’t the killing that is cruel; it is the waiting to die. It is the knowing of the how, the when, and the where that is cruel and unusual.

Perhaps…but when I think of the horrible crimes these monsters dole out to innocents and the destruction they do to their victim’s loved ones, I can garner little sympathy for the criminal. I am human and believe in justice, so I could never participate in the wanton torture of another human, whatever their crimes; but to want the monster dead? Yes. I would want that. Hugo’s argument, that the mental anguish of the convicted murderer awaiting justice is cruel and unusual punishment, forgets the terminal horror suffered by the loved ones of the victim. I think their wish must trump any consideration for the murderer’s feelings.

George Orwell in his 1931 essay “A Hanging” seems to concur with Hugo. In Orwell’s account, the speaker, a small contingent of soldiers, and a condemned man are making there way to the gallows one August morning, when the condemned man goes out of his way to avoid stepping in a mud puddle… “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”

Again, since the death penalty in the United States is generally reserved for murderers, Orwell’s message is one I wish the murderer had taken into consideration before he went out to commit his crime. I wish the murderer had seen “the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it was in full tide.” Some of these monsters kill children after doing unspeakable things to their bodies…No, I can find no cause to spare them the “cruelty” of waiting for their prescribed death.

For me the only question remaining is certainty. Can we be certain never to execute an innocent man?