The Case Against Capital Punishment

                This month, Arkansas was slated to execute eight convicts over the course of ten days before a federal court put a halt to the process. The reasoning behind the rush to evacuate their death row of inmates, in part, seemed to hinge on the fact that the state’s drug of choice for executions is set to expire at the end of the month. It is a costly procedure replacing life-taking drugs, so instead of allowing these drugs go to waste, Arkansas decided to move forward with the execution of the convicts. Ignoring for a moment the question of whether it is ethical to hurry an execution due to the inconvenience of pharmacological shelf life, the real question should in fact be, why does the practice of state sponsored execution still exist?

                Decrees against the taking of a human life pervade religious text, and are universally found in the laws which govern modern societies. Someone who claims the rights for an individual to commit murder would be thought a lunatic, and rightfully so, as no rational person could make such an argument. While some cultures justify atrocities such as honor killings, secular western civilizations label such practices barbaric and uniformly condemn murder in all its forms. Except, that is, in the strange case of capital punishment.

                In the United States, support for the death penalty tends to come from people on the right. The fiscally-conservative, pro-life party has demonstrated time and again that it is only pro-life for the duration of gestation within the womb, and not when it comes to policies regarding the survival of those already born and walking the streets of the world. This callousness towards life is often demonstrated by an argument, commonly put forward, which states that capital punishment makes sense from a financial standpoint. According to this train of thought, a young man convicted of a heinous crime should not languish in prison for the rest of his life at the expense of the taxpayers, but rather he should instead be forced to pay for his crime immediately by execution. It costs an average of thirty thousand dollars a year to house an inmate in the United States. This argument put forth fails to take into account that the average person spends more than a decade on death row due to the lengthy, and quite necessary, appeals process, and the cost per death row prisoner is triple that of an inmate in the general population. Also, the average cost of cases tried involving capital punishment are almost double that of cases involving life sentences, and maintaining death row facilities and the drugs used for the execution, itself, have become increasingly costly. The most important argument to refute this lack of humanity, however, is that human life should never be weighed with numbers on an abacus. It is impossible to put a price on the moral decision to end a human life.

                There are times when killing another human being may be necessary. These tend to be limited to cases of self-defense, when one forced to preserve a life or the life of another by harming an assailant. Other than that, the instances in which people attempt to argue murder is appropriate are those where justification is much harder to find. For example, if someone were in the process of injuring an innocent, it would be hard to argue that intervening to save that individual from harm would not be the right choice. If someone had just watched a man injure a member of their family and now the perpetrator was lying subdued, prone on the ground, posing no immediate threat, it would be much harder to justify killing that person, even though, in the heat of the moment, they perhaps want to. Now imagine the same scenario, only this time the assailant has been subdued, then taken home, and locked in a basement only to be murdered at the earliest convenience. Of the three scenarios, the first appears to be the only case with justification for taking a life. The second scenario, as it involves family and was still in the moment, may buy sympathy from a jury, killing a person who poses no immediate threat would still not be justifiable to the law. The third case is one very few people would attempt to rationalize, yet the third situation is exactly the one in which the state finds itself when it executes a criminal. A locked-up criminal poses no threat to the public, but retributive justice is still carried out through capital punishment. It is the duty of the judiciary to rise above the mob mentality towards vigilante justice and not have its morality clouded by emotions surrounding the case. If murder is wrong, then it is wrong for the state to murder.

                The most difficult case to make for clemency may also prove to be the most compelling, in which the overriding emotion which governs the legal system should not be anger coupled with the need to punish, but rather compassion. People have a variety of reasons for why they choose to commit crimes, but how much choice a person truly has is a matter for some debate. A person cannot choose their genes. They cannot choose the underlying brain chemistry, which makes up their personality or their decision making. No one gets to choose their parents, or the environment they are raised in. It is a well-known fact that poverty is a direct link to crime, and children raised in poverty are more likely to end up as adults who live in poverty, caught in a vicious, downtrodden cycle. No one would choose to be born into a life of disenfranchisement, but the number of people in prison who have lived their entire lives below the poverty line is staggering. The circumstances which make up a person’s life happen on a large scale by pure accident. Compassion is not an argument against punishment. If a person has demonstrated the inability to distinguish right from wrong, they must be held accountable for their actions for the safety of the rest of society. However, it is not the place of the government to execute someone for the closure of victims. If compassion, rather than vengeance, drove our sentencing, no further executions from the state would be seen. Ultimately, that should be a goal to aspire to.