Capital punishment: history, ethics, and policy perspectives

Capital Punishment

The issue of capital punishment is one of the hottest and most controversial topics in the United States right now. The platform that politicians take on this issue is one of the most important for voters, and has been a key element in the success or failure of election bidders. What is interesting to note is that this topic has not been a controversial issue within governmental structures until fairly recently, historically speaking. Because of a growth and interest in the value of the individual, the philosophical and moral, social, and economical complications of capital punishment become clear.

The two opposing forces in this issue are essentially supporters of human rights vs. supporters of punishment for crimes done. Unfortunately there is little common ground for these groups considering they often support exact opposites of each argument. Human rights advocates are interested in the dignity of the individual, the integrity of the justice system, and the moral implications that ending another human being's life entail. Supporters of capital punishment are only interested in the individual in as far as they are justly punished for the pain and trauma they have inflicted on the victims and their loved ones. They focus on the bigger picture of safety of the public in general.

Human rights supporters often base their arguments on religious or spiritual grounds, stating that capital punishment is morally unethical. They reject the idea of "an eye for an eye" and state that it is not the place of a government body to dictate the fate of a human being. This likely comes as a reaction to the atrocious human rights tragedy of the Holocaust. After their defeat in WWII, Italy and Germany became the first countries to abolish capital punishment, and the trend has swept the majority of the Western world since then (Eliot 17). They also insist that the punishment itself is "cruel and unusual," and therefore qualifies as a violation of the Constitution. However, supporters of capital punishment feel that the severity of the crimes that the individual commits that warrants a judgment of the death penalty deserves nothing less than the same kind of violent ending. They feel that the individuals are essentially behaving no better than a primitive animal, and therefore should be afforded no more humane treatment than this same animal.

On a more practical note, some objections are that capital punishment does not seem to be an effective deterrent of criminal behavior (Goertzel 4). Many studies have been done on the efficacy of the death penalty by collecting statistical data both before and after a change in capital punishment policy has occurred. The vast majority of these studies have shown that the death penalty is not providing an effective deterrent to violent crimes, however, supporters of the death penalty question the ability of these statistics to accurately detect the special minority of crimes that would warrant the death penalty in the first place (Goertzel 9).

Another major argument is that it is becoming more and more clear that the cost to the public of executing a prisoner is much higher than simply detaining them with a life sentence. Fiscal evidence is in abundance to support this claim, however, supporters of capital punishment state that the extra cost to tax payers is an acceptable sacrifice to keep these same tax payers safe from such predatory behavior.

The arguments in this debate are extremely difficult to resolve. Much of the argument is based on highly subjective criteria that end in a philosophical stale mate precisely because of this subjectivity. However, some arguments can be analyzed in an objective manner. The two strongest arguments are that the cost of executing a prisoner is higher than keeping a prisoner for the term of their life sentence, and that the death penalty has not been proven to be an adequate deterrent for violent crimes. The weakest are the ones based on spiritual beliefs, and human rights argument.

The fact that it is more expensive to execute a prisoner than it is to keep them for a life term, is just that: a fact. Because of the severity of the punishment for these crimes, the judicial system needs to be absolutely sure that this individual not only is clearly and undeniably guilty, but they also need to insure that the circumstances under which they committed this crime are so extreme that they do, in fact, deserve to die for their crimes. This need leads to an extensive, and expensive appeals process, during which the individual is incarcerated just as any other prisoner (Dieter 4). This, in effect, means that the criminal on death row is costing the public anywhere from double to triple the amount of tax money than a prisoner who is not on death row because they are accruing the regular costs to sustain their life, as well as the added costs of the court process. It should also be noted that the process by which the prisoner is killed is never cheap either (Dieter 5). This all sounds quite reasonable until we come to the conclusion that this is not, ultimately, an argument about money, but about public safety and retribution. Supporters of the death penalty will ask about what price are we willing to pay to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Clearly that price would be quite high. However, if we gather in data from other studies done on crime in general, we can see that this question in itself may not necessarily apply. It has been statistically proven that poorer cultures have higher rates of violent crime (Dieter 2). This not only applies to the cultures of the world, but the small communities within the United States. The neighborhoods afflicted with the majority of violent crimes are those with the lowest socioeconomic status. If we bring the idea that the death penalty is more expensive to its extreme conclusion, we can state that the communities that states that still practice the death penalty will experience a decline in socioeconomic status, therefore, what they will actually see is an increase in violent crime because of the repercussions the death penalty has.

In addition to the expense of the death penalty, there is the finality of the punishment to consider. With technology advancing in leaps and bounds the way it has over the last few decades, more and more cases have come to light that have shown the man (or woman) who is sitting on death row for a murder, is not, in fact, the guilty individual (Cannon 14). There have even been major films made to tackle this very subject. Even still, though the technology has been advancing, many of the methods being used are still slightly unreliable, and some advanced forms of forensic investigation aren't even admissible in court (Cannon 9). So, it seems reasonable to think that if we cannot prove the individual is actually guilty in the first place, then we cannot legally or morally commit them to death.

There is very little to debate the fact that the vast majority of research indicates that the death penalty is not adequately functioning as a deterrent to violent crime (Goertzel 4). Though supporters of the death penalty state that the logical end to the death penalty is the end of violent crime because there is no logical person who would choose to commit these crimes in the face of such harsh punishment this argument falls quite short of the truth of the matter (Eliot 21). The fundamental problem with this argument is simply that clearly the individuals who commit these crimes are not operating under the same rules of logic that the majority of society subscribes to. There really is no way to deny that the empirical and replicated evidence that is available has shown that the death penalty simply just doesn't work.

The arguments that rest on human rights and moral responsibility are much more difficult to support or deny. Those that oppose the death penalty based on the opinion that it is not up to human beings to end the life of another human being may have the strength of their convictions, but if it isn't up to humans, then who is it up to? Naturally their answer is God, but philosophers have been in a perpetual circular dance over the actual existence of God for centuries. The strongest objective argument is that since the individuals who oppose the death penalty for these reasons are large in number, then the questionable penalty should not be practiced until a vote of the general public is held to determine which side of the argument is in the majority. The problem with this is that so far in this country we are not able to vote directly on such matters. The only thing we can really do is vote for politicians who support our views, but then comes the complication of finding a politician who supports all of our views, which is nearly impossible. What happens at this point is the issues are then prioritized, and the death penalty can potentially be considered less important than personal taxes, abortion, or whatever other issue the voter deems as important. This results in an extremely clouded concept of what the majority of the population actually supports in this country -- not just on the death penalty, but any issue. Ultimately this point of this argument, though not invalid in a humanistic point-of-view, is invalid because of its lack of solid, empirical ground to stand on. In fact, it is in danger of being ignored all together if we are to take a macrocosmic view of the country in terms of the constitution and the freedoms from religious policy that we enjoy. Of course if we take this point-of-view then we have to ask how we come to any decisions about our laws at all if not based on moral judgment. As can be seen by this, this point could go in circles for many more centuries.

The idea of retribution is equally as difficult to fairly analyze. Is an "eye for an eye" policy the best policy to exact the most powerful amount of retribution on a criminal? Is the death penalty, in fact, even an "eye for an eye" policy? Many of the victims of those who are punished with the death penalty are killed in a gruesome, terrifying manner. These individual suffer extreme amounts of both physical pain and psychological stress. With this in mind, can it fairly be said that criminals who are essentially put to sleep in a peaceful, low stress atmosphere treated in the same manner as those that they executed (Trollinger 88)? Suffering a lifetime in incarceration with the removal of all civil liberties might be considered a much more of equal punishment for these criminals, but even this idea can be disputed by pointing out how lush and pleasant many prisons have become, and how the fight for prisoner's rights has made incarceration more of a vacation than a punishment (Trollinger 89).