Pros and Cons of Death Penalty

Death Penalty

An issue as divisive as the death penalty has many arguments in its favor and many against it. Sorting through these different arguments to find a reasonable conclusion to either support the death penalty or not can be challenging. In terms of favoring the death penalty, there are two main themes, the deterrence theme and the retribution theme (Gill, 2013).

Some pros are:

Death penalties act as a deterrent for some

Death penalties act to punish those who commit heinous acts

The death penalty is more cost-effective than keeping someone in prison for life

Violation of the social contract to behave with civility towards one another rules out one's right to civil treatment from society

Prevents future crimes

Some cons of the death penalty are:

The right to life is sacred and no one should take it, governments included

Moral hazard in choosing who lives and dies

The death penalty does not act as a deterrent

The death penalty in the U.S. is handed out in a racially-biased manner

The poor are also targeted disproportionally, as they lack access to quality legal defense

Source: ProCon.org (2013)

In general, I do not support the death penalty. I accept that the death penalty is an inadequate deterrent -- that those most likely to be deterred are rational citizens who are unlikely to commit capital crime anyway. Those who do not act rationally are unlikely to be deterred. Research typically shows ambiguous results with respect to the deterrent value of the death penalty (Manski & Pepper, 2011), and this probably why -- deterrence implies rational thinking and a weighing of outcomes, things that those who commit capital offenses typically lack.

With deterrence ruled out, retribution is the primary motive for enacting the death penalty. While I am in principle fine with the idea that those who break our social contract in such a way as to kill another are deserving of no other fate than death, it is necessary to also accept that there are constraints on the degree to which we should exercise our right to retribution.

It is here that my objection to the death penalty arises. America is a racist, classist country and cannot be trusted to enact the death penalty with the maturity and gravity such a punishment it deserves. Bright (1992) argues that the Bill of Rights should protect those who have limited ability to protect themselves -- the poor and minorities. Furman v. Georgia imposed strict new standards on the application of capital punishment because its use was found to target minorities and the poor disproportionally. Since that ruling, minorities and the poor still dominate the list of people on death row. The states most likely to impose the death penalty -- nine of the ten states with the highest execution numbers are south of the Mason-Dixon line (DeathPenaltyInfo.org, 2013) -- are precisely those with the worst histories of systemic racism in the nation. This does not reflect well on our ability to use the power of capital punishment responsibly. The Bill of Rights is applied unevenly at best, or ignored at worst, when it comes to delivering justice to people of color and the poor.

The standard of discourse surrounding the death penalty simply isn't high enough to demonstrate to me that Americans can handle capital punishment. The pro-side isn't much more eloquent than "Yee Haw!" And the con side rests too much on moralizing. We have not as a society agreed upon a particular standard of ethics that we can apply evenly and fairly. That there are so many arguments, and those doing the arguing are won't to talking over each other, speaks volumes about our inability to have the sort of intelligent discourse that this subject demands.

This is a problem. We have the death penalty on the books because we always have. For centuries, capital punishment was acceptable. While other countries, and indeed some states, have been able to engage in calm, rational debate about the death penalty and come to reasoned conclusions about its use, we have been unable to confront the issue to any serious degree. That is why we still have the death penalty, not because the issue has been given proper consideration and a conclusion reached that the costs of capital punishment are worth the benefits we reap. This failure of discourse is not only why we still kill people, but it is why we get it wrong as often as we do. We should never, ever take an innocent life, but we do. That this does not cause outrage speaks of a callousness in our society that goes beyond the realm of decency.

This is why I cannot support the death penalty in America. It is not because the death penalty is inherently wrong, but because Americans cannot be trusted to apply it fairly, evenly, and with the seriousness that it deserves. We cannot bring ourselves to have a mature debate, to understand our moral codes and establish a decision based on clear ethical imperatives. Instead, we kill people because it is our legacy, something we have always done, and we have never had the stones to confront ourselves on this issue and ask ourselves why, if we must have capital punishment, we are so unwilling to honestly address the inadequacies of how we apply it.