RETRIBUTION
Justice, it is often insisted, requires the death penalty as the only suitable retribution for heinous crimes. This claim will not bear scrutiny. All punishment by its nature is retributive, not only the death penalty. Whatever the legitimacy, therefore, is to be found in punishment as just retribution can in principle be satisfied without recourse to executions.
It is also obvious that the death penalty could be defended on narrowly retributive grounds only for the crime of murder, and not for any of the many other crimes that have frequently been made subject to this mode of punishment (rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug lords). Few defenders of the death penalty are willing to confine themselves consistently to the narrow scope afforded by to retribution. In any case, execution is more than a punishment exacted in retribution for the taking of a life.
As Camus wrote For there to be equivalence, the death penalty the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
It is also often argued that death Is what murderers deserve, and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle that criminals should be punished according to their deserts, making the punishment fit the crime.
If this principle is understood to require that punishments are unjust unless they are like the crime themselves, then the principle is unacceptable. It would require us to rape rapists, torture tortures, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murderers.
If, however, the principle of just deserts is understood to require that the severity of punishments must be proportional to the gravity of the crime, and that murder being the gravest crime deserves the severest punishment, then the principle is no doubt sound. But it does not compel support for the death penalty. What it does require is that crimes other than murder be punished with terms of imprisonment or other depravations less sever than those used in the punishment for murder.
Criminals no doubt deserve to be punished, and punished with severity appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused to the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits imposed both by justice and our common human dignity. Governments that respect these limits do not use premeditated, violent homicide as an instrument of social policy.
Some whose loved one was a murder victim believe that they cannot rest until the murder is executed. But the feeling is by no means universal. Coretta Scott King has observed, As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.
Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the slain Senator Robert Kennedy, has written: I was eight years old when my father was murdered. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder. But even as a child one thing was clear to me: I didn t want the killer, in turn to be killed. I remember lying in bed and praying, Please God. Please don t take his life too. I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family. another set of parents, children, brothers, and sisters thrown into grief.
FINANCIAL COSTS
It is sometimes suggested that abolishing capital punishment is unfair to the taxpayer, as though life imprisonment were obviously more expensive than executions. If one takes into account all the relevant costs, the reverse is true. The death penalty is not now, nor has it ever been, a more economical alternative to life imprisonment.
A murder trial normally takes much longer when the death penalty is at issue then when it is not. Litigation costs including the time of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and court reporters, and the high costs of briefs are all burdens of the taxpayer.
A 1982 study showed that were the death penalty to be reintroduced in New York, the cost of the capital trial alone would be more than double the cost of life imprisonment.
In Maryland, a comparison of capital trial costs with and without the death penalty for the years 1979-1984 concluded that a death penalty case costs approximately 42 percent more than a case resulting in a non-death sentence. In 1988 and 1989 the Kansas legislature voted against reinstating the death penalty after it was informed that reintroduction would involve a first-year cost of more than $11 million. Florida, with one of the nation s largest death rows, has estimated that the true cost of each execution is approximately $3.2 million, or approximately six times the cost of a life-imprisonment sentence.
The only way to make the death penalty a better buy that imprisonment is to weaken due process and curtail appellate review, which are the defendant s (and society s) only protections against the grossest miscarriages of justice. The savings in dollars would be at the cost of justice: In nearly half of the death penalty cases given review under federal habeas corpus, the conviction is overturned.
PUBLIC OPINION
The media commonly report that the American public overwhelmingly supports the death penalty. More careful analysis of public attitudes, however, reveals that most Americans would oppose the death penalty if convicted murderers were sentenced to life without parole and were required to make some form of financial restitution. In California, for example, a Field Institute survey showed that in 1990, 82 percent approved in principle of the death penalty. But when asked to chose between the death penalty and life in prison with restitution, only a small minority 26 percent continued to favor executions.
A comparable change in attitude toward the death penalty has been verified in many other states and contradicted in none.
ABOLITION TRENDS
The death penalty in the United States needs to be put into international perspective. In 1962, it was reported to the Council of Europe that the facts clearly show that the death penalty is regarded in Europe as something of an anachronism.
Today, 28 European countries have abolished the death penalty either in law or in practice. In Great Britain, it was abolished (except for treason) in 1971; France abolished it in 1981; Canada abolished it in 1976. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed in a formal resolution that, throughput the world, it is desirable to progressively restrict the number of offenses for which the death penalty might be imposed, with a view to the desirability of abolishing this punishment.
Conspicuous by their indifference to these recommendations are nations generally known for their disregard for the human rights of their citizens: China, Iraq, Iran, South Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Americans ought to be embarrassed to find themselves linked with the governments of such nations in retaining execution as a method of crime control.
Opposition to the death penalty in the United States is widespread and diverse. Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant religious groups, national organizations representing people of color, and public-interest law groups are among the more than fifty national organizations that constitute the National Collation to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Once in use everywhere, and for a wide variety of crimes, the death penalty today is generally forbidden by law and widely abandoned in practice. The unmistakable worldwide trend is toward the complete abolition of capital punishment.