There are certain issues and stances on which we look back and wonder, "How the hell could people have ever felt this way?" From the big, scary phenomena such as slavery and genocide, on down to lesser concepts such as the denial of suffrage for women and African Americans and Prohibition, we wonder how society, as a collective, could have ever deemed such practices to be feasible and just. Yet they are an integral part of who we are today because they are a part of who we have been. Our past beliefs show us how we arrived at our present state.
That said, let me state unequivocally: those who believe in the death penalty today are on the wrong side of history. They are the people that our grandchildren will look back upon in their history books as comparable to the barbarians who beat blacks away from lunch counters and deprived women of their fundamental right to vote for their leaders. They are the people about whom it will be asked, "Why didn't they have the backbone, the moral clarity, to see what was wrong with the world they lived in and work to fix it?" Much like those who defended the peculiar institution that put Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in chains or advocated for the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans on behalf of the war effort. Cowards without foresight, at best.
As with any debate of this moral scope, there are those on the right side of history: the abolitionists, the suffragists, the civil rights activists. These are the folks who gave as much as their lives so that the moral arc of the universe bent a little closer towards justice in their lifetimes. Yet it is hard enough alone to just right a wrong. It's even more taxing when otherwise thoughtful, compassionate people take up an unjust, indefensible stance and oppose you.
So I found myself sitting in class wearing my Be Abolitionist T-shirt (the "abolition" of course referring to the death penalty) in my SPA Leadership class when I was called to task.
"So, Mr. Abolitionist, do you think killing is ever justified?"
My simple answer was, "No." But I am certain that state-sanctioned killing is wrong. The state cannot, simultaneously, be in the business of punishing people for murder while committing murder itself. It's a lot like writing "all men are created equal" into the Declaration of Independence only to turn around and own slaves. Ultimately, there must be a reckoning for this stark dissonance. There was in that case and there will be in this one as well.
Still, some of my classmates insisted that "some people just do not deserve to live" after committing certain crimes. The little Catholic boy inside of me remains horrified that people who style themselves as progressive leaders could be leading our society so astray with such a heinous, immoral idea as capital punishment.
Take Maryland, for example. All of the state's six current death row prisoners were sentenced for murdering white citizens despite the fact that African Americans are victims of approximately 80 percent of all homicides in Maryland annually. The four Maryland prisoners who could soon face execution are all African-American and were convicted of killing white people. In Maryland, blacks who kill whites are two-and-a-half times more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill whites and three-and-a-half times more likely than blacks who kill blacks. If you support the death penalty, you support racism in the criminal justice system.
Kirk Bloodsworth sat on Maryland's death row for over eight years before DNA evidence proved his innocence and secured his release. He stills wakes up in cold sweats in the middle of the night with nightmares about sitting in a box and possibly being killed by his state for a rape and murder that he did not commit. How many innocent men sitting on death rows were not as "fortunate" as Bloodsworth? A little perspective on the innocence factor: as of June 2006, 123 people had been released from death row nationwide after being found innocent.
A deterrent? From 1990-2005, the murder rate declined by 56 percent in states without the death penalty but only by 38 percent in states that have it. Given the cycle of violence that it perpetuates, perhaps the death penalty is not a deterrent, but possibly an accelerant, to murder.
Furthermore, the Maryland Court of Appeals has determined that the average execution costs the state $400,000 over and above the cost to process and maintain a prisoner serving a life sentence. Capital punishment is not at all, as the very least of these concerns, cost effective.
You want to talk about an axis of evil? We're in good company. Our partner nations in capital punishment engage in beheadings (Saudi Arabia, Iraq), hangings (Iran, Pakistan), shootings (China, Vietnam), stonings (Afghanistan, Iran) and stabbings (Somalia). We opt for the more humane methods for murder such as lethal injection and electrocution. But at the end of the day, it's all the same.
So this morally incongruent, viciously racist, comparatively expensive, non-deterrent form of "justice" called the death penalty remains a legitimate state practice in one of the last bastions of cruel and unusual punishment in the developed world - our country. It remains so because otherwise kind and intelligent people across this country are doing nothing to stop it.
The author would like to invite readers to join the AU Campaign to End the Death Penalty for an anti-capital punishment vigil tonight, Thursday, April 5, at 8 p.m. in the Amphitheatre.
Paul Perry is a senior in the
School of International Service and a liberal
columnist for The Eagle.
