A Moral Case Against The Death Penalty

Over at the Telegraph, we learn that the death penalty "works". We also get a wonderful attempt to demolish the arguments of opponents of the death penalty through a striking example of hysterical (and largely empty) rhetoric:

We can expect anti-death penalty campaigners to point to America as an example of why it should stay banned. The usual images will be invoked of pot-bellied, racist, white judges sentencing innocent saints to death by chainsaw in some Alabama charnel house. Accepting the many obvious injustices in the US legal system, there is an instinctive British snobbery towards Americans that renders any comparison between our two countries unflattering. Amnesty International, Liberty and the New Statesman will probably ask, “Why would we endorse a system of retribution practiced by those knuckle-dragging, Bible bashing, toothless crazies over in Texas?”

Well, while some may use such imagery in their arguments against the death penalty, you won't find it coming from a death penalty opponent such as my good self. I don't care what the examples of the US - and of other more authoritarian (Iran, China) and totalitarian (North Korea)regimes - show us. Because my opposition to the death penalty is far simpler, and doesn't rely on statistics showing how ineffective it is. My position is this: the death penalty is morally wrong.

I don't believe the state should be able to take the lives of its citizens. I don't believe it makes sense. To claim that a crime - such as murder - is so wrong that the only way to combat it is to take a life doesn't fit together for me. Such arguments justify state murder using murder. But if murder is wrong, then why should the state be empowered to commit such a crime?

Of course, what the current campaign is actually advocating is the death penalty in certain cases - when the victim is a child or a police officer killed in the line of duty. Surely I'm not defending a person as vile as a child or cop killer? Well, no, of course I'm not - I believe that those people should be locked up for life. But to say those crimes are so heinous that the perpetrators deserve to lose their lives - or have their lives taken by the state - actually tells us something quite interesting about how we view individual worth. Put simply, the life of a serving police officer or a child is worth more than mine in the case of murder. And I struggle with that. It alludes to a mindset where we do not exist as individuals, but rather as amorphous blobs; of collective categories rather than individual humans. And I also worry about what the death penalty says about our relationship with the state; there can be few better ways of showing that the state is more important than the individual than through empowering it to end the existence of individuals in certain circumstances.

Then there's the problem of the fallibility of humanity. Humans fail; through incompetence and malice. That's why we have murderers in the first place. But the state - any state - is the construction of humans. Therefore, it too will be fallible. Yeah, I'm about to trot out the line about innocent people being sent to the gallows. But it is so often used in these debates because it is absolutely crucial to the nature of the death penalty. Any proponent of the death penalty needs to use their powers of empathy to put themselves in the shoes of a person wrongly accused of child or cop killing in the condemned cells facing the last night of their life before the state takes their very existence from them. There are no certainties in this life; we could all end up the victim of a miscarriage of justice. But I know for many of those arguing for the death penalty it seems highly unlikely that they would end up facing the ultimate sanction. As the examples of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans shows, it is often the mentally slower people who end up as innocents on death row. Or, to use two examples of those who have more recently suffered miscarriages of justice and would have ended up facing death under Guido's proposed law, those who have stood out as in some way strange - Sally Clark with her post-natal depression or Stefan Kiszko, whose main crime seems to actually have been being an awkward mummy's boy. So those who are prepared to take a risk and allow for state murder are falling into the same trap as those who argue some victims are more important than others - they are stating that the lives of some are more important than others. They are effectively saying that the lives of the non-conformist, of the mentally ill or of the mentally subnormal are worth risking if we can string up a genuinely guilty child or cop killer. And I find such valuations of individual lives as morally questionable at best, and morally repugnant at worst.

So those who oppose the death penalty don't use to use anti-American cliches to make their case. Even if there was conclusive evidence using a simple utlitarian calculation that the death penalty works there would still be a moral argument to be made and one that needs to be effectively answered before we revert to the noose or embrace the needle.