The Declining Death Penalty

A page from an old sheaf of papers revealed a 10-28-11 news update on the decline in enforcement of the death penalty in the United States. That news brief included this interesting question: “Why does the U.S. remain an outlier?” 

With that question duly posed, the writer had this to say in the following paragraph:

          "A majority of Americans continue to believe that capital punishment is the only way to

          deliver proportional justice to a murderer. ‘Someone who murders another human being

          can only be made to pay for his actions by forfeiting his own life,’ says death-penalty

          advocate Casey Carmichael. ‘If the punishment for theft is imprisonment, then the 
          punishment for murder must be exponentially more severe, because human life is infinitely
          more valuable than any material item.’ This view is largely rooted in the Bible and its ‘eye-for-              an-eye’ ethos, which still exerts a powerful influence in parts of the U.S. where religious                        conservatives predominate.’  Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and            has least support in the church-going United States,’ conservative Supreme Court Justice                      Antonin Scalia has written. 'I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian death is            no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal.’“

The problem becomes obvious with the realization that the basic assumptions in this paragraph are flawed, debatable, and/or simply wrong, even when viewed from a Biblical perspective. While the ethos of an ”eye for an eye” may be Bible based, and although it is true that it still exerts a powerful influence among conservative-Christians in some regions of the country; it is an incomplete view, fundamentally flawed, and draws a wrong conclusion.

“Eye for an eye” is an Old Testament concept. While well-intended for equal justice, when assimilated into the New Testament teachings of Jesus and the Kingdom of God, it falls far short of what Jesus actually taught (restorative justice). I began to understand this better when I came to the pragmatic realization that a prisoner could be fed and housed for a number of years and still be less costly than the death penalty, a statement of fact that I did not want to believe at first.

When I began to realize the impact of the number of commutations being given because of legally flawed jury decisions, I began to see

              1) the flaws in our justice system, and

              2) I began to realize the contrast between our theories about punishment and what Jesus taught   regarding restoring people.

I saw the idiocy of simply punishing people and turning them loose (or killing them) and ending up with an unsolved problem after all that expense.

I have no need to attempt a death penalty resolution with a single blog but I do give serious consideration to the opinions of the warden’s whose jobs are to preside over such executions. I take seriously when some of these men and women candidly confess that participating in the “planned, cold-blooded killing of human beings” has haunted them, that it often inflicts lasting trauma on those so employed, and that many of them turn to drugs and alcohol “from the pain of knowing a man died at their hand.”

When a 22-year veteran of the Florida Corrections System forthrightly declares,”The state dishonors us by putting us in this situation. This is premeditated, carefully thought-out ceremonial killing,” I have to take him seriously. When he advocates “an alternative that doesn’t lower us to the level of the killer: permanent imprisonment.” I do take new hope,

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