Hang 'em high?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, jurisprudence, death penalty, capital punishment, polemics

Spoiler alert: this review contains an outline of the authors' arguments. Let's just dive in. The title and subtitle make it clear the object is contra-capital punishment:
The Top Ten Death Penalty Myths: The Politics of Crime Control, by Rudolph J. Gerber and John M. Johnson. The book is a well-reasoned series of arguments. Each is the subject of a chapter:

1. Death Penalty History and the Myth of Community Bonding

   • Since colonial times, the venue of a judicial death has moved from the public square to a private, in-prison setting, and the means of death has become less and less painful and degrading.
   • Over the same period, the "community bonding" aspect has given way to a more divisive reality



2. The Myth of the Rule of Law in Capital Cases

   • Modern forensics, particularly DNA testing, has shown the high rate of erroneous convictions
   • This is driven largely by the prosecutors' drive to 'win at all costs', with which much of society is in general agreement.
   • Both prosecutorial and police misconduct are the natural result



3. The Myth of Equal Justice

   • The major point, and 90% of the chapter's material, is racial discrimination: sad but true.
   • Social class and gender are more minor biasing effects



4. The Myth of Deterrence

   • This equals a myth of Rational Perpetrators. In my view, no murderer can be in his or her right mind
   • Required for deterrence: speed plus certainty plus proportionality plus publicity
   • All four requirements are violated



5. The Myth of Fidelity to the Constitution

   • Two amendments specifically limit the right of the government to "remove life"
   • A long disquisition amounts to saying 'times have changed'



6. The Myth of Human Execution

   • Methods of execution in the U.S. have shifted from the sword or axe, to the Guillotine, to hanging, to the electric chair, to the gas chamber, to the nearly universal (in 38 States) use of lethal injection.
   • Each method was considered 'humane', and perhaps it is, by comparison with its predecessor
   • All of these methods can be botched, leading to increased suffering by the condemned



7. The myth of Closure

   • This firstly assumes the victim's family wants revenge or would be comforted by the judicial death
   • The second assumption is that society at large will be similarly comforted



8. The Myth of Retribution

   • Retribution is not revenge, it is punishment intended to be felt by the perpetrator, so the question is raised, is death without suffering any punishment at all?
   • It is based in lex talionis: 'an eye for an eye' and so forth



9. The Myth of Effective Crime Control

   • The argument is entirely based on the relative economic costs of prosecuting, appealing and carrying out a judicial death, versus alternatives
   • To the authors, "effective" means "cost-effective"



10. The Myth of the Dedicated Public Servant

    • The governors and judges who get elected often ride to power upon a 'devotion to death'
    • The public is more and more risk-averse, as shown by these voting records

Why is such great argumentation needed? I am tempted to say, "Methinks thou protesteth too much," but such a stance would ignore the fact that this is the second-most divisive issue in American politics, the most divisive being abortion.

If you boil down the authors' arguments to a sound bite, you get, "Judicial killing is still too cruel, its application is too arbitrary, it is too costly, and it doesn't fulfill its stated goals." My own stance is this: Nine of the arguments are beside the point. One is plain wrong: Death is a deterrent, in two ways. Firstly, the chance that a killer may himself (or rarely, herself) be killed does make at least some people adhere to the proverb, "Don't do something you can't undo." Secondly, the death of a killer completely deters the killer from killing again. This and this alone I consider a justification for a continued right to take a perpetrator's life.