Protesting the Death Penalty: Lighting the Roman Colosseum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6238131.stm

The death penalty should not be part of any legal system. This is not because I think perpetrators of heinous crimes should not ever be put to death, but because we can never be sure enough of guilt to allow death to be a punishment. I am not against the idea of the death penalty. If there were some way to know the defendant was guilty, not beyond a reasonable doubt but for sure, then I would support removing the worts of the worst, such as mass murders, from the global community.

We kill innocent people. Not on purpose, but because we can not help it. There are many emotional reasons to want to execute someone that may lead to the conviction and killing of an innocent person. These include a desire for actual justice, or worse, for publicly perceived justice; a desire to set an example for other potential murderers, and a desire to punish the killer. But these reasons are emotionally explosive, and the anger, pain, and fear resulting from heinous crimes demand immediate appeasement. Logic and measured analysis are easily shoved aside by the most well-meaning jurors when they are confronted with violence, filled with self-righteousness, and delivered a defendant, likely of unsavory character, and they think the defendant must be here for a reason.

Setting aside unintentional bias and emotionally-induced error, there is the potential for intentional mis-conviction and mis-execution. There are people in power who are not honest and fair. It is naive to think scapegoats have not been used by our government. There are innocent suspects who may confess for selfish reasons, to protect someone else, or out of fear. Law enforcement officers and politicians feel the pressure of the public to find the criminal and punish him or her. Everyone wants to see justice done; so much so that an innocent person may be made an intentional or, perhaps more disturbingly, an unintentional, scapegoat. Everyone wants closure and this pressure is strong enough to bring the innocent to the death chamber.

And none of these desires necessarily leads us to the actual perpetrator. These desires give us strong emotional reasons to impose the death penalty: retribution. A desire for retribution can grip a well-meaning jury and sweep aside a dearth of evidence, proper application of the law, even logic, and result in the conviction and execution of innocent people. While retribution is a dangerous reason to kill, executing criminals to deter others from committing the crime may be even more hazardous and malignant. This purpose is served by killing innocents as well as criminals, and to execute anyone for this purpose is too great a cost. The example set does not take; no one commits a crime intending to be caught.

There are many other reasons to oppose the death penalty, and they are as varied as the religions of the world. But they are often based on dogma or ethics rather than logic and reason. Dogma and ethics are endlessly debatable and can only be resolved in an agreement to disagree, given they are not provable.

Therefore the only rational and logical reason to impose the death penalty would be as a social execution in self-defense of the community. But this only works if we know for sure that the person we are killing is guilty. Notions of fairness, logic, and reason should underly the ultimate decision to oppose, or for that matter, support, the death penalty. This means that until we are omnipresent, omniscient, have all the evidence, know all the facts, and can untangle logic from human emotion, we can not know that the people we kill are not innocent.

May the lights burning in the Colosseum help motivate us to eradicate the death penalty.