There are many excellent arguments against the death penalty, and TMV co-blogger elrod wrote passionately about them in an earlier post. From arbitrary and racist sentencing to the truly horrible risk of executing an innocent person, worries abound, because once the ultimate penalty has been carried out, there’s no going back.
Yet this latest Great Debate about capital punishment didn’t come up for any of these reasons. Instead, they arose yet again from questions about lethal injection, and whether this method is “cruel and unusual” under the 8th Amendment.
This continues to confound me. How is it that we can put a person under sedation for surgery, or even into a controlled coma, but we cannot manage to administer a painless death in an execution?
As it happens, Polimom is not against the death penalty on general principle. There is a class of crime that rises far above the others, and for which this penalty is suited: the torturous mutilation, molestation, and murder of children. In April I wrote:
There are, I believe, crimes that are so heinous – so beyond the limits of what society can possibly tolerate – that they call for the ultimate penalty, and atrocities like those committed against Jamie Rose Bolin, Dylan Groene, and the many (too many) others are where Polimom draws the line in the sand.
Yes, I worry about the possible miscarriage of justice against a wrongly convicted person. The evidence supporting a death penalty cannot be questionable — but there is nothing extenuating enough to explain or defend these types of crimes; even insanity will not do.
Was the murderer abused as a child? I don’t care.
Was he a good boy in school? Had a good job and lots of friends? No prior record?
I don’t care.
I care about the children who, like my own, are going about the business of growing up right now – today – all over the country. They’re playing with friends, or watching television, or swimming, or crying, or laughing, or being mad…. they’re in the process of learning about trust, and life.
I care about the lifetime still ahead for my daughter and her friends, and all those like them. I look forward to the years of memories yet to be experienced, even while I know that the memory books of the mothers and fathers and grandmas and grandpas and siblings of the lost children are finished now. End of story.
I care enormously about what the family of this Oklahoma girl is going to suffer, knowing the awful suffering of their daughter – that her last moments were full of terror and agony. There is nothing worse than this pain, and they will be engulfed in it for the rest of their lives.
This is the crime that rises above all the others, and for which the penalty must be death.
I still feel that way, and it’s in this context that I view “cruel and unusual”.
To me, there’s nothing more cruel or unusual than these outrageous, horrific crimes against children… and for their parents, what could possibly be more viciously ironic than knowing that the beast haunting their nightmares was spared because the punishment would hurt.
In truth, the arguments against the death penalty are valid all across our Criminal Justice system; sentencing is far too often subjective, arbitrary, and racist. And does anyone truly believe that a person released after twenty years for a crime s/he didn’t commit is not institutionalized and broken, or that their lives weren’t destroyed? There’s no “going back” there, either.
As California has ruled, the lethal injection implementation can, and should, be “fixed”; worries about whether an execution is painful should not be the foundation for the capital punishment debate.
While they’re “fixing” this, though, we need a time out — a temporary national moratorium on executions — so that the larger questions about retribution, sentencing models, punishment v. treatment, and the wider morality of the concept of capital punishment can be revisited.
There’s no reason the implementation of a sentence should be interfering with the much larger, and deeper, examination that needs to take place of the punishment itself, and the system in which it exists.