death penalty news June 9, 2004
USA: CON: State must refrain from taking life Editor's note: David Paul Hammer, a federal death row inmate, was scheduled for death by lethal injection this week at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute. However, Hammer was granted a stay of execution by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court last Thursday. Even though the execution is not presently going forward, we feel that coverage is appropriate given the local and national relevance of the topic of capital punishment. That's why today's Opinions section consists of a point/counterpoint analysis of the issue. Capital punishment is an increasingly-debated issue in American society, and since the start of federal executions at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, it's also an issue that's gained local visibility. Most recently, it's been brought to the public's attention through media coverage of the case of death row inmate David Paul Hammer, sentenced to death for strangling his cellmate in a Pennsylvania prison. At the time he was serving over 1,200 years for charges including kidnapping and attempted murder. Hammer, originally scheduled to be executed yesterday, was granted a stay of execution due to improper proceedings in a January competency hearing. As in the months and weeks leading up to the execution of Timothy McVeigh, strong feelings have been ignited on both sides of the issue. Both camps hold deep-seated convictions and offer often-complex defenses as to the correctness of their respective positions. Complexity is an inescapable feature of this debate, as capital punishment is an issue which unites broader themes and invites broader questions. One of those questions (too large to completely answer in this space but convenient for use as a starting point) is this: Should the focus of punishment in the criminal context be retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or, less practically and more metaphysically, a restoration of the moral order? Criminal justice has been viewed in all of the above lights, but in the end practical concerns must be outweighed by foundational moral ones, as our legal code is itself founded on moral considerations of right versus wrong. So - is the death penalty really a moral imperative in crimes considered capital? First, there is the argument of simple vengeance. This must, however, be discarded as a valid justification for capital or any other variety of punishment. If achieving an end of vengeance were the sole motivating factor behind criminal sentencing, then essentially the state need not involve itself at all; the families of murder victims could accomplish that same end on their own, often more swiftly. Such vengeance killings are, in fact, crimes according to our system of law, so we must look elsewhere for pro-capital punishment moral logic. As noted by legal scholar Ernest Van Den Haag, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel put forth more intricate defenses of the death penalty. In their views, the punishment of death is not a degradation of the value of human life, but rather a reinforcement of it: "execution ... affirms his [the offender's] humanity by affirming his rationality and his responsibility for his actions. They thought that execution, when deserved, is required for the sake of the convict's dignity." Theologian (...extraordinaire) C.S. Lewis, addressing the issue of punishment in general, makes a related argument in his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment." Lewis asserts that to hold back a deserved punishment is to deny the personal responsibility and thus the full humanity of the guilty: "To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better,' is to be treated as a human person made in God's image." These are compelling arguments when advanced in defense of the death penalty, and in and of themselves are logically sound. However, I believe they fall partially out of context when we try to apply them to society as we know it. Death is the gravest of punishments. If any society is going is going to assign to itself the power of taking lives (excepting wartime self-defense), that society must be morally whole & sound. The arguments of Kant, Hegel and Lewis claim the need for punishment in full - that is, punishment perfect in its justice. However, the integrity of the justice of a given state must be viewed as a whole; as the sum of connected parts which, when it comes to matters of life and death, cannot be separated. When such matters are involved, justice to the perfection of execution is only permissible when the integrity of the state is at a comparable point of perfection (or in cases where society can be protected in no other way). This is not to say that just punishment should not be attempted. It should, and justice should be pursued to the fullest extent possible. The "exception," if you will, applies to capital punishment and to capital punishment alone; and that solely because of the special category into which such punishment falls. It is the irrevocable extinguishing of (earthly) existence, and only that society which has perfected itself may cast such a fatal stone. To move our focus away from moral concerns for the moment, though - what of those more practical issues mentioned at the start? They are many, but two foremost considerations are deterrence and cost. Capital punishment has been promoted as a deterrent to crime, which sounds sensible in the absence of contradictory data. However, such data has come to light in recent years in the form of studies and statistics which support the conclusion that the use of the death penalty cannot be correlated with a deterrent effect. To cite two examples, the FBI reports that in 2002, the murder rate in the South increased by 2.1 percent while that of the Northeast decreased by nearly 5 percent. This in spite of the fact that since 1976 the South has hosted 82 percent of all executions and the Northeast less than 1 percent. And in Canada, homicide rates have fallen since the abolition of the death penalty there in 1976. More examples can be found under the "Deterrence" link of the Death Penalty Information Center's Web site (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). Regarding deterrence, it has been observed that the majority of homicides are not committed when the murderer is in a lucid, farseeing state of mind; realizations of the eventual consequences of the act aren't foremost among this thoughts. Cost is another important factor in the debate over the death penalty. At first glance it might appear that imprisoning an offender for life would be far more costly than executing him, but due to the high number of appeals and other legal proceedings involved in capital cases, this is largely not so. To name a few examples, it has been demonstrated that Kansas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Texas, and our own state spend more on capital cases than they do on maintaining life-without-parole prisoners. To conclude and to leave behind both moral and practical justifications or lacks thereof, what of the state of our system of capital punishment as it exists today? Shameful, to put it briefly. There's not room to fully detail its failings here, but the system is demonstrably fraught with mistakes and gross inconsistencies. Those responsible for some the most heinous crimes receive sentences of life in prison, while lesser offenders are put to death. Perhaps even more alarmingly, 114 people have been freed from death row upon proof of their innocence since 1973. More data and documentation on these topics can be found on DPIC's Web site and on Amnesty International's death penalty page (www.amnesty.org/deathpenalty). The taking of the lives of its citizens is one power that government must deny itself, and here capital punishment does not qualify as an exception. However, even with that certainty aside, the dismal state of our current system of capital punishment is (or should be) of enough concern to justify at the least a national moratorium on the practice and at best its abolition. (source: Opinion, Indiana Statesman)
