No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.
Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis. He was convicted of killing a cop. There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.
I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty. You can’t take it back.
Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973. From the late 80s on, DNA has become an important factor, but it is a relatively minor one. Chief factors include witness recantation, capture of the “real” perpetrator, or review of the trial and findings that the State had done a shabby job.
I do not have a problem with the idea that some people may deserve to die. Life, in and of itself, is not sacred to me. It simply is. And we make choices, some of them bad, and decisions get made that have consequences, and people should be held accountable for their actions.
If I walk into my home and find someone there, uninvited, who is raping my wife, has killed my dog, and will likely kill my wife when he’s finished, and I can do so, I will kill him. I have no moral qualms about that, nor any question about my right to do so. (Yes, I will probably have to go to counseling afterward, because the taking of a life under any circumstances is a Big Deal.)
But if I come home and find my dog and wife dead already and a month later someone is arrested for it, tried, and convicted of the crime, I do not want him to receive the death penalty. Maybe that sounds perverse, but it comes down to two simple caveats: the State tries and convicts innocent people all the time and I do not have 100% confidence that they can do better and if I can’t be 100% sure, I don’t want someone being sure on my behalf, not in something as final as this.
But secondly, I don’t want the State to wield that power. Certainly it can be argued that certain crimes are so bad that only death may be proper, but laws change and the crimes under which death is dealt can be determined by politics as much as by justice. I want the State barred from applying that penalty in all cases because I do not trust that only those crimes with which I may have sympathy will receive it.
In short, basically, if I catch the son-of-a-bitch doing the crime and put him down, that’s fine. After the fact, I will settle for incarceration because I do not want the State to have the power of life and death, especially since they do not use it fairly, nor is the system sufficient to guarantee they kill only the criminal. Obviously they do not.
By the same token, I do not have the right to go on my own hunt for someone with the view to exact vengeance. If the State can’t get it right, how can I? If I miss the chance by not being there when it is done, I can’t recover it and acting on my own is as bad as the State screwing up.
There are countries where the death penalty is used for adultery or blasphemy. No, we don’t do that here. But we do have it for treason, and that, it seems to me, is rife for misapplication. Society changes, politics is fickle. We don’t kill people for having sex out of wedlock or cursing or suggesting certain ideas aren’t true. Today. I’d rather we begin to accept as a principle that the death penalty is never appropriate and find some other way to deal with our urge for vengeance—because that’s all it really is. We’ve killed a lot of innocent people with it because we were angry. Not just. Angry.
And you can’t take it back if you find out you had the wrong guy.