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ARCATA,
California—It’s not easy to explain why, virtually alone
among advanced industrial democracies, the United States
holds on to the practice of capital punishment.
The
United Nations General Assembly recently passed a
worldwide moratorium on capital punishment and most
advanced industrial democracies have outlawed the death
penalty.
Capital
punishment is coming to be seen in much of the world as
an ultimate abuse of human rights. In continuing to
embrace the practice, the United States finds itself
aligned with nations whose human-rights records it
routinely condemns—China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia.
Why it
persists in this globally unpopular policy and why the
American public continues to support it by two-thirds
majorities—is a source of puzzlement.
Capital
punishment has a deep-rooted history in the US.
State-sanctioned executions hark back to the country’s
colonial days, when the practice was imported from
England but applied to a narrower range of crimes.
In the
course of more than 200 years, some 14,000 Americans
have been put to death by the order of the state. In the
mythic popular rendering of the Wild West, frontier
justice followed the biblical dictum of “an eye for an
eye,” though with scant reverence for its source and
less than consistent application of the law.
The
death penalty was most actively applied in the first
half of the 20th century, when 150 people or more were
put to death annually. But it began to be called into
question during the civil-rights movement of the ’60s,
when its vastly disproportionate toll on African-
Americans and other minorities first came to public
notice.
In the
late ’60s, federal courts, then in a far more liberal
temper than today’s bench, began handing down decisions
that effectively, if only temporarily, halted
executions. In 1972 the US Supreme Court invalidated
hundreds of death sentences, declaring that state laws
were being applied in an “arbitrary and capricious”
manner that violated constitutional guarantees of equal
protection and due process. But in 1976, the Court
revived the death penalty, opening the way to the
execution of over a thousand death-row inmates over the
next 30 years.
Today,
35 states have capital-punishment laws on their books,
but just 10 maintain active execution programs. A number
of Midwestern and Northeastern states have abolished
capital punishment. About 3,350 people languish today on
“death row,” and keeping them there is an immensely
expensive proposition.
The
great majority are poor and a significant number are
mentally disturbed. More than 40 percent are
African-American (four times their proportion in the
general population), and disproportionate numbers are
Native American, Latino and Asian.
Most
experts on the death penalty decline to speculate on why
the United States hold so firmly to capital punishment.
It’s not enough to say that it’s a tenet of conservatism
in an era of conservative ascendancy, since recent
surveys reveal that even Barack Obama, an unapologetic
liberal, finds it necessary to support the death penalty
in cases in which “the community is justified in
expressing the full measure of its outrage.”
Yet,
even in his home state of Illinois, it was a Republican
governor, George Ryan, who instituted a January 2000
moratorium on executions to reevaluate the state’s
death-row inmates on the basis of newly available DNA
testing. In so doing, he commuted the sentences of all
the state’s death-row inmates and said, “Our capital
system is haunted by the demon of error, error in
determining guilt and error in determining who among the
guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having?
What effect was poverty having?”
In the
past few years there has been modest movement, even in
an increasingly conservative US Supreme Court, to limit
the range of crimes to which the death penalty applies.
In 2002 the court barred the execution of mentally
retarded defendants. In 2005 it ruled against the death
penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18, and
in June 2008 the court struck down the death penalty for
the rape of a child. In this most recent case, Justice
Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, asserted that
“when the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden
descent into brutality.”
Yet, the
moral case against capital punishment is unlikely to
carry the day on its own in a country whose religiosity
recalls the Biblical injunction, “an eye for an eye,”
but fails to note the Gandhian amendment, “till all the
world is blind.”
In the
end, it may be more practical considerations that tip
the balance in favor of de facto, if not formal,
abolition. Maintaining death-row facilities and dealing
with decades of litigation costing millions per case is
an exceedingly expensive proposition. In an era of
declining economies and shrinking state budgets,
death-row inmates cost vastly more than “lifers” to
maintain.
The cost
of a new death-row facility set for construction at
California’s San Quentin penitentiary has ballooned to
$400 million, and at current rates of death-row
sentencing, it will be full within three years of
completion.
Americans may soon be forced to choose between
retribution for criminals and health care or education
for their children. It may then be hard to tell which is
the greater crime, the sparing of life for those who
have taken it, or the deprivation of opportunity for
those just starting theirs.
Mark
Sommer hosts A World of Possibilities, an
award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program.
(www.aworldofpossibilities.com.). |
