I promise, this is one of the few times where I’ll get political. I usually leave that to my husband – he’s the true politico in the family, and when he gets his own blog, you guys can argue with him until you all get carpal tunnel syndrome.
But something’s been bothering me ever since I heard that Clarence Ray Allen was slated to be put to death in California. The death penalty is one of those issues that’s always made me queasy, because I can see both sides of it. The very idea seems so Hammurabian, yet in what circumstances is it to be used, if at all?
For killing all those children, I thought justice was well served when Timothy McVeigh was taken out (although if justice was really well served, I would have strapped a suicide belt around him, rolled him into a field and blew him up). And John Mohammed deserves his fate - he was hunting people, for chrissakes. (Yet prison officials in August were ordered to force feed him following a hunger strike, to keep him alive so they could kill him. Huh?) And Scott Peterson, for killing his wife and the viable fetus of his child, has also earned his fate.
Yet the threat of death does not seem to be a deterrent to crime, and with newer DNA techniques what if we find out we’ve killed a lot of innocent people? But on the flip side, why do these people deserve to live? (if you can call being in prison with no hope of parole a life) Especially if it’s pretty clear that they are sociopaths who, when given the opportunity, probably would kill again? Why are some people’s lives more punishable for the taking than others? How can we justify paying for the upkeep of murderers into perpetuity when so many of our own children go to bed hungry at night? When our army is not adequately paid or armed?
But in the case of Clarence Ray Allen, a Choctaw Indian (for some reason, probably to show another example that it’s mostly minorities who get the death penalty, the press thought it important to report that he was a Choctaw Indian) I think the taking of his life was merciful. Here is a 75-year-old man with a long history of crime, already in prison for the murder of his son’s 17-year-old girlfriend in 1974 (At 40, he and his gang had committed a robbery and was afraid that his son’s girlfriend would tell police), then he compounds his crimes in 1980 by ordering members of his gang to murder three more people. He’s in a wheelchair; he’s blind and diabetic. He had a heart attack in September, was revived and sent back to death row. (again, revived so they could kill him)
Yet his lawyers were arguing up until the last that it would be “cruel and unusual punishment” to put this frail man to death. I can’t get into the guy’s head, but I’d imagine that under the circumstances of his health, on death row with the sword of Damocles dangling over his head every single day, I’d just as soon take the needle and have it done with.
And with what prison guards described as a “jovial” Allen’s final words, “this is a good day to die,” possibly he agreed with me.
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3 comments:
Deserve life? Many who live deserve death, Frodo... and some who die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to mete out death.
Actually, that really doesn't say anything, but I've always liked the passage.
Why do human beings 'deserve life'? I don't know. I guess it's the social equivalent of an article of faith. We live in a pretty bleak world; if you want to make people 'earn' continued existence, you're making it a lot bleaker.
Or, to put it another way, if being a truly civilized civilization requires me to pay some taxes to support some people at a subsistence level of no-comfort for however long they can live in a stone box, I'm okay with that.
I used to say I have no moral objection to capital punishment, my problems were pragmatic, with a highly imperfect justice system. Nowadays, though, I simply think that to have the state coldly and clinically put one of its citizens to death... to murder one of its citizens... it's just barbaric and savage and it dehumanizes us all a little bit more whenever it happens. It makes our culture just a little bit coarser and meaner. I'd rather we didn't do it; I'd prefer to be a citizen of a merciful state than a ruthless one.
That's an emotional argument, but it's an emotional issue.
Which is why the issue makes me queasy. I appreciate and thank you for your argument; all opinions are welcome here.
I'm not "pro" death penalty except for the very fewest cases; most involving the murder of children. But the death penalty system as we have it now is possibly as barbaric and savage as putting criminals to death in the first place: to leave these people waiting for their death sentence for ten, twenty, thirty years? And definitely cruel to snatch them from death so they can be killed later. Only when we all get justice can we be truly civilized. I know that's kind of a circular argument but you're right, it's an emotional and not entirely rational issue.
I'm of two minds on this subject.
On the one hand, I do believe that there are some crimes, especially those committed against children, that should be punished by death, and that the state should protect its law-abiding citizens from the people who commit these crimes, and ensure that they never commit them again in the only 100% guaranteed way, death.
On the other hand, ours is an imperfect world, and our justice system is no more perfect than the rest of it, and in fact is highly susceptible to tyranny. As such, giving it the power of life and death over the citizenry does not sit well with me. I'd much rather that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man die.
As things stand, I oppose the death penalty. Humans are not perfect, and in matters of life and death, mistakes are intolerable. You can release a man from prison, you can't bring him back from the dead.
If the standards under which a capital conviction were changed to require absolute physical evidence, eyewitnesses, photographic evidence, etc... I might change my stance, but it is absolutely unacceptable to me that a man can be killed based upon circumstantial evidence.
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