It's Debatable: Death penalty: Necessary or evil?

July 14, 2013: Vaughn Ross is scheduled to be executed July 18 for a 2001 double homicide in Lubbock. Texas recently executed its 500th prisoner. This week, Arnold Loewy and Don May debate the death penalty. Don writes an independent blog for lubbockonline.com and Arnold is the George Killiam Professor of Law at Texas Tech University School of Law.

Don: Capital punishment is a necessary and vital component of a civilized society. The primary purpose of the death penalty is to rid a society of violent criminals so they will have no further opportunities to harm others.

Liberal parole boards, judges, governors and presidents are quick to release violent criminals for almost any reason and often push to return criminals to the street as soon as possible. Execution dates are delayed for as long as possible, with the continued pursuit of reprieve.

Imprisonment without execution gives criminals the continued hope of a parole, an early release, a pardon or even a chance to escape.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a law in March 2011 banning any further convicted criminal executions. He also commuted the sentences of death row inmates to life sentences without the possibility of parole or release.

Quinn wanted to make sure a future conservative governor would not have the chance to execute anyone currently on death row.

He offered this excuse for signing the bill, “I have found no credible evidence that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on the crime of murder and that the enormous sums expended by the state in maintaining a death penalty system would be better spent on preventing crime and assisting victims’ families in overcoming pain and grief.”

The death penalty is indeed a deterrent. Executed criminals no longer pose a danger to civilized society. No executed criminal has ever committed another crime.

Liberals claim Judeo-Christian theology mandates criminals be forgiven and not executed. This is not the case, and liberals dance around the issue hoping conservatives do not understand the Bible.

The words of Genesis 9:6 tell us why murderers should be executed, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For God made man in His own image.”

There is no record Christ ever said thieves and murderers should not be executed. Christ did not tell the thieves being crucified with him they did not deserve to die.

Executions are the only way to eliminate the worst criminals. Murderers, rapists, armed robbers, child molesters, terrorists and other doers of evil are permanently eliminated when executed, never again to commit another atrocity.

Executions ensure a liberal judge, governor, president or parole board will not release a dangerous criminal back into society in the future.

Criminal executions should be swift, frequent and inexpensive.

Arnold: Whatever else might be said for or against capital punishment, it most certainly is not “a necessary and vital component of a civilized society.”

Almost every society other than the United States that we consider civilized have abolished the death penalty (e.g., Canada, Australia, England, France, and Germany.)

And all of these countries have a significantly lower homicide rate than we do. Indeed, there have been times when they have refused to return a fugitive from justice out of fear he will be subject to capital punishment.

As for Governor Quinn’s observations, they are absolutely true. There is neither credible evidence nor logic to believe the death penalty deters murderers.

If there were, it would be hard to explain the lower murder rate in countries that do not have capital punishment and even the generally lower murder rate in the U.S. among states that have abolished capital punishment as opposed to Texas and Florida, which are among the leaders in both their murder and execution rates.

The governor was also quite correct in regard to the cost of maintaining capital punishment. During the recent economic crisis, some states have abolished capital punishment in the name of fiscal conservatism.

Dr. May’s explanation of why he thinks the death penalty is a deterrent goes to the issue of restraint, not deterrence. He is quite correct an executed offender (or for that matter a wrongly convicted innocent) will not offend in the future.

The question is whether such restraint is necessary given the cost of capital punishment. I suggest it’s not. We have a super-max prison in Colorado where we send the worst of the worst offenders (e.g. shoe bomber Richard Reid).

So far as I am aware, no one has ever escaped from that prison or harmed an innocent person outside.

Given we do sometime convict innocent persons, such as Timothy Cole, it seems to me those supporting capital punishment have the burden of proving some good will come from the administration of capital punishment that would not come from life without parole.

Frankly, I have difficulty finding any, and certainly none that’s worth the risk that, under our fallible system, some day a state official will have to tell a mother: “We’re terribly sorry we executed your son, who we now know was innocent.”

Don: There is no evidence even a single innocent person has been executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated. If there were, the left would remind us at every opportunity.

Even though innocent people are sent to prison, that is no reason to close our prisons and to release dangerous criminals into society. Most releases from death row have been on legal technicalities. As far as is known, those who were innocent of a capital crime have consistently been identified and released by the legal appeals system in place.

The left tries to equate the physical act of a criminal murdering a victim with the physical act of the state executing the murderer and uses this “equivalence” as a reason to end the death penalty.

While each act of killing may be a physical equivalence, there is no moral equivalence because the state is removing a violent menace from society.

A life sentence without parole for a violent criminal is not equivalent to executing the criminal. With a life sentence without parole, the condemned has no reason to avoid killing other prisoners, guards and prison employees, as he already has the maximum sentence allowed by law.

Many Europeans describe the death penalty as a barbaric ancient relic with a thirst for vengeance.

Such feelings ignore the barbaric and evil nature of crimes deserving of the death penalty, deny the value of the lives of the victims and their families, and elevate the importance of the criminal above that of the victims.

The claim Britain and other European countries have fewer violent crimes than the United States is a myth.

Eurostat, the European Commission’s database, revealed a “77 percent increase in murders, robberies, assaults and sexual offenses in the UK” between 1997 and 2009.

Violent crime has increased 67 percent in France over the past decade, with a rate of 504 violent crimes per 100,000 population.

There are more than 2,000 violent crimes a year per 100,000 population in the UK and 1,677 per 100,000 population in Austria.

The violent crime rate continues to decrease in the United States, with the 2011 FBI Crime Statistics report listing “386.3 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants.”

Opinion polls show the American people favor capital punishment by more than 2 to 1, with 67 percent favoring the death penalty and only 28 percent opposing.

Research has shown racial minorities have been treated fairly when it comes to the death penalty. Research from Emory University has shown “capital punishment has a strong deterrent effect; each execution results, on average, in 18 fewer murders.”

A polite and safe society is well-armed and eliminates its violent criminals.

Arnold: Although it is true that current system has worked to save many innocents from execution (e.g. Juan Melendez, a former guest speaker at one of my symposia, who spoke after being released from death row in Florida after spending 20 years there for a crime of which he was eventually found to be innocent), the system advocated by Dr. May would not.

Under his view, trials should be swift, and the appeals process short.

Under his system, we would not tolerate saving an innocent man from death if it took 20 years to establish his innocence.

Thus, instead of riveting my audience with his harrowing story of surviving the process, he’d be dead, and Dr. May would continue to claim there is no proof we have ever executed an innocent person because the proof wouldn’t be there. Who spends time trying to prove a dead man is actually innocent?

Have we ever executed an innocent person under the current system? Well one cannot be sure, but I do know that a few years ago we executed a man from Texarkana named Willingham, who had been convicted of murder of his three children by burning down their house with them in it.

We later learned that the evidence upon which the arson/murder was predicated was junk science and totally unreliable. Nevertheless the state of Texas went through with his execution, evidently believing in his guilt despite the lack of evidence to prove it.

So, was he innocent? Who knows? The only thing we know for sure is there was no credible evidence to prove him guilty.

Any thought victims’ families are better off with capital punishment is belied by the evidence.

In jurisdictions that do not have the death penalty, family members typically feel vindicated when their loved one’s killer receives life in prison. But in jurisdictions with the death penalty (e.g. Texas), frequently a jury verdict of life (which is more common than death) causes the victim’s family to believe that his/her life was undervalued.

Finally, those studies which show for every execution there are a certain number of lives saved (one says 8, another says 18) have been debunked by other studies as methodologically flawed.

Indeed, if they were true, it would be hard to know why the murder rate is as high as it is in Texas and Florida. So, I am inclined to credit those studies which challenge the life-saving power of capital punishment as flawed.

So, because capital punishment is not a meaningful deterrent, is fiscally irresponsible, and is administered by us, flawed human beings, it should be abolished immediately. 

Courtesy: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal