Give Me The Death Penalty But Don’t Give Me Death
November 13th, 2007 John McG
Posted in death penalty, Uncategorized |
In an article examining death penalty practices, Dahlia Lithwick concludes:
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor and expert on lethal injection, highlights this same political inertia in a recent article in the Fordham Law Review (PDF). State death-penalty procedures are screwed up because while courts and lawmakers want to be tough on the death penalty, they don’t want to dirty their hands with execution.
I think this somewhat charitable notion of what motivate death penalty advocates is about right — people aren’t so much interested in extracting a pound of flesh from the criminal som much as sending the strongest signal possible that society condemns the act. Since we’ve applied long prison sentences to actions much less abhorrent than murder, the death penalty seems to be the only way to do that.
So, we hand out lots of death sentences, but don’t execute many people. But we live with this stigma og having the death penalty. And in order for it to have meaning, we actually do have to execute someone once in a while. But executing only a few people means that it will be somewhat arbitrary and disciminatory. And there’s always the risk of executing an innocent person.
Leaving the question — is there a way to signal a singular abhorrence of murder without these negative consequences?
I say yes — with life prison sentences, but this would require rolling back sentences for things like drug dealing, which probably isn’t a political winner.
