Who Deserves to Die?

A year ago, during the awful lead-up to and then even more awful execution of Troy Davis, I started thinking about the death penalty. And now, as Texas sets itself to execute (another) cognitively deficient man, I'm thinking about it again.

What is a "death penalty?" Killing someone for a crime committed. Lots of people find such punishment appropriate: "An eye for an eye," goes the refrain of the religious who support it; "Some people just can't be trusted," say the less Biblically minded. In essence, a death penalty is a judgment of irredeemability. Killing someone for a crime necessarily means that society has judged that person incapable of rehabilition; they will never be a functioning member of society, and therefore must be removed from it so as to prevent further harm.

You might be able to guess that I am not a supporter of the death penalty. I find the idea of judging someone beyond redemption a horrific display of hubris and privilege that leaves me sick to my stomach. Of course, as soon as I start to talk with anyone about my moral objections to the death penalty, they'll inevitably come up with one scenario or another for which I have no good rejoinder. The expense of keeping people behind bars (if we quit locking people up for years for non-violent offenses, the cost of locking up violent offenders would be much more tolerable), the danger to other members of the prison population posed by certain offenders (sociopaths are a thing I really have no solution for), the inherent inhumanity of a lifetime of isolated confinement in an 8 by 8 space (a point made eloquently to me by a man that vowed to get himself shot before being locked up again; I think he meant it, too).

I don't have practical solutions to these issues. All I have is the absolute conviction that killing people is wrong. And it is just as wrong to kill someone that has killed someone else as it is for that person to kill someone else in the first place. The practical issues of human beings being awful to each other are messy, but the morality of it is crystal-clear to me: killing people is wrong. Full stop.

So what does it say about us, as a society, that we have authorized the state to validate our own worst impulses and kill people? What does it say about us that we suffer a governing principle that does not demand of us to better ourselves, but rather allows us to close our eyes and stop up our ears like children frightened of something in the dark? Because desire to hurt another being always stems from fear.

It says nothing flattering about us, to be sure. It says we will suffer stagnation. It says that we, as a culture, refuse to move beyond fear and reactionary retribution.

And I can't help but draw corollaries between state-sponsored execution and vigilantism and mass murders. We continue to grant the state this power of life and death over its citizens because we will not let go of the idea that we ought to have the power of life and death over each other. The different, scary Other deserves to die, and we will be the instrument of death if no one else steps up, it is our RIGHT to extract pounds of flesh and harvest souls.

Yes, I know that generally sane, well-adjusted people don't tend to be the ones that take up arms and kill people. But that's the point, isn't? Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing. Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't kill other people. So why are we, collectively, killing people left and right? We must not be generally sane, or well-adjusted. Perhaps we should do something about that.

A culture that continues to hold that there are people that deserve to be killed will continue to breed Loughner's and Holmes' and Page's.