I was thinking about a statistic I had seen the other day about how only a little over 1/3 of Americans believe that the death penalty is immoral and should be removed from the justice system. I find it actually quite appalling, since I happen to be a staunch opponent of the death penalty for a number of reasons. It is for this reason that I’m writing this article. I hope that some people will read it and have it open their eyes to the complete foolishness of the death penalty.

I believe there are two types of individuals in this issue. People that have really thought about it, and people that haven’t (or won’t). People that have really thought hard about it may have originally been for it, or following some chain events, came to analyze the mounds of sociological evidence and decided against it. Or rather, they carefully examined the reasoning behind their morality, and found it to be contradictory. Those who haven’t thought about it usually have some pretty shallow justifications for their beliefs. Beliefs that are not ground in morality or logic, but in raw emotion. Unfortunately for them, raw emotion doesn’t make you right or rational.

So what I’m going to do is this. I’m going to prove that if you believe in the death penalty, you are irrational (meaning you aren’t using logic in your argument and therefore your argument is not valid), and furthermore, I’m going to prove that you don’t care about anyone but yourself. In short, I’m going to try and make you look like a bad person. If you don’t support the death penalty, then you have nothing to worry about. Don’t believe me…follow carefully. Oh and I promise to be a little less bias in the rest of the article.

Why do we kill?

Why do we kill criminals? Because they deserve it! I don’t mean to be so tongue in cheek about it, but that IS why. When you ask someone if they support the death penalty, the most frequent response is that they do because it’s justice (or they deserve it, or they are murderers, etc). So let’s frame the argument here using basic logic everyone should know from high school. We’ll start with one basic fact:

Killing is wrong.

But is that true? No! It isn’t true — at least it isn’t quite that simple. We kill for a lot of things, killing is a part of life. We hunt, we farm (kill plants), we kill bugs, but most people wouldn’t consider all those things wrong (some do — but for this we’ll throw a broad lasso). Generally we think killing things that feel pain is wrong, or at least things that have a higher sense of awareness. For the basis of our argument, we’ll concern ourselves only with that which relates to the death penalty. The death penalty is considered the “ultimate punishment” for the “ultimate crime”, which is killing another human being. So in the legal and moral sense, we should be able to revise the above statement to say the following:

Killing a human being is wrong. (a)

Unless it is for self-defense or in defense of another. (caveat 1)

Ok, that’s sounds about right, right? I think almost everyone would agree on that statement. It’s certainly what the legal system plainly says. Murder is punished, unless its in self-defense, in which case it is OK (not punished). It makes pretty good sense, it’s not right to kill somebody…but if you are about to be killed you have the right to try and stop an attacker from killing you. This system promotes violence only when necessary to save life (unfortunately, people are not always nice and will tend to use any justification for killing). Moving on then, we know that murder fits this definition. It is the pre-meditated killing of a human being, and it is not in self-defense (but rather for some other purpose: money, greed, lust, revenge). Ok, so murder is bad…we got it. What about the death penalty?

The death penalty is the killing of a human being.

So, then by (a), the next statement logically follows:

The death penalty is wrong, unless it is in self-defense or in defense of another.

We should then, based on this definition (a), be able to say that the Death Penalty is OK if it is in self-defense, or in defense of another. In fact, if you can’t prove this (that isn’t for self-defense), you start to see that your entire moral case starts to fall apart (unless, of course, you are ignorant…in which case you can continue to ignore all evidence against the things you believe in). So can we prove that the Death Penalty is in self-defense? All we need is proof that it usually prevents deaths. Is there any?

The short answer: NO!

Continue on the next page for the long answer, but don’t lose track of our argument so far.

Effects of the Death Penalty.

We could say that the Death Penalty was used in self-defense if it fit either of the two following conditions:

1. Necessarily stops people from being killed, that would otherwise be killed by the person facing the penalty.
2. The death penalty acts as a deterrent on crimes and stops others from committing murder (though this is morally ambiguous at best, we’ll include it as satisfying the definition).

The first point here is clearly not true. Incarcerating an individual for life is just as effect in societal protection as the death penalty. In the era of high security prisons, the probability of escape is fairly low. Don’t believe me? You can read the following article with data from 1998 (the most recent data I could find). You can also skip it and i’ll summarize for you.

http://www.slate.com/id/1007001/

According, less than .5% of prisoners escape from prison and most of them are from low security prisons where prisoners just walk out. In maximum security prisons, the rate is even lower. The important fact is stated plainly though:  if you escape you are usually recovered and placed back in jail. Only in 1994 were there more escapee’s than recaptured (to be fair, I can’t give data for the past 10 years, but in the study the number of escapee’s had declined every year). And if you are wondering about federal prisons, only one person escaped from a federal prison in 1999 (out of 115,000 federal prisoners). This was the only prisoner to escape federal prison in the previous 4 years. Oh and he was recaptured the same year.

So let’s recap what we’ve learned. We don’t need to kill people to keep society safe. Now people ask…isn’t it more expensive to keep someone in jail their whole life? Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to kill them? You forget that in our justice system we have such a thing as a court. In court, you are entitled to something called a lawyer. That lawyer tries his best to win the case…even after he loses it the first time (that’s called  an appeal). All-in-all it’s estimated that death penalty costs 38% more (source). So why am I paying extra money to kill somebody when I’d be just as safe keeping them in jail?

If I’m lucky, maybe it’ll turn out that my 38% increase in crime tax will turn out to act as a deterrent to crime. Turns out I’m wrong. It turns out that the average murder rate in states without the death penalty is lower than states with the death penalty. The same is also true of countries with/without the death penalty (source). Actually, if you read around you’ll actually find an interesting report. There isn’t a single case in the United States where a reinstatement of the death penalty as led to a decrease in murder rate. Not One. Ironically, it increases murder rate, because even if you haven’t changed the number of innocent people murdered, you are murdering criminals since this evidence clearly shows that the death penalty is not justifiable by (a). Oh yeah, (a), that pesky little thing — what did we say that was? Oh yeah:

Killing a human being is wrong. (a)

So why do we need to kill people to punish them for murder? It has 0 net benefits to society. In fact the only benefit I can see is that it tends to quench the thirst for revenge of the victim’s family. But anyone who has been in 2nd grade knows that revenge isn’t right, it usually serves no purpose and hardly ever benefits you. Certainly, it’s not the governments job to facilitate that revenge. The job of government is to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals and to protect society. Since the death penalty does none of those, it doesn’t fall under the power of government (but like many things, they do it anyway).

As a humanist, I tend to look for logical reasons for supporting my beliefs. I don’t agree with the death penalty because logic dictates that I shouldn’t. Empathy dictates that I shouldn’t. So I don’t.

Here’s the problem. If you think murder is bad, then you can’t punish it by killing someone. If you could, the person’s loved ones would have a right to kill you. If you believe murder is wrong than you have to use killing as an absolute last result, when no alternative exist, otherwise you yourself become the murderer.