“Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.”
-- Woody Allen
Capital punishment is one of the most controversial topics facing any society. Most of us spend little time thinking about killing our fellow man and really struggle with this question because we are generally ill-equipped to answer about the adequacy or morality so important a use of Justice.
The legal process moves at glacial speed and once a sentence of death is delivered by the Jury, it takes on average of 25 years for appeals to be exhausted before the sentence can be carried out. How can any punishment 25 years after the crime be a deterrent to potential murderers?
The death sentence becomes a bureaucratic process of lawyers trying to 'out-clever' and out-maneuver each other and costing societies millions of dollars while the perpetrator lives at great cost to society in prison waiting for the final answer to his multiple appeals.
There is little return to the society is terms of a decline in violent deaths and there is a huge financial cost, not to mention the further slowing of the justice system.
This is made even more onerous when the possibility of an innocent person being sentenced to death is added to the equation.
Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961).
The time between sentence and crime eliminates Camus' "power of example" argument. The crime has been buried in the past and many equally horrific crimes have taken place since that blur the memory of the society that delivered the sentence.
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Does the execution make us all guilty of the crime we are punishing?
Are we Complicit in murder?
The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?
Roger Ebert, "Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.", Chicago Sun-Times, 4 February 2000
The profound moral question is not, "Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?"
- Helen Prejean
If violence is objectivated institutionally as an expression of a society's collective political will to justice, institutions of violence will necessarily become formative of society.
-- Larry MatteraThe burning of the house of the offender is not a permissible punishment for arson. The rape of the offender is not a permissible punishment of a rapist. Why should murder be a permissible punishment for murder?
Justice Ismail Mahomed, S v Makwanyane, 6 June 1995
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
- Henry Ford
There is No permanent answer because social ideas about capital punishment change constantly.
If we could do away with death, we wouldn’t object; to do away with capital punishment will be more difficult. Were that to happen, we would reinstate it from time to time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, from Makarie’s Archive (1829).
Is death the best punishment versus being forced to live with the horror of the crime committed by the offender?
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
Anton Chekhov, The banker in The Bet, Works, vol. 7, p. 229, “Nauka” <1254>
Lawmaker's Opinion shaded by the humanity of the killer and the harm done to a society that uses the death penalty as a deterrent:
As regards capital cases, the trouble is that emotional men and women always see only the individual whose fate is up at the moment, and neither his victim nor the many millions of unknown individuals who would in the long run be harmed by what they ask.
Moreover, almost any criminal, however brutal, has usually some person, often a person whom he has greatly wronged, who will plead for him. If the mother is alive she will always come, and she cannot help feeling that the case in which she is so concerned is peculiar, that in this case a pardon should be granted.
It was really heartrending to have to see the kinfolk and friends of murderers who were condemned to death, and among the very rare occasions when anything governmental or official caused me to lose sleep were times when I had to listen to some poor mother making a plea for a criminal so wicked, so utterly brutal and depraved, that it would have been a crime on my part to remit his punishment.
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography
Is the death penalty ever considered by the killer when he makes his decision to end the life of his victim? Is it real and tangible enough to stop the murder happening?
I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.
Margaret Thatcher
Are we playing God?
Three things belong to God and do not belong to men: the irrevocable, the irreparable and the indissoluble. Woe to men if they introduce it in their laws!
Victor Hugo, National Constituant Assembly of the French Republic, 15 September 1848
“Laws are rules established by men who are in control of organized violence for the non fulfillment of which those who do not fulfill them are subjected to personal injuries, the loss of liberty, and even capital punishment.” -- Leo Tolstoy
{http://www.capital-punishment.us/view/classic ( an interesting quote source...)}
The repugnance of the act of punishment would dissuade most from voting in favor of capital punishment:
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937
"Money and influence decide who is considered for a parole hearing, what the decision is likely to be and what the Governor's decision is likely to be. It is that, not your behavior in prison that decides your release."
"The application of the death penalty is like a lottery because such a small percentage of murderers get the death penalty- 1 or 2 percent of the thousands who commit homicide every year. And of those receiving death sentences, only a fraction are executed."
-- Helen Prejean The application of the death penalty is like a lottery because such a small percentage of murderers get the death penalty- 1 or 2 percent of the thousands who commit homicide every year. And of those receiving death sentences, only a fraction are executed. Most people think this one or two percent who go to death row must have committed the most heinous, pre meditated, cold-blooded murders, but you see in many, many of these cases panic murders by defendants who have a history of child abuse or have had head injuries or who are mentally retarded, or outright insane.
Source: Wikiquotes
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