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By John Yoakum.
In a roundabout way, the op-ed from John M. Crisp makes the good point that capital punishment is not a good idea. It does not do what its proponents want it to do. It doesn’t restore victims or deter capital murder. And all murders are heinous, not just some chosen because their cases are easier to win. Why pursue cases from 30-40 years ago? We have plenty of crime today. Use scarce resources for that.
In Arizona, we’ve put 10 people on death row who never committed the crime. Too many appeals? We only allow the appeals required by law and our Constitution. The death penalty is plenty more expensive than life in prison without any chance of parole.
No state has earned the right to kill its own people.
John M. Crisp: Another Good Reason to Abolish Capital Punishment
Our world never runs short of images and stories that reflect the cruelty and misery that humans are capable of inflicting upon one other.
According to the United Nations, 84 million world citizens have been forcibly displaced from their homes and are suffering from the desperation of life as refugees. In Afghanistan, a million children under the age of 5 could die of starvation by the end of the year. China has forced 2 million people into concentration camps, has subdued Hong Kong and threatens to invade Taiwan.
Around 25,000 people die of hunger every day. Child labor, slavery, forced marriages and honor killings are common in parts of the world. In many places, homosexuality is a crime with severe penalties.
Tribalism and autocracy are on the rise. In short, despite humanity’s significant advances, our world resides on an unstable, semi-civilized crust that is in constant danger of cracking beneath us and exposing what Tennyson called the “natural” world, “red in tooth and claw.”
And this is what we’re seeing in Ukraine:
- A democratic country is being attacked by a brutal dictator who is completely unrestrained by scruples over atrocities against civilians.
- The war is testing Ukraine’s capacity to absorb the heartbreaking brutality of modern warfare.
- Old people, children, and even pregnant women, are being indiscriminately targeted by Russian rockets and artillery.
But if one follows the war in Ukraine closely, everything begins to reflect through its lens. Here’s an example:
On March 12, Saudi Arabia staged a mass execution. The details are sketchy, but it’s very likely that the 81 victims were beheaded, possibly in a public event. Saudi Arabia does not decapitate with the comparatively humane guillotine of the French Revolution. Instead, victims are beheaded with a sword — if they’re lucky — or with a knife. It’s a brutal, grisly, painful process.
Critics of this mass decapitation argue that many of its 81 victims were executed for political offenses rather than for violent crimes. Allegedly some were tortured and tried in secret. A disproportionate number were Shiites, suggesting a sectarian bias among the Sunni executioners.
Due process was undoubtedly in short supply. But despite these judicial failures, it’s the image of the grisly decapitation of 81 human beings that should stun us. This is the sort of violence that reminds us that our culture, whatever its flaws, is better than the autocracies of Saudi Arabia, Russia or China.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the essential champion of a liberal world order (with a small “l”) that aspires to advance the most civilized values that humanity has developed so far:
- Democracy, individual rights, free elections, equality before the law, inclusion, tolerance, maybe even compassion.
- The war in Ukraine and the mass execution in Saudi Arabia remind us of how fragile these values are.
- Russia’s attack is a belligerent expression of the philosophical conflict between the liberal world order and the brutality that lies just beneath the surface.
So why are we still executing people in our country? Considerable evidence indicates that capital punishment has no deterrent effect, we’ve never figured out how to apply it without regard to race or economic class and undoubtedly we sometimes execute innocent people.
But in a larger framework, it should concern us that we are the last country in the West that carries out state-sanctioned killings, traveling in the dubious company of autocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Certainly, we don’t commit such savageries as beheadings, but several states still use the electric chair and four states permit execution by firing squad. In some states, hanging is still legal. The war in Ukraine represents a clash between savagery and a superior liberal world order. The United States is on the right side of this conflict, and it’s a distinction between two world views that is worth fighting for. But democracy and its values require constant recommitment and renewal.
We could begin by refusing to allow the state to put people to death on our behalf.
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