Capital Punishment

I am in favor of capital punishment , though I hasten to add that at the present time, there seem to be insurmountable problems with actually USING capital punishment.

Wikipedia defines capital punishment as “the infliction of death upon a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offence”, which I suppose is as good a definition as any. In recent years, the entire idea of capital punishment has become increasingly controversial, and it has been abolished in many countries and individual US states.

People on both sides of the issue have an almost infinite number of reasons for their positions. Curiously, one of the reasons some Americans oppose capital punishment is that under our present system, it ends up costing much more to execute a convicted criminal than to keep them incarcerated for life.

For me, there are currently TWO good reasons NOT to use capital punishment. The most serious is the fact that our system does not do such a good job of determining guilt or innocence. When a person sentenced to prison is later determined to be innocent, they can be released (which does not make up for wrongly imprisoning them, but it’s better than keeping them in prison). When an executed person is later determined to be innocent, there is no solution. Still, in certain cases, this “guilt or innocence” problem can be overcome. In certain cases there is NO reasonable doubt about guilt.

The more insurmountable problem with capital punishment is harder to put into words. Basically, it is the idea that we need a more serious punishment to hold over the heads of lesser criminals to keep the less serious crimes from becoming more serious ones. For instance, I believe that rape should be a capital offense -- though there is still the problem of separating the innocent from the guilty. However, if the punishment for rape was the same as the punishment for murder, a rapist might conclude that they should go ahead and murder their victim, rather than risk the victim testifying against them.

It is this second problem that may be impossible to overcome. Even if we come up with ways to absolutely separate the guilty from the innocent, we will still need a way to prevent the “smaller” crimes from escalating. If not for this problem, I would favor capital punishment for a shocking variety of lesser crimes.

There is a third serious problem with my visions for capital punishment, but this problem applies to almost all crimes and punishments. Potential criminals must both understand what actions are considered illegal, and realize that they will truly face punishment. As an example, take “speeding”. Currently, most American drivers do not consider driving a few miles per hour over the posted limit to be “speeding”, or at least they do not believe they will be punished for driving a few miles per hour over the posted limit. Personally, I would like this to change, and have the posted speed limit be the ACTUAL “limit” -- the fastest that a person could drive while avoiding punishment. However, I realize that under our current system this would be unfair, since no one is AWARE that they risk punishment for driving 56 miles per hour when the posted “limit” is 55.

The same applies to capital punishment. IF we made shoplifting a capital offense, then people would have to be AWARE that shoplifting was a capital offense. By the way, I am NOT arguing that shoplifting should be a capital offense. However, if there was some way to solve these three problems, I would favor capital punishment for a wide variety of crimes -- many of them malicious rather than serious. For example, if someone deliberately throws a brick through your window, I would consider capital punishment -- IF there was some way to absolutely determine that they were guilty of intentionally doing this maliciously, AND there was some way to keep smaller crimes from escalating into larger ones, AND everyone was AWARE that brick-throwing was a capital offense.

I have not addressed any of the other objections to capital punishment. Basically, my belief is that we presently have too many people on earth, AND we are not very good at actually “rehabilitating” prisoners, and therefore capital punishment, though far from perfect, makes sense on a philosophical level. But I cannot overcome those two problems.

I am left in the awkward position of favoring capital punishment on a philosophical level, but opposing it in many cases unless we come up with a way to overcome those problems. By the way, I am basically okay with those few cases in which our society currently uses capital punishment, since I am fairly certain those particular people have actually been proven guilty.

Truth is complicated.