Since I was a law student, I have been against the death penalty. It does not deter. It is severely discriminatory against minorities, especially since they’re given no competent legal counsel defense in many cases. It’s a system that has to be perfect. You cannot execute one innocent person. No system is perfect. And to top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics it, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.
RALPH NADER, Meet the Press interview, Jun. 25, 2000
How come life in prison doesn't mean life? Until it does, we're not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of "punishment" for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers.
JESSE VENTURA, I Ain't Got Time to Bleed
The debate over the death penalty has always fascinated me, in a horrific way. I believe our continual controversy and dual implementation/cessation of this practice does reflect our Cartesian world-view. What could be more of a mind/body split than the mindful decision to kill another person's body/mind because of actions committed based on thought?
In my selected quotes, Nader's is obviously more sympathetic, while Ventura is perhaps more 'inhabited by Descartes'. By this I mean Ventura is supporting the appeals to reason and the denigration of the body. If someone has a corrupted, criminal mind, Ventura/Descartes does not have a problem with killing a body based on 'reasonable' jurisdiction.
To this, I propose a counter argument in line with Nader. Our heightened-by-the-media society forces us to choose one side or the other, as involved and informed citizens. Pro or anti death penalty, abortion, etc. In my opinion and to the best of my un-superior knowledge, I find dichotomies between many aspects of arguments concerning the death penalty, since some are based on theoretical or moral ideals, while others are feasible within our flawed contemporary legal system.
Should we have the death penalty because innocent tax payers shouldn't have to pay for murders to live? Ideally, I don't want to pay for criminals to live, but am morally against 'playing God' and choosing life or death for another human being. Applicably, within the confines of our system, I found the following statistics helpful, taken from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf.
The most comprehensive study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million per execution over the costs of sentencing murderers to life imprisonment. (Duke University, May 1993).
Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole.
In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992).
Another question- should the death penalty be implemented for justice, especially that of the victim's family? In my opinion, no, since I follow the sixth commandment. Also, our justice system is for the overall good-victims don't get to decide sentences- killing criminals doesn't bring victims back to life.
This website and others have heated discussion about discrimination within our legal system, and below are quotes I found interesting, all from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf.
From 2000-2007, there has been an average of 5 exonerations per year.
According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 88% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Lacock, 2009)
In 96% of the states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of- victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. (Prof. David Baldus report to the ABA, 1998).
A comprehensive study of the death penalty in North Carolina found that the odds of receiving a death sentence rose by 3.5 times among those defendants whose victims were white. (Prof. Jack Boger and Dr. Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina, 2001).
A study in California found that those who killed whites were over 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks and over 4 times more likely than those who killed Latinos. (Pierce & Radelet, Santa Clara Law Review 2005).
Thoughts?
I'm really glad that you were able to fold the California study into your post because it is my understanding that the race of a "perpetrator" of a crime might matter less on capital punishment cases than the race of the victim. Which I think is an interesting / terrifying fact, particularly given the history of extrajudicial punishments like lynching in the history of the United States.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is a way to say "body" and highlight the fact that people are being killed as an extinguishment of the body, but I also think that life imprisonment does a lot of things to a body (and to a mind as many prisoners live with untreated mental illnesses--are they pre-existing or caused by being locked in a cage) and none of those things are nice.
For example, if you were to look at the mind / body split -- is there any specific outrage over a practice like solitary confinement, that might literally make someone lose their mind, and being on death row? In specific relation to the criminal body, I think that our society as a whole maybe has abandoned both the mind AND the body of certain people.
With that said, I like the part about the purpose of justice in the U.S., which is ostensibly for the social good, and I think it's interesting that Jesse Ventura is the one who brings the social body up (I'd like to say that I saw his last TPT interview and YES, it scared me). Ventura cites the protection of the society at large from murderous people as justification for the death penalty, and Nader focuses on the economic benefits of selected life imprisonment instead.
I am really interested in Nader's response because it is so focused on economics, which connects it with neoliberal ideas. EVERYTHING has an economic value. I think a lot of interesting work could be done about when neoliberal principles apply (like maybe to public employees in Wisconsin) and when they don't (like to criminal bodies). For instance, there is a veritable prison problem in this country--we have SO many people incarcerated. For some of these people, it would be cheaper to actually cut them a monthly check and put them up in an apartment than to incarcerate them...but that isn't even an option that is on the table, right? I'd like to note that I'm talking about nonviolent offenders, who comprise a huge amount of our prison population in the United States. Why don't neoliberal, bottom-line economic principles apply to criminalized bodies? Why are we attached to our current prison system that is premised on putting criminalized bodies into cages and leaving them there? What does it mean that we are willing to put certain bodies in cages and leave them there? I understand that crimes that qualify for the death penalty constitute a class of crimes that we don't want to deal with in society, but most people who are locked in cages by our government have not committed these types of crimes.
I think that the focus on the fact that the system isn't perfect is also very Cartesian. I think that Descartes believed we could create "perfect" conditions and have a perfect knowledge of all things, including criminals. Maybe that is why our legal system is supposed to convict "beyond a shadow of a doubt" (which it almost never does).
This topic is REALLY fascinating and you should stick with it and keep working on it.
My comment doesn’t really have anything to do with the mind body split, but I wanted to comment anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe question about death penalty really comes down to the question, where does our government get its power from? Being born into the state of nature, we give up some of our sovereign rights, so we don’t have to constantly fear for our lives. It’s the social contract. But you cannot give up rights you don’t have. And we don’t have the right to take another persons life, ergo, no democratic country can demonstrate death penalty.
I agree with the previous comment, you should stick to this topic, it's really interesting.