The Federal Government murdered a man this morning, for the first time in almost two decades. While murder is illegal for the average person to commit, it isn’t for the government and that should give one pause. I will state at the outset that I believe the Constitution of the United States pretty clearly states that murdering someone as punishment for a crime is not allowed:
Article [VIII] (Amendment 8 – Further Guarantees in Criminal Cases)
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
What can be crueler or more unusual punishment than the taking of one’s life? It is telling that the prohibition against it is in the same sentence as prohibiting excessive bail or fines. It’s almost as if it were an obvious limitation to the powers of the government against the people, yet we have and continue to inflict the most heinous possible punishment across the land.
Twenty-eight states today allow citizens to be murdered by the state for certain crimes. In cases before Supreme Courts across the country, the death penalty has been ruled unconstitutional:
- In 1979, the Supreme Court of Rhode Island held that the state’s statute imposing a mandatory death sentence for an inmate who killed a fellow prisoner was unconstitutional. The legislature repealed the law and removed it from the state criminal code in 1984.
- In 2004, the New York Court of Appeals held that a portion of the state’s death penalty law was unconstitutional. In 2007, the court ruled that its prior holding applied to the last remaining person on the state’s death row. The legislature has voted down attempts to restore the statute.
- In March 2009, New Mexico voted to abolish the death penalty. However, the repeal was not retroactive, leaving two people on the state’s death row. The New Mexico Supreme Court vacated those sentences on June 28, 2019 and ordered the two prisoners be resentenced to life in prison.
- In April 2012, the Connecticut legislature voted to abolish the death penalty for future crimes. By its terms, the repeal law did not affect the status of the 11 prisoners then on the state’s death row. The Connecticut Supreme Court subsequently ruled in August 2015 that the death penalty violated the state constitution. The Court reaffirmed that holding in May 2016 and reiterated that the state’s remaining death row prisoners must be resentenced to life without possibility of parole.
- On August 2, 2016, the Delaware Supreme Court held that the state’s capital sentencing procedures were unconstitutional and struck down Delaware’s death penalty statute. On August 15, the Delaware Attorney General’s office announced that it will not appeal the Supreme Court’s ruling. Whether the Supreme Court’s decision applies to the 13 people facing active death sentences is still unknown.
- On October 11, 2018, the Washington Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional, saying that it was applied in an arbitrary and racially discriminatory manner.
- In May 2019, the New Hampshire legislature voted to abolish the death penalty. However, the repeal was not retroactive, leaving one person on the state’s death row.
Yet somehow, as a nation, we still persist in this barbaric practice. Not withstanding the legality, which some continue to debate, I want to move on to why philosophically, I think it’s not even the right form of punishment for any crime, whether a given state deems it legal or not.
When we consider that someone’s crimes are so egregious, so horrific, that only killing them would be the appropriate remedy, we are reacting to a primitive base instinct of revenge. Yet killing the criminal will not undo the crime, nor will it remove the heartache and suffering of those affected by the crime. That pain will continue, only now adding more people to the list of sufferers; the family and loved ones of the criminal.
The criminal who was executed no longer suffers imprisonment and the loss of their freedom. They no longer suffer the harsh realities of a life spent in prison, with no hope for a better future. They no longer have to live with the burden of what they have done, or suffer the mental anguish it carries. They are gone. No longer conscious to experience anything at all. They have been freed of their torment, leaving only their family and friends to suffer instead.
Human beings cannot imagine a state of nothingness. Our brains just can’t process it. But if you try to remember what it was like before you were born, you can get an idea of what it would be like. Death is hardest on the living. We are inflicted with the arguably cruel and unusual burden of knowing we will die, and fear of death is much worse than actually being dead. When we see the painful agony of people grieving over the death of another, we empathize with their sorrow and conclude that death is the horror we cannot escape. We are shocked when we hear that someone young has died, or that a beloved figure has died, and this pain we feel is sympathy for the deceased and yet another look in the mirror at the inevitable end of our own lives. So the idea of death feels in point of fact, like punishment. But the deceased over whom we agonize isn’t sharing in the agony. They aren’t even aware they are the source of our pain. They aren’t conscious of the impact of their lives or their death upon anyone. They’ve been removed from the equation and are spared the pain we all endure in the wake of their passing. To end the life of a criminal relieves them of the punishment we as a society meant to inflict.
Life in prison without the possibility of parole is the harshest sentence a society can impose upon a person, and it should be reserved for the truly heinous conduct that has no extenuating circumstances. The only thing that keeps this punishment from being cruel and unusual in my view, is the possibility that it can be reversed if it was found that we erred in our conviction. We can’t do that if we killed them, and just in the last few decades, 170 people who were sentenced to die for their crimes were exonerated of those crimes.
The only humane thing we can do as a society, is to stop inflicting more suffering on the living than life already doles out on its own. We cannot allow the collective representation of our ideals that we call The State to be given the right to choose to end one of our lives.
Joe's Blog 