The Death Penalty

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The Death Penalty

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 153 - 155

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The Death Penalty

NOW THAT NEW YORK'S NEW GOVERNOR, George Patald, has come out in favor of the death penalty that Mario Cuomo opposed for so many years, the defenders of murderers have sprung into action. A feature story in the New York Times was headed: "The Rage to Kill Those Who Kill."

The title was a gem. It explained away others' beliefs as mere emotion—"rage"—and created a false moral equivalence. According to the deep thinkers, executing murderers is "repeating the acts that society condemns." Physical equivalence becomes moral equivalence.

If we took this kind of "reasoning" seriously, it would be wrong to take back by force what a robber has seized by force. It would be wrong to imprison someone who had illegally imprisoned someone else. It would be wrong for the police to drive above the speed limit to pursue someone who was speeding.

No ordinary person with common sense confuses physical equivalence with moral equivalence. Only deep thinkers on a crusade do that.

The grand dogma of the opponents of the death penalty is that executions do not deter murder. A 1959 study on which this dogma was based was so crude that it was laughable. But it told the anointed what they wanted to hear.

A more sophisticated study, by Professor Isaac Ehrlich of the University of Chicago, indicated that eight murders were deterred by every execution. The anointed jumped all over him, making all sorts of objections to his statistical methods that they never made against the study that supported their prejudices.

One of the problems with statistical studies on this subject is that the era when executions were common and murder rates were low was also an era of sloppy statistics, with all sorts of "homicides"—including fatal automobile accidents—sometimes being included.

Since the death penalty has applied to premeditated murder, it was never intended to deter automobile accidents. And now that the statistics are better kept, executions are so rare and so long delayed that high statistical correlations are not to be expected.

But we do not require high statistical correlations for most policies on most issues. Moreover, we know that the death penalty definitely deters those who are executed. The fact that this is obvious does not make it any less important.

It is certainly not less important to the families of people murdered by those who have murdered before and who have been turned loose by judges or parole boards, or allowed weekend furloughs by "progressive" prison authorities. Whether these additional murders meet the statisticians' technical definitions of "significance," they are very significant to widows, orphans and the parents of murdered children.

"Life in prison without the possibility of parole" is the grand alternative to execution presented by those who consider words equivalent to reality. But there is nothing to prevent people under such a sentence from being paroled under later laws or later court rulings. Moreover, there is nothing to stop them from escaping or from killing again while in prison.

One of the most dishonest arguments against the death penalty is that it costs more to execute someone than to keep them alive. That may well be true in itself, but it is precisely the kind of people who oppose the death penalty who have promoted all kinds of delaying tactics and judicial rulings that make it possible for even the most clear-cut murder conviction to take more than a decade to end with an execution.

The Supreme Court got us into this legal mess by pretending to find a prohibition or restriction against capital punishment implicit in the Constitution, rather than in the fashionable writings of the anointed. While the 8th Amendment forbids "cruel and unusual punishment," the 5th Amendment—passed at the same time—accepted the legality of the death penalty by saying that it must take place through "due process of law."

This twisting and straining of the law by judges reflects the same influences as the twisting and straining of logic by others among the anointed who, confuse squeamishness with higher morality. More fundamentally, however, the death penalty is another in a long series of issues which provide occasions for moral preening and presumptions of deeper wisdom which lie at the heart of the vision of the anointed—whether the issue is crime, foreign policy, or health care.

Most of those who oppose capital punishment tend to oppose punishment in general and to favor "rehabilitation," getting at the "root causes" of crime and other notions that have failed disastrously and repeatedly.

One of the reasons so many liberal schemes have continued to be defended, long after they have turned out to be counterproductive, is that conceding that a particular policy has been mistaken is not merely a policy issue. Such a damaging admission can bring a whole vision of oneself crashing down in ruins.

Naturally, the anointed resist that bitterly. Unfortunately, others pay the price of this bitter-end resistance to reality.

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13 June 2024