The Hunger for the Ultimate Punishment | Should We Have the Death Penalty? | Part 1
Should We Have the Death Penalty? Part I of a three-part investigation.
The Hunger for the Ultimate Punishment:
There is a particular silence that follows the worst kinds of news. It is the silence of a country reading the same headline at the same hour, holding the same thought without speaking it. Someone did something so far outside the boundaries of imaginable horror that it discombobulates the ordinary proceedings of justice itself. And then, almost without choosing, almost as if the word arrives from somewhere older than thought, it surfaces. A word on the internet, a news debate, or public forums. Kill them.
This is the question the death penalty asks of every society that keeps it. It is not, in the end, a question about the worst people. It is a question about us. About what we want when something unbearable happens. About what we believe punishment is for. About whether the difference between justice and revenge is one we can still see when we have been shortsighted by impulse.
The case for capital punishment is at its strongest in the cases hardest to look at. Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 168 people, including nineteen children in a daycare on the second floor. He was unrepentant. He referred to the dead children as collateral damage.
This sheer nature of this statement horrified the public a little more than it infuriated them.
The sole thought of such people living amongst us is enough to bring to mind a plethora of thoughts, which more often than not are led by emotions, as to what should the punishment be for such "people."
However, when the federal government executed him in June 2001, the first federal execution in nearly four decades, even longtime opponents of capital punishment struggled to find their voice. If anyone deserves the ultimate punishment, the argument runs, it is him. To say otherwise is to flatten the magnitude of what was done into something smaller than the act itself.
Immanuel Kant, writing in 1797, argued that even a society dissolving itself must, before it parts, execute its last murderer, so that the moral weight of the killing would not fall back on the citizens who refused to act. The intuition behind this is that punishment is not primarily a tool of social engineering. It is an expression. It speaks, in the most authoritative voice a community has, that the victim's life mattered. That the act will not be allowed to stand as the final word on what they were worth.
This is the victim-centered argument at its most honest. It is not bloodthirst. It is the refusal to let the killer have the last sentence in the story.
But the same argument carries its own problem inside it, and the problem is older than Kant. It is the problem the eighteenth-century Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria identified in 1764, in the small book that began the modern abolition movement. Beccaria did not deny that some crimes were monstrous. He denied that the state, by killing in response, did anything other than imitate the killer with paperwork. The death penalty, he wrote, is a war of a nation against a citizen. No nation, he argued, has been authorized to wage it.
The difficulty for any modern reader is that both writers were describing the same act. One saw justice. The other saw vengeance dressed in the robes of the law. The execution itself does not tell you which it is. Only the people watching can decide.
This is why the question keeps returning. It is not a question that data will settle, because at its root it is not a data question. It is a question about what kind of society writes its punishments down.
Public outrage after grievous crimes is real, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. After the December 2012 Delhi gang rape that killed a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, Indian crowds filled the streets demanding execution. The four men responsible were hanged in March 2020, more than seven years later, after appeals and mercy petitions and public exhaustion. The crime was so brutal that India expanded its capital sentencing for sexual offenses despite the recommendation of its own Justice Verma Committee against the move. The country was grieving and furious. The law followed the grief.
It is worth asking, carefully, what that following actually does. Does it heal? The largest empirical study to ask the question, conducted by Marilyn Peterson Armour and Mark Umbreit at the University of Minnesota, compared families of murder victims in death-penalty states with families in life-without-parole states. The results were not what the death penalty's defenders predicted. Families in the death-penalty states reported worse psychological and physical outcomes, partly because the appeals process kept the killer's name in the news for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. The promised closure never came. The wound was reopened with every hearing.
This does not invalidate the moral intuition that some crimes deserve the strongest available answer. It complicates the practical claim that execution is what families need. The two are not the same.
So the case for the death penalty, presented at full strength, looks something like this. A society that refuses to kill its worst killers is a society that has decided, in advance, that no act, however monstrous, can fully forfeit the protections of the political community. That is a defensible position. It is also a position that asks a great deal of the people standing closest to the body.
The defenders of capital punishment are correct about one thing the abolitionists sometimes miss. There are crimes for which life imprisonment, fairly considered, can feel like an evasion. The killers of the Oklahoma City children, of the Delhi student, did something the ordinary apparatus of justice was not designed to hold. To pretend otherwise is to lie to the reader.
But here the argument turns. It turns the way a hallway turns in an old building, into a corridor you did not know was there. Granting that some people, in the abstract retributive sense, deserve death is not the same as granting that any actual courtroom, in any actual country, can be trusted to identify them correctly, sentence them without bias, and kill them without killing the wrong person by mistake.
The question is no longer whether the worst killers deserve to die.
The question is whether the rest of us are good enough to decide.
By Karma Gray, Editor-in-Chief, The Crime Ledger
Karma Gray is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Crime Ledger (crimeledger.org), an independent criminology publication dedicated to analytical, non-sensationalist crime coverage. For more criminology analysis, criminal psychology research, and crime reporting, visit crimeledger.org.
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