On Executions

On Executions:

Captain's Quarters has posted a remarkable argument from economic principles in favor of the death penalty. CQ is itself opposed to the proposition, but was impressed enough by this letter to post it in full.

Suppose we have a career criminal with a long record of violent felonies, what we in California would call a "three-striker", who knows that he will be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he is ever caught committing a new offense. When he goes to rob the local convenience store, he doesn't want to hurt anyone - he just wants the money. But he also knows that, as there is no death penalty, he will face the exact same punishment (life imprisonment) whether or not he kills the clerk, the only witness to his crime. He would be a fool not to do so. If he happens to bump into a police officer on the way out, he may as well kill him too - there is no extra charge, so to speak.

If we somehow manage to catch the "three-striker" and place him on trial, it will be in his best interest to sabatoge his own trial by killling witnesses, jurors, prosecutors or judges. After all, if we can't convict him, he goes free. (Remember that scene from the movie Traffic, where the druglord walks?) And even if we manage to successfully prosecute him for one of these new murders, he will still only face the same life sentence that he was sure to get in the first place. If we do manage to put a murderer like Tookie away for life, he can then kill anyone he wants to - inside or out of prison - with complete impunity.... I would not want to be the legislator who had to explain to a prison guard's widow that we knew that we had created a system of justice that refused to set any punishment for the lifer inmate who killed her husband.

There is something to be said for this argument. It is true that this would, in a sense, create open season on prison guards. There are administrative punishments to be had in prison, but the Eighth Amendment sets limits on them: you can sentence someone to solitary confinement, or perhaps to reduced rations, but you can't do much more than that.

The problem grows out of even these limits when you consider the problem of prison gangs. When it is no longer individual actors, but rather groups with an internal and self-reinforcing motivation to violence, you could easily get serious violence both between gangs and in terms of gangs versus the guards. There would be, for many of these violent gangsters, nothing to lose.

I have the same ethical concerns over capital punishment as most: I don't approve, particularly, of the state killing its own citizens. When I was younger I opposed capital punishment outright because of those concerns. Yet, once again, I think my father was right and I was wrong: there are some people, it is sad but undeniably true to say, who do truly horrible things without remorse or pity. At some point, there is just no other way to control the very worst of mankind.