Death-penalty opponents argue a weak case

Last Friday, March 13, the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican showed a photograph of a young couple, eyes closed, heads bowed, mourning the execution of Terry Clark in 2001. Later the same day, the New Mexico Senate voted to abolish the death penalty.

During the NMI live blog of the Senate debate, on my blog and in conversations with friends, I was challenged to answer numerous arguments, both secular and religious, against capital punishment.

It is often argued that the death penalty is unequal in application, with poor defendants disproportionally receiving it. This is true, but if you extend the argument to its logical conclusion, you’d have to abolish not only the death penalty but prison as well.

The sad fact of life is that the rich have it better than the poor in almost every way — they have better jobs, get elected to public office more, have better health care, wear nicer clothes and shoes, they have more attractive spouses and sex partners, and they have better lawyers and consequently are less likely to go to prison when they break the law.

If we’re going to abolish the death penalty for this reason, we might as well abolish prison as well — not to mention private property, private health care (they’re working on that, I realize), designer clothes and yes, even sex.

Our rights to liberty and property are routinely taken away after due process of law, but death penalty opponents would answer that the right to life (except for fetuses) is qualitatively different because once you kill a man, he’s dead forever.

But say a man is wrongly convicted at age 25, sent to prison, serves 40 years, and then is exonerated and released. He has lost the best years of his life, and can never get them back. He will probably never marry, never be a father, never play with his children or grandchildren, never have a rewarding career, never know the love of a woman who has grown old with him.

Hasn’t something nearly as priceless as life itself been stolen from him? Once again, if we’re going to do away with the death penalty for this reason, we’d better do away with prison as well.

It is often claimed that innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder, and the execution of a single innocent person is unacceptable. Better DNA technology has recently led to a number of convictions being overturned, and because an innocent person can be convicted, we must never execute anyone.

First, better DNA technology means that it’s increasingly unlikely that innocent people will be convicted. Second, an erroneous conviction is far more likely to be discovered in a death row case because of all the extra appeals. Third, if a murderer escapes prison or has his sentence commuted by a soft-hearted governor, and then kills again, how many of his victims are “too many” for death penalty opponents?

I turn now to the religious arguments.

I am told that because I am a Christian, I have a moral obligation to oppose the death penalty. Why? First, the Sixth Commandment says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Actually, the Sixth Commandment has unfortunately been translated most often as “Thou shalt not kill,” whereas the Hebrew means “Thou shalt not murder.” With as many people as the God of Moses strikes dead or orders other people to kill in the pages of the Old Testament, I should think that wouldn’t need much explanation.

Second, I am admonished, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” (Deuteronomy 32:35). This confuses justice with vengeance. Vengeance may be the Lord’s, but justice in ancient Israel was administered by human beings. The death penalty was applied after due process, making it an expression of justice rather than vengeance.

Third, if I am pro-life on abortion, I must also oppose the death penalty.

I have never understood the insistence that if you want to protect the life of an unborn child, you must also want to protect the life of a person convicted of murder by due process of law. It’s like saying that if you’re opposed to grabbing a random person off the street and keeping him locked up for 20 years, you must also by necessity be opposed to keeping a convicted murderer locked up for 20 years.

What part of “due process of law” do some people not understand?

Finally, Jesus stopped a crowd from stoning and adulteress by challenging them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him cast the first stone” (John 8:7), so Jesus was obviously opposed to the death penalty and I have to be too.

There’s a slight problem with that conclusion, however: The woman about to be stoned was an adulteress, not a murderer. The crowd was full of sinners, but it probably wasn’t full of murderers, let alone murderers who also raped and tortured little children.

As I look at that photo in the New Mexican of the tender-hearted young couple grieving for Terry Clark, I wonder whether they had any tears left over for Clark’s victim, a 9-year-old girl he had raped and killed. When he killed her, Clark was free on bond pending the appeal of his conviction for kidnapping and raping a 6-year-old girl.

We can argue all day about whether Jesus would have tried to stop that execution if the crowd had been about to stone a man who had kidnapped and raped two little girls and murdered one.

I’m inclined to think he wouldn’t have, but you’re entitled to your opinion.