Poison gas is inhumane, but a lethal injection is acceptable.
If it takes someone 42 minutes to die, it’s shocking and cruel, but 10 minutes is more than OK.
Killing is wrong, but killing a convicted killer is right.
Discussions about the death penalty are rife with inconsistencies, little lines that somehow separate civility with savagery without really making any difference at all.
On Feb. 13, newly elected Gov. Tom Wolf placed a moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania, ensuring no one will be executed in the commonwealth until a task force investigating capital punishment completes its report.
It’s absolutely the right call. But ideally, the task force will confirm what more and more Americans are realizing: The death penalty is arcane, and the fact that humans are fallible means we could be executing innocent people.
The desire for justice in families who have lost someone is understandable. Their pain is something I’m lucky enough to have never experienced and cannot fathom. For the United States government, however, execution should fall outside the legal definition of justice and into the category of cruel and unusual punishment.
According to Amnesty International, “Since 1973, over 130 people have been released from death rows throughout the country due to evidence of their wrongful convictions. In 2003 alone, 10 wrongfully convicted defendants were released from death row.”
More than 130 people have been wrongly sentenced to death. The fact that the justice system will make mistakes is inevitable; it is a system orchestrated and overseen by humans who, by definition, are flawed.
But we cannot bet people’s lives on our beingcorrect. If even one life is wrongly extinguished because of capital punishment, the entire system isn’t worth whatever other justice it carries out. Killing an innocent person – robbing someone of a future – is the most heinous crime a person can commit. Our government should be held at least to the same standards as its citizens.
The death penalty is also used disproportionately against minorities, something Wolf also mentioned in his Feb. 13 statement about the moratorium.
“While data is incomplete, there are strong indications that a person is more likely to be charged with a capital offense and sentenced to death if he is poor or of a minority racial group, and particularly where the victim of the crime was Caucasian,” the statement said.
It’s true. A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that black defendants receive the death penalty three times more than white defendants when charged with the same crime.
The racial inequalities this country is grappling with are well-documented. The recent “black lives matter” protests, and the white fear which accompanied them, showed how little many people of authoritycare about overt killings of black men and women. The entire criminal justice system, in fact, is riddled with racially skewed data.
According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s website, African Americans represent 12 percent of the total population of drug users, but make up 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 59 percent of those in state prison for a drug offense. They are sentenced more harshly, too. African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense as whites do for a violent offense.
These miscarriages of justice are a major problem and need to be addressed. But with the death penalty, inequality is a life-or-death issue.
When humans stop being racist and stop making mistakes, maybe there will be a place for the death penalty in our society. Until then, let’s send it the way of the firing squad: Into the cringeworthy annals of our history.
