In response to my recent post “On the Right of Abortion,” Christian asked about my stance on the death penalty.  I thought I’d briefly treat that subject here, since it came up.

Yes, I am opposed to the death penalty in almost all cases.  There are cases where the fact of guilt is morally certain, but for most, there is far too much possibility for human error, despite our best efforts.  This has proven to be so with the numerous findings, after a person has been imprisoned for some time, where the convicted was in fact not guilty.  For this reason alone, I think we cannot gamble with lives.

In cases where guilt is morally certain, it becomes a question of whether or not justice truly requires the death of the guilty.  There are strong arguments in favor of this; however, I would prefer, even in such cases, to err on the side of mercy and choose life imprisonment without parole (truly, without parole) in order to allow for the chance of repentance and reform.

Christian tradition has varied on the justness of the death penalty.  When the (Roman) state was opposed to Christianity, and Christians were regularly slaughtered under the auspices of the death penalty, they were certainly against it.  Even after Rome was Christianized, Saint Ambrose himself argued against it. 

As part of his argument, he pointed out that even God, in the case of the Cain vs. God, chose mercy.  Surely God knew Cain’s guilt as certainly as is epistemologically possible.  Surely God, of all beings, understands true justice.  Yet he chose not to kill Cain but to simply mark him with a curse.  For those who are striving to be perfect like God, as Christians have a mandate to do (Mt 5:48), we should strive to imitate God in this way as well.

There are of course those who point out that the Mosaic Law provides for, even strongly endorses, the death penalty, and, after all, the Law was given by God, was it not?  But Jesus tells us that the Law was given to us because of the hardness of our hearts (Mt 19:8), and in fact he explicitly contravenes the “eye for an eye” doctrine, saying that we should even “turn the other cheek” (Mt 5:38-39).

Early Christian tradition strongly opposes the death penalty, and it was not until Christianity had firmly entrenched itself as the state religion that states began to use theology to justify the death penalty again, if they even bothered justifying it at all, since it was practically taken for granted.  Medieval life and thought was significantly different from our own, and a world seen through such eyes and practical expediencies makes it far easier to justify such a strong sentence.

Today, however, we see the world through very different eyes.  Life itself is very different, including our institutions of justice.  I would say, at least in the U.S. and other modern, western states, that the system of justice is far better than it was then.  Yet even today, it is not perfect. 

All the same, we can and do have the means to protect society from convicted criminals without killing them, and I think that, given the repeatedly demonstrated inadequacies of our judicial system, we should make use of these means to protect society and serve justice without killing.

On a purely rational level, we can consider the nature of government.  Ultimately, in a democracy, government is a manifestation of the corporate will of the governed.  In our judicial system of trial by peers, it is also a manifestation of a lesser corporate judgment.  It has been formalized so much that many take it for granted and feel confident washing their hands of the decisions made by such juries, thinking it is this Other (the State) that is responsible. 

But when it comes down to it, a jury convicting a person to death is nothing more than a group of people agreeing to kill another person.  We should always keep this in mind when discussing the subject.   How does killing become okay when it is a group of, say, twelve people making the decision.  How is that different from five, or three, or one?  If it is not much different, how is it different from the one being convicted who has, presumably, killed?  Didn’t that person make a judgment that another person should die?

What makes the decision of a jury to kill a person more just than the decision of an individual?  The law?  In a democracy, the law, and consequently the perception of justice, is a manifestation of that same corporate will and is technically just as morally questionable and arbitrary (because it is based solely on the will of the majority) as is the individual’s judgment and will to kill.

Therefore, on a purely rational level, I don’t think a state can be justified inflicting the death penalty because there is no absolute basis on which to justify such a decision—justice cannot come into the picture because it is a manifestation of absolute morality that cannot be determined by the “will of the people.” 

At best, in the question of murder, a democratic society has a mandate to protect its citizens (working for the common good).  That mandate justifies actions taken to protect society, and in modern societies, that goal is served by life imprisonment. 

But of course, I do not hold to a philosophy of reason alone, and I can also find, as outlined above, good reasons to question the justness of the death penalty, even granting moral absolutes and contentions for the seeming justice of “an eye for an eye.” 

In any case, we mustn’t forget Ghandi’s axiom when dealing with this subject: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”  Even if you see justice in killing murderers, you should temper that justice with mercy for the sake of the greater good.