Picture this: A woman is standing alone at night on the side of the road. She flags down a man passing by, and offers herself to him in prostitution. Should he accept her solicitation, she climbs into his car and soon after, she will shoot him with the .22-caliber pistol she keeps in her purse. Now picture that she does this, not once, but six times, until she is finally caught. Surely by disregarding others 'human rights in such a way, this woman has forfeited her rights, and the state should have no problem ending the life of one who was so bold as to take it from others far more innocent than she. A tempting explanation to embrace; after all, we have all been raised on fairy tales in which the bad guy always gets his due. But let's step back for a second.
The woman who has just been described is not fictional. Her name was Aileen Wuornos, and she was the first female ever to fit the FBI criteria for a serial killer, and she was executed Wednesday morning in a Florida prison. As a child, she was raised by her grandparents after being born to a mother who abandoned her, and a father who was a convicted child molester and who killed himself in prison. Not exactly an easy childhood.
It is very easy to look at the crimes of this woman and dehumanize her, but, as we can see, there is more to her story. This is not to say that this excuses the acts she committed later in life; there is no question that there was evil inside that woman, but this is by no means justification for putting her to death.
The idea that sane people -- leaders no less -- in this world think that they have the right to make the decision as to who lives and who dies is nothing short of sick. There are many arguments for the death penalty: It is a deterrent to crime, it is not cost-efficient to support death row inmates, and of course the ever so simplistic notion of an "eye for an eye." However, when examined closely, all of these arguments fall apart.
When talking of pro-death penalty policies, one often willhear politicians deem capital punishment necessary in that it acts as a deterrent to crime. Should this be true, the question of whether this would hold water morally would still be up for debate; however, unfortunately for champions of this argument, it never even makes it that far. Decades of research have failed to provide any conclusive evidence that the death penalty actually is a more effective deterrent to crime than life sentencing, and the 12 states in the Union that do have the death penalty have crime rates similar to their more humane counterparts (prisionexp.org).
Once this argument is defeated, those in favor of the death penalty usually move on to an economic line of reasoning. They argue that taxpayers should not have to support those who have failed to observe the laws of the nation, and that these individuals should, rather than be given life in prison, merely be killed. While this stance is again morally questionable, it too never even makes it into that gray area of debate. Studies have consistently shown that, due to the lengthy appeals process that goes along with a death sentence, execution is in fact more expensive to the state than supporting an inmate with a life sentence.
For example, a case study of Maryland between the years of 1979 and 1984 showed that the state paid $2.16 million more per execution than it would have paid for merely a life sentence. A 1993 Duke University study on the state of North Carolina came up with similar figures. And so, despite the fact that at first glance the death penalty seems logically to be economically preferable, given actual evidence on the topic, we see that this assumption is inaccurate.
With both traditional social and economic arguments for the death penalty discredited, we are left merely with our good old "eye for an eye" philosophy. For those who are unfamiliar, this notion comes straight out of the Old Testament of the Bible, and has thus often given death-penalty proponents "divine" support for their arguments. However, it should be noted that not only is this idea taken out of context -- "eye for an eye" was actually instituted to prevent excessive punishment for minor crimes -- but it also comes out of the same Bible that teaches forgiveness and love for our neighbors. This teaching hardly seems to fit in with the concept of capital punishment. Thus, regardless of which angle you take, the Bible is discredited as a source for death penalty justification.
The last possible validation for the death penalty would be a Kantian-like theory of "moral scales" that can only be balanced through executing due punishment for crime. Even should one accept this idea, it inevitably gives rise to the impossible question of who decides what is due punishment for crime, and furnishes our society with yet another slippery moral slope. Due to these factors, this kind of method is not feasible or even really desirable. Now, with our last possibilities for justification called into question, we are faced with a harsh reality: The death penalty can be explained -- note, I do not say justified -- only by our human thirst for vengeance. It is clear that this is not a positive aspect of human nature, and it is not hard to argue that it is, in fact, one of our major weaknesses.
When we step back from this and look at the bigger picture, at its root, there is no real difference between Aileen Wuornos' vengeance against the world that took away her parents and ruined her childhood, and the vengeance that is propelling death-penalty supporters to put people like her to death instead of reaching out to them and trying to give them a chance at closely monitored rehabilitation. We are doing no good by responding to evil with evil, and while it is true that attempts at rehabilitation for these people may fail, no harm can ever be done by practicing understanding and love. By keeping the death penalty alive in America, we are doing society no good socially, and we are hurting it economically. Above all, by supporting capital punishment we are implicitly supporting one of the worst qualities present in human nature. Our government should be acting as an example for all of us, not as an agent of needless and petty vengeance. If the government so badly desires to deter murder, perhaps a good idea would be to stop practicing murder itself.
(Laura Parcells is a Cavalier Daily
associate editor. She can be reached at lparcells@cavalierdaily.com.)
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