TUCKED AWAY in prisons across America, about 3,000 convicted murderers sit on death row. As average, law-abiding Americans, we tend not to think about their plight or their punishment and instead happily ignore the barbarism inherent in the convicts' sentences.
For most of my young life I either have not thought about the death penalty because the practice is so removed from my everyday consciousness or, if I happened to be paying attention, I relied on conventional "the state knows best" wisdom. Although several states have banned the death penalty, many -- including Virginia -- remain strident in maintaining the option to seek the death penalty in murder trials, Theorists, theologians, policy makers and average American citizens justify capital punishment on the grounds that God grants authority to the state to revenge the shedding of innocent blood, that some crimes are so horrendous that it is a social good to execute the convicted criminal, and that the threat of capital punishment deters some murders. These positions, however, are untenable in a modern context and the death penalty, instead of humane, is actually abhorrent.
To begin, in a pluralistic and fully modern state, it is bad policy to base law in one religious tradition. In the Western tradition, the death penalty finds its origins in Old Testament and Mosaic Law and represents a case in which our legal system blindly adheres to bad tradition. God does not tell us who is guilty and who is not; rather a jury of the defendant's peers, all flawed and imperfect human beings, determine guilt based on the limited and sometimes inaccurate information before them. Scientific advance and DNA evidence diminishes the likelihood of wrongful conviction, but even the slightest possibility of wrongful conviction makes the death penalty unacceptable. Statistically speaking, capital punishment cases are also fraught with racial tension and bias. For example, the statistical probability of a convicted murder receiving the death penalty is much higher if the victim was white.
But even if the system was conducted fairly, and a jury could accurately determine guilt 100 percent of the time, capital punishment may still not be a matter of social utility. It costs more to execute a person than to sentence the convicted murderer to life in prison. Because of a lengthy appeals process and long court proceedings, the state ends up bearing a very large financial burden in return for a death sentence. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that is against the death penalty, John Conger, the Muscogee, Georgia, District Attorney said, "That's the unfortunate truth. It costs a lot of money to try a death case. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of people." On the one hand the cost of an execution trial demonstrates that a state, such as Virginia, does not take its business as executioner lightly. One the other hand, it demonstrates the willingness of that state to uphold an unjust and outdated institution.
Statistics measuring the deterring effect the death penalty has on criminals are highly erratic and vary from one interest group to the other. There is the rational thought process that says you probably do not want to kill someone in Texas, of all the 50 states, given the high rate of death penalty sentences there. Yet in the heat of a crime, it is all together unlikely that rational calculations about sentencing even cross a murderer's mind.
The death penalty may have had a deterring effect when people were killed publicly and death was, in general, a much more public mainstay. Now it is done tucked away in some sanitary cell by people who are detached from the crime committed. The impulse for the past 50 years has been to make capital punishment cleaner, safer, less painful, more sanitary and physically removed from the public eye. Yet strangely, this humane impulse has made the practice more barbaric, not less.
Like most things, the death penalty is a complicated and emotional matter and if someone murdered my loved one it would be hard to maintain he or she should live out a miserable life in a cushy jail cell. I have very little personal sympathy for violent murderers, their comfort or their freedom. Yet when we maintain the constitutionality of the death penalty, we compromise what has been in many other regards a just legal system. It is a grim business and unpleasant to confront violent murder and capital punishment, but, as a matter of justice, the state cannot play executioner any longer.
Christa Byker is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. She can be reached at cbyker@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | 4 days agoThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | 5 days agoAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
YOUNIS: Why every U.Va. student should say yes to English
By Ayat Younis | January 9, 2025Every student at the University, regardless of their primary field of study, can professionally and academically benefit from engaging with the English department.
