WEDNESDAY before last, the foremost contenders for the Republican presidential nomination met to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. At one point, moderator Brian Williams began to ask candidate Rick Perry a question about his death penalty tally as Texas governor. When Williams mentioned Perry's record-setting 234 executions, the heavily Republican audience applauded wildly. The affair of state-arranged deaths received the kind of cheering one would expect to hear in a Texan football stadium. Why is such a barbaric and unjust custom still so disturbingly well-received in the United States?
Capital punishment has become less popular as different societies have begun to see it as impractical or simply immoral. According to Amnesty International, 96 nations have abolished capital punishment. Dozens of nations that retain the death penalty have not used it in the last 10 years. The United States belongs to the minority of countries that actively execute convicted criminals. We also remain one of the world's top executors, alongside Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. I somehow doubt the Republicans who cheered for Perry admire those three countries.
"Pragmatic" arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart upon basic inspection. Europe has not been destroyed by violent crime, showing that the threat of death is not necessary to stave off anarchy. Multiple studies indicate the death penalty is ultimately more expensive to taxpayers than handing down life sentences. The money used for executions could have been used to fund effective crime prevention programs rather than sate some primitive craving for vengeance.
Even if the death penalty made financial sense or lowered the crime rate, it still would be ethically wrong. Our justice system is supposed to be dispassionate and fair: Slaying a convict to "give closure" or satisfy the clamoring mob is in complete contradiction to these principles. Executions, even for the truly guilty, remain, as Voltaire said, "an arbitrary barbarity against human nature," and they are morally inferior to binding convicts to lives of public service that aid their communities. Voltaire is fortunate not to have seen the horrors of the French Revolution, nor capital punishment's continued existence hundreds of years after the Enlightenment.
Worse yet, when you execute 234 people you are bound to have a few die surrounded by questionable circumstances. A number of people executed on Perry's watch suffered from inadequate legal counsel. For instance, Leonard Uresti Rojas was assigned a lawyer who was inexperienced and allegedly suffering from mental illness. The lawyer failed to meet basic appeal deadlines, and Rojas was executed in 2002. Perry also has dealt "justice" to people who were juveniles at the time of their crimes, an appalling act condemned by nearly every other nation.
Like George Bush, the notorious Texan governor who came before him, Perry also has approved the execution of his fair share of mentally incapacitated persons. Perry's list includes one man who testified in court about military chips planted in his brain. This should be a familiar narrative to Virginians, considering how last year current Governor Bob McDonnell permitted the execution of Teresa Lewis. She was executed for hiring two men to kill her husband and stepson. Lewis, the "mastermind" who plead guilty, had an IQ score of 72, making her borderline mentally retarded. The killers, who according to Lewis' defense were of average intelligence, were both given life sentences.
Such is "justice" in Virginia.
The dangers of staking a human life on the fallibility of human trials should be self-evident. The Death Penalty Information Center has identified a number of cases where there was reason to doubt an executed person's guilt. A post-mortem pardon is of little use to the innocent party who has received, in Perry's words, "ultimate justice." Life sentences give the wrongly convicted a chance to be meaningfully proven innocent, while still keeping the 'rightly' convicted out of society. The alternative is to do things Texas style, where Perry has been accused of trying to shut down probes into wrongful death convictions.
A handful of states have made progress and banned the death penalty, but the South continues to pick up the slack. At the time of this writing, a man by the name of Troy Davis is scheduled to be killed by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21. The case against Davis is shockingly weak: There is no physical evidence, and a number of the witnesses who got him convicted have recanted their testimonies. Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union are working with legal experts and calling for citizens to demand clemency for a man whose guilt is far from beyond reasonable doubt. The University's branch of Amnesty International will be holding a march at the Charlottesville Downtown Mall at 6 o'clock tonight to highlight Davis' case. One only can hope that Georgia Governor Nathan Deal will listen.
I would hope all citizens find common ground on striving to avoid killing innocents. To do otherwise would be a sickening affront to justice, an affront easily avoided by abolishing the barbaric, outdated practice of capital punishment once and for all.
Sam Carrigan's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.carrigan@cavalierdaily.com.
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