Killing in self-defense or in a war — those are the only forms of homicide that our laws sanction and that our culture imbues, on occasion, with respect. All other kinds of murder we loathe or profess to loathe as moral abominations, but not the most premeditated kind of killing there is: vengeance murder by the state.
Capital punishment is one of those markers that indicate the moral condition of a culture and its society. In an ideal world, one in which good people are forever trying to make ideals come to life, a society sets the standard for not only decent behavior but for life-affirming values that apply as much to how individuals treat each other and how society treats differences as it does to a culture’s attitude toward its natural environment and its duty to help its citizens and children achieve their full potential as individuals and as contributors to the greater good.
Capital punishment, child poverty, mistreatment of the mentally ill, systematic pollution of the environment, cruelty to animals, addiction to old paradigms and a fear of change in the future, a fumbling and disrespectful view of the importance of education, gender inequality, racism, classism, sexism, the condition of prisons, the misunderstanding of the mission and significance of higher education, the failure to steadily decrease homelessness, the terror of rampant crime — all are markers of a society that is in the midst of a protracted collapse.
Capital punishment leads the list of markers because, in its essence, it is the supreme act of hypocrisy in a state that professes to value life, law and order and equal justice under the law. When the state kills someone, or more accurately when state employees are required to kill someone, the state itself is committing what its laws consider to be the “worst” of crimes — murder with malice aforethought.
So last year, when Governor Susana Martinez worked the legislature to reinstate the death penalty in New Mexico, many of us felt that conservatives had not only impoverished the state economically after eight years, but that they were working to take the moral high ground away from our state and its people and force us to endure again the grotesque and hideous circus of legal murder. The governor lost the war last year, so to speak, despite winning battles in the House to allow legal killing once again. And conservatives are bound to press on the issue in the future.
Even though there are two people still on death row in New Mexico since Governor Bill Richardson abolished capital punishment in 2009, we join a list of 19 other states that have freed themselves of the moral burdens of methodically killing human beings “humanely” while subjecting them to the Kafka-like apparatus and procedures of execution.
In 1986 when New Mexico’s then-outgoing governor Toney Anaya commuted the death sentences to life in prison with no parole for five inmates on death row, he did so, he said, because the death penalty was “inhumane, immoral and anti-God.” The New York Times reported that he said “for me to simply walk away now will make me as much an accomplice as others who would participate” in an execution.
Anaya made many of us feel as if New Mexico had at least addressed one of the markers of its long social decline. Governor Anaya had cleansed the immediate future of a moral taint that had darkened the workings of state government since the horrendous riots at the maximum-security penitentiary outside of Santa Fe in February 1980. In what author Roger Morris called “the devil’s butcher shop,” in his 1983 book of the same name, 33 inmates were killed in ghastly ways, 200 wounded and over a dozen corrections officers taken hostage, many sodomized and brutalized in ways that scarred them for life.
When I toured the state penitentiary six months before the riot with other reporters, something struck me in the conference room where we first gathered, and it has never left me. I saw on the wall what looked from a distance to be a Boy Scout’s wooden plaque of knots. When I went to investigate I discovered that the ropes were in what might be considered little noose-like frames around photographs of executed inmates. It struck me as ghoulish then, to say the least. I wondered what kind of “corrections officials” would do such a thing — actually keep trophies of those they gassed or hanged.
But as a police reporter, I should have expected it. And it was on my mind when I was doing a stint on the ACLU Board in Albuquerque during a series of investigations on county jails in New Mexico. Some of them were so horrendously filthy, such dangerous fire traps and so poorly managed that they were temporarily shut down.
I can imagine, however faintly, the state of degeneracy in New Mexico’s prisons if voters had to suffer another four or eight years of conservative governors working to turn the state penitentiary into a killing factory once again.
The struggle over capital punishment has been a long one. In 1957, French philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay entitled “Reflections on the Guillotine” in which he not only described his father’s retching after witnessing a beheading, but also argued that public, or hidden, executions were not a deterrent to crime but in fact sets the moral tone for other murders in a murderous state. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
A chapter in George Orwell’s little book “Why I Write” is entitled “A Hanging” and described one he witnessed in Burma in the 1930s. Orwell commented that as the prisoner wobbled to the steps of the gallows, he saw that he “had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide…His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. …” Capital punishment was abolished in England in 1965.
One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is that often the processes take so long that the condemned is no longer the “same” person when finally executed. The state is, in effect, executing a possibly-reformed and different human being. A case in point is the 1960 gassing of Caryl Chessman, who committed serious crimes, including kidnapping and rape, but not murder, in Los Angeles in 1948. While he appealed his conviction, Chessman wrote four books including a memoir entitled “Cell 2455, Death Row.” A movie of the book was made in 1955. It seemed to many that Chessman was a reformed person by the time he was executed, and his plight was the object of a worldwide campaign to save his life. California remains on the list of 31 states that still sanctions capital punishment. Whatever it takes, I hope we do not let New Mexico be added to that list again.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
To all these reasons why executing people is wrong, we can add another: the imperfect way our justice system works has produced many situations over the years in which the innocent have been put to death. In other words, execution took the life of someone who didn’t even commit the crime of which he or she was convicted: an error impossible to correct. I don’t believe there is any justification for taking a human life in a premeditated way. Capital punishment doesn’t restore the life taken. It is only one more savage act, in a society blighted by violence. It has absolutely no place among civilized people.
Absolutely spot on, VB. Thanks for your clarity on this and so many other subjects. Write on….
Of the many immoralities of the death penalty, one that has long struck me, that no one talks of, is that it generates or encourages a desire for blood revenge on the part of the victim’s living loved ones. Those bereaved and angry people are yet again victimized, but this time by the prosecutors and any part of society at large that clamors for the death penalty. The institution turns so many of those loved ones into people they perhaps never thought they would be, waiting and hoping and demanding year after year that the decision will be made to kill the offender, a fellow human being. If the death penalty was off the table, and never an option, then to a large extent “closure” comes more quickly and certainly to the victim’s loved ones, even if initially they wished for revenge. I cannot imagine how corrosive to one’s very being it must be to demand and wait for another person to be killed.
Excellent piece, VB. May I re-state and add to the reasons given by Margaret and Terry as to why capital punishment is wrong?
There are several reasons to oppose capital punishment. Among these are:
(1) Prisoners sentenced to the death penalty cost at least three times more than do those sentenced to life imprisonment.
In one state study, each death penalty prosecution cost the taxpayers about $1.5 million more than a life without parole prosecution.
A meta-analysis of cost studies conducted across the country estimated that the death penalty costs states with capital punishment an average of $23.2 million more per year than alternative sentences.
(2) Innocent people are on death row, and innocent people have been put to death. These are irreversible tragedies. A recent study concludes that 4% of people on death row in America are not guilty. Since 1973, 144 prisoners on death row have been found to be innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the United States in 1976, 138 innocent men and women have been released from death row, including some who came within minutes of execution. In 2016 six death row prisoners have been exonerated this year. Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas were on track to execute each of the six until they were all cleared of all charges.
(3) The death penalty does not have a deterrent factor and does not decrease crime. States with the death penalty do not have lower homicide rates. Around our country, states without the death penalty have a lower murder rate than neighboring states with the death penalty.
The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime.
A survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime.
(4) Civilized countries have banned the death penalty as have 20 U.S. states, while the governments that maintain the death penalty are typically more corrupt and dictatorial ones (e.g., China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen).
The U.S. is the only remaining Western country to regularly administer the death penalty.
(5) The death penalty is racist and has been applied in racially-discriminatory ways. African American men are disproportionately sentenced to death. Prosecutors, juries, and judges are much more likely to apply the death penalty when the victim is white and the defendant is black.
(6) The death penalty is inhumane. Killing people makes us like the murderers. It is not only about what capital punishment does to those killed, but also what it does to those who do the killing and those in whose name the killing is done.
A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems – the worst possible example to set for the citizenry, and especially for our children.
(7) Capital punishment goes against almost every religion. Although isolated passages of the Bible have been quoted in support of the death penalty, almost all religious groups in the United States regard executions as immoral.
Pope Francis has spoken out against capital punishment.
In our state, the New Mexican Catholic bishops have written (in the ABQ Journal, 9/22/2016): “We oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty in New Mexico.”
The NM Council of Churches has also opposed the reinstatement of the death penalty, writing in the Albuquerque Journal of October 6th, 2016:
“We, the judicatory heads of Protestant denominations, join with the New Mexico bishops of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in the Roman Catholic Church, to express our concern.” Also writing: “We also call on all legislators to reject this …. in future legislative sessions. The national trend is to end this immoral, unnecessary, and ineffective practice.”
Remember the Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”