THE DEATH PENALTY

                                 “Death Penalty: Justice or Revenge?”

The potential punishment for committing a capital offense within 38 states of the U.S. is the death penalty. In the remaining thirteen states, it is merely life imprisonment. One wonders how the majority of the world manages to survive without this form of retributive justice. The truth is that there is no ‘justice’ in taking a life for a life. As David Bruck said in ‘The Death Penalty’, “What really fuels the death penalty is the justifiable frustration and rage of people who see that the government is not coping with violent crime. So what if the death penalty doesn’t work? At least it gives us the satisfaction of knowing that we got one or two of the sons of bitches.” (485). Consequently, is the death penalty justice, or is it just plain blood thirst?

Considering the arbitrariness of the American criminal justice system, meaning that laws are subject to individual judgment or preference by a court or judge rather than a specific law or statue, there is great room for error in both the conviction and execution of the accused. Stephen B. Bright, an attorney and the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, informs the reader in ‘Why the U.S. Will Abandon Capital Punishment’ that, “Law enforcement officers, usually overworked and often under tremendous public pressure to solve terrible crimes, make mistakes, fail to pursue all lines of investigation, and, on occasion, overreach or take shortcuts in pursuing arrests. Prosecutors exercise vast and unchecked discretion in deciding which cases are to be prosecuted as capital cases. The race of the victim and the defendant, political considerations, and other extraneous factors influence whether prosecutors seek the death penalty and whether juries or judges impose it.” (157). As Bright has explained, the law can not only be translated in different ways, it can be molded to the personal beliefs of the person meting out ‘justice’, in many cases resulting in wrongful convictions.

Some would argue that there are more than enough barriers placed in the judicial system to protect the innocent and that the American justice system revolves around the motto ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ However, not only do the innocent often suffer needlessly for crimes they did not commit, but the statistics prove that, in reality, this is not true. Stephen Bright states that until the intervention of DNA tests, many people who were wrongfully convicted were executed. This changed considerably by 2002. By this time, more than 100 people who would have been executed were saved by DNA tests. This is limited only to those cases where DNA tests could be used. In many others, there was no DNA to test. Also, Bright emphasizes that, “Over 100 people condemned to death in the last 30 years have been exonerated and released after new evidence established their innocence or cast such doubt on their guilt that they could not be convicted.” (158).

One case cited in his essay is that of Eddie Joe Lloyd, who was wrongly convicted for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl and spent seventeen years in jail for a crime he did not commit, until DNA testing proved that he was innocent. Since he was convicted in Michigan, a state that does not practice capital punishment, his life was spared long enough for him to be freed. If he had been in a state where the death penalty was legal, he would have been executed. (159-60). Bright goes on to say, “In the South, the death penalty is most often imposed and carried out, over half the victims of crime are people of color, well over 60 percent of the prison population is made up of people of color, and half of those sentenced to death are members of racial minorities. Yet people of color are seldom judges, jurors, prosecutors, and lawyers in the courts.

For example, there is not one African American or Hispanic judge on the nine-member Texas Court of Criminal Appeals…even though 43 percent of the population of Texas is nonwhite, over 65 percent of homicide victims are people of color, and nearly 70 percent of the prison population is black, Hispanic or nonwhite.” (165). If the system worked, innocent people would not have to spend large chunks of their life in jail for crimes they never committed simply because of faulty procedures and factors such as arbitrariness, lack of reliable witnesses, and racial biases.

Some people claim that the death penalty somehow upholds the ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ theory and that the victim’s life can only be honored by taking yet another human life. As Bruck put it, “This lottery of death both comes from and encourages an attitude toward human life that is not reverent, but reckless… He suggests that we trivialize murder unless we kill murderers. By that logic, we also trivialize rape unless we sodomize rapists.” (485). To say justice can only be served if a person is killed for capital offenses is pure nonsense. As Bruck suggested, if these convicts are already punished by life imprisonment, there is no need to end their lives. Society is safe from them as long as they are in prison. If the government continues to pursue retributive ‘justice,’ or revenge, in this manner, it will be committing the same crime for which it is ending these lives.

The only way to end this barbaric practice of legal killing is to learn that justice does not require blood. It only requires fair punishment for proven guilt. Instead of taking lives, we have to teach others the value of life. The death penalty does not accomplish this and allows for the irrevocable act of execution. Allowing the death of children, the falsely convicted and the mentally ill by execution does not do this. The thirst for revenge satisfies no one. If we are to show true value for life and true respect for the victim, those charged and proven guilty for capital offenses should be given life imprisonment and made to suffer a pointless life. That is the only true justice known to mankind at this point in time. All other methods of chastisement are futile, barbaric and completely unjust. As Bright concludes, “The American people will ultimately reach the same conclusion, deciding that, like slavery and segregation, the death penalty is a relic of another era… And the United States will join the rest of the civilized world in abandoning capital punishment.” (485).


                                                     Works Cited
Bright, Stephen B. “Why the United States Will Join the Rest of the World in Abandoning
     Capital Punishment.” Debating the Death Penalty. Eds. Hugo Adam Bedau and Paul G.
     Gassell. Oxford University Press, 2004. 152-82.
Bruck, David. “The Death Penalty.” The Macmillan Writer. Eds. Judith Nadell, Linda
     McMeniman, and John Langan. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. 482-85.