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Execution of
defendants—Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/11/11/1887-parsons-spies-fischer-engel-haymarket-martyrs/]
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Why Ending The Death Penalty Only Benefits The Worst Criminals
Capital punishment isn't vengeful or vindictive, it’s a repayment of
justice proportional to the most shockingly evil crimes.
By Russell La Valle
When she was
just 12, Lisa Marie Velasquez and her younger siblings watched in horror as her
pregnant mother was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Twelve years later, Lisa was
repeatedly bludgeoned with a hammer and brutally dismembered, then her remains
stuffed into trash bags. A week later, Bronx police discovered two bags of
Lisa’s body parts in Crotona Park. Four days after that, three more bags
containing Lisa’s remains were found in Barretto Point Park in Hunts Point.
When Bronx
County District Attorney Darcel Clark announced indictments for the man and
woman charged with the crime, she characterized Velasquez’s murder and torture
as “the ultimate degradation of a human being.” The desecration was so
unspeakable that Jacqueline Perez, Lisa’s aunt, was unable to identify her
niece. Horrified by the sheer enormity of the atrocity, she declared, “I want
the same thing to happen to them that happened to my niece!”
Perez’s raw
plea for justice was fueled by righteous anger. Her shattered heart demanded
accountability in the face of a monstrous injustice. She called for an
unmistakable punitive response to those responsible for such a barbaric act. It
was an appeal to a fundamental principle of justice in civil society. A justice
rooted in “proportionality”—that punishment should be dispensed in direct
relation to the level of injury caused to others.
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Reagan
had faced the dilemma [of a governor's role in capital punishment] while
serving as governor of California, Reagan recalled the demonstrators who
regularly paraded in front of the governor's mansion. With a slight chuckle,
the president mentioned how some Christian ministers began tolling their bells
in anticipation of the execution. "I told them,
'If you toll your bells every time somebody is murdered, I won't mind if you do it every time the state
executes a killer."
[Focus
on murder victims while considering capital punishment (Source: Lessons From a
Father to His Son, by John Ashcroft p.138-139 , May 5, 1998)]
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The
Importance of Proportional Punishment
Applying
proportionality in evaluating and punishing unlawful conduct is at the heart of
any ethical administration of justice. It reinforces our obligation to
pronounce moral judgment on criminal behavior and to implement a code of
penalties appropriate to the crime. The most challenging and severe application
of this principle is the imposition of the death penalty.
Robert James
Bidinotto was a criminologist and investigative crime reporter in the infamous
Willie Horton case. As he puts it, “To abandon proportionality in sentencing is
to abandon the quest for justice itself. And to deny the death penalty for
premeditated murder is to deny the very principle of fitting punishments to
offenses. . . . Proportionate punishment is the moral keystone of any system of
justice.”
In “Why The Death Penalty is Still Necessary,”
professors Edward Feser and Joseph M. Bassette agree:
We reserve the death penalty in the United States for the most heinous murders and the most brutal and conscienceless murderers. . . . To sentence killers like those to less than death would fail to do justice because the penalty . . . would be grossly disproportionate to the heinousness of the crime.
However,
many, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have a different view. Newsom has
said, “The death penalty is a failed policy that wastes money and is
fundamentally immoral.” Recently, Newsom put his personal beliefs into action
by granting reprieves for 737 death row inmates. Newsom’s unilateral action
disregarded the direct will of Californians, who in 2016 voted to retain the
death penalty via Proposition 62 and to expedite executions by streamlining the
costly death penalty appeals process through Proposition 66.
Sadly, in today’s charged political climate, it has become fashionable to toss around the term “immoral” to shut down meaningful debate on important issues like the death penalty. Walls are apparently now immoral. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is immoral. Incorrect pronouns are immoral. Tuition is immoral. Masculinity is immoral. School mascots are immoral. Whiteness is immoral. Are you sensing a trend?
Morality has become usurped, cheapened, and diluted by outrage mobs. Regardless of the strength or truth of any countervailing arguments, these mobs don’t hesitate to arbitrarily label anything “immoral” if it’s contrary to their ideas or ruffles their high-minded feathers. The result is a self-righteous, cynical, partisan game that reduces everything to derision and denunciation.
Proportional justice must be anchored in the principle of retribution to counteract this brand of toxic thinking. Only on this firm foundation can we avoid the irrational, mindless reprisals and revenge in reaction to crime and its adjudication.
Contrary to death penalty opponents,
retribution is not that same as revenge. It is not vindictive or some blind
retaliation of “an eye for an eye.” It is a measured and rational moral
response to capital offenses, free from any personal animosity.
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A woman holds up a sign with ‘Too many terrorists in prison’ written on
one side and ‘Kill them all’ written on the other during a rally in Tel Aviv on
April 19, 2016 to support Elor Azaria. (Photo: Jack Guez/AFP)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/08/israelis-palestinian-attackers/ ….. ….. http://victimsfamiliesforthedeathpenalty.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-group-of-50-families-in-israel-for.html] |
The Origins of Retributive Justice
At its root, the word retribution
derives from the Latin for “recompense, repayment” or to “hand back.”
Originally, “that which is given in return for past good or evil.” In more
modern usage it has become “evil given for evil deeds.” This definition finds
its roots in virtually all religions and cultures, including the
Judeo-Christian heritage that undergirds America’s founding.
Retribution “casts back” upon criminals
the harm, injury, pain, and suffering they have caused. In the case of the
death penalty, if we can agree that human life is our highest moral value, then
murder is the greatest moral affront to civilized society. Feser and Bessette
again explain:
Perhaps most importantly, in its supreme gravity it [the death penalty] promotes belief in and respect for the majesty of the moral order and for the system of human law that both derives from and supports that moral order.
Yet, even in the face of this, many
still consider the death penalty “unconstitutional” and regard its application
as “cruel and unusual” punishment.
In 2015, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reminded Americans that
the death penalty is firmly rooted in the U.S. Constitution. In Glossip v. Gross, he cited
the Fifth Amendment’s provision that “no person shall be held to answer for a
capital . . . crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,”
nor “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Scalia noted, “Not once in the history
of the American Republic has this court ever suggested the death penalty is
categorically impermissible.” He argued it was “impossible to hold
unconstitutional that which the Constitution explicitly contemplates.”
As for the notion of cruel and unusual
punishment, Scalia continued, “Historically, the Eighth Amendment was
understood to bar only those punishments that added ‘terror, pain, or disgrace’
(Baze v. Rees) to an otherwise permissible capital sentence.” He stated that he
“would not presume to tell parents whose life has been forever altered by the
brutal murder of a child that life imprisonment is punishment enough.”
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Relatives of victims
of the July 26, 2008 bomb blasts in Ahmedabad burn a picture of Ajmal Amir
Kasab during a demonstration welcoming his death sentence.
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Life in Prison Is Sometimes Not Enough
Scalia’s sentiments have been echoed by
countless grieving relatives who have earnestly pleaded to know why life
imprisonment is considered the worst fate for heinous criminals. This
impassioned question was underscored loudly in the Willie Horton case.
After serving only ten years, Horton
made a mockery of his original sentence of “life without the possibility of parole.”
After being transferred to a minimum-security prison, Horton soon became
eligible for work release. It was on an unsupervised weekend furlough that he
committed armed robbery and assault, subsequently torturing and raping a
Maryland couple for 12 hours.
Unfortunately for untold victims and
their families, the Horton episode is not an isolated case. Life sentences
seldom mean “for life,” or anything even close to it. Last year, Herman
Bell was released from prison after serving 44 years. Along with two other
members of the Black Liberation Army, Bell had been convicted of coldly
planning and carrying out the assassination of two police officers in 1971.
Even more recently, Weather Underground
terrorist Judith Clark won parole after only serving 38 years of a 75
years-to-life sentence for her participation in a 1981 bungled armored car
heist that killed two police officers and a Brinks security guard. William
Smith Jr., the dissenting vote against Clark’s release, wrote: “Release at this
time would deprecate the seriousness of the offenses and undermine respect for
the law. In time . . . media coverage will lessen. What will not diminish is the
loss felt by the loved ones . . . the sounds of their weeping will remain.”
“What kind of justice is this?” ask
victims’ loved ones. Friends and family of the victims not only remain lifetime
victims themselves, but must stand by as murderers can fill their lives while
incarcerated with entertainment, sports, formal education, vocational training,
psychological and spiritual counseling, libraries, gardening, and a whole host
of fulfilling activities.
Yet those murderers have killed may
experience none of this, of course. Why should murderers get what their victims
never can again? When do the families of victims get to resume their lives, put
their grief aside, and attempt to recover from a loss that is unrecoverable?
Who has the true life sentence?
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“Countries
that give up this penalty award an unimaginable advantage to the criminal over
his victim, the advantage of life over death.”
[Mr. Kaczynski said in July 2006. His coalition partner, the far-right League of Polish Families, wants to change the country’s penal code so that pedophiles convicted of murder will face execution.] |
We Must Uphold Life as Our Highest Moral
Value
In a time of mass shootings,
terror-driven beheadings, the slaughter of innocent children, and the senseless
moral depravity of gang violence and human trafficking, the death penalty has
an even greater role to play in the defense of human life. In a nation claiming
to value both life and the rule of law, it becomes a moral necessity.
Human life is our highest moral value.
It is precisely because we cherish human life that the state must sometimes end
the lives of those who have wantonly ended it. In our commitment to justice, we
must make the hard, sober, moral declaration that there are some crimes that
cannot be forgiven, or repaid through imprisonment of whatever length. There
are certain acts for which the only appropriate punishment is the ultimate
penalty—the forfeiture of one’s life.
We take no pleasure in the solemn duty
of carrying out capital punishment, nor should we make apologies for a civil
society requiring retributive justice. But by punishing criminals appropriately
and proportionally, as befits their crimes, we can honor the Lisa Marie
Velasquezes of the world. As Elizabethan dramatist John Webster once
wrote, “Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.”
Russell Paul La Valle is a veteran
political writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York
Times, Village Voice, Newsday, NY Daily News, American Thinker, The Daily
Caller, and many other newspapers and magazines.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/30/ending-death-penalty-benefits-worst-criminals/
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