By Marc Jampole
By making the opposition to capital punishment part of
church law, Pope Francis cited a moral reason to oppose the death penalty:
because “it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Of
course, morality is the first victim when people feel threatened. Fear stokes a
certain American blood-thirstiness that made a majority of Americans approve
the mass incarceration laws of the 1990s and the Bush II torture regime.
Fear-induced bloodthirstiness has swayed large numbers of Americans to support
the current administration’s mean-hearted treatment of immigrants and refugees.
Pew studies show that currently 54% of all Americans and 53%
of Catholics favor the state killing people convicted of certain crimes. Only
39% of all Americans and 42% of Catholics oppose the death penalty. Will the
Pope’s announcement change minds? Past experience suggest the answer is, “not
many,” unless the Catholic Church engages in an aggressive campaign to promote
the new position. Even that might not work, considering how many rightwing politicians
depend on fear-mongering about crime, drugs, immigrants and terrorism to get
elected.
Catholics in westernized nations, like their Jewish and
Muslim cousins, find it an easy matter to reject religious teachings when it’s
convenient for them to do so. A year ago, the Gutmacher Institute reported that
98% of all Catholic women will use birth control methods banned by the Church
sometime in their lives. Another Gutmacher study showed that about 24% of all
women who have abortions are Catholic. An older Gutmacher survey found that
about 2.2% of Catholic women have an abortion each year, compared to 1.8% of
Protestant women. About eight years ago, the National Center for Health
Statistics reported that 61% of all American women will live in a sexual relationship
with someone without the benefit of marriage sometime in their life; based on
how Catholics compare to others when it comes to capital punishment, birth
control and abortion, we can safely assume that the percentage among Catholics
who cohabitate is about the same as the overall population. Thus, Catholics are
used to using a “just say no” approach to the teachings of their religion.
We can only hope that the Catholic Church throws at least as
many resources behind advocating against capital punishment as it has to oppose
a woman’s right to control her own body.
Morality is just one of several reasons to oppose capital
punishment. Here are some of the others:
·
It doesn’t work as a deterrent.
The preponderance of the evidence from the studies done on the deterrent effect
of capital punishment show that the fear of being executed does not stop
murders. And it turns out that, as with a lot of research supporting rightwing
positions, many studies claiming to show that capital punishment does deter people
from taking the lives of others have severe methodological and mathematical
errors. One researcher reran the numbers used in a survey supposedly proving
that capital punishment works as a deterrent and found that it actually
increased the murder rate!
·
Capital punishment is irrevocable: Juries make
mistakes all the time. When the mistake is uncovered, the wrongly convicted
person usually eventually gets out of jail. But society can’t reverse an
execution.
·
Our adversarial legal system
makes executing someone an expensive process. Executing an inmate on death row costs much more than sending an inmate to
prison for life without the possibility of parole. Those sentenced to death are
guaranteed by the Constitution to a very long, thorough and expensive judicial
process before taking the needle. It costs states millions of dollars for each
execution.
·
It is
unfair, or at least will remain unfair as long as racism and poverty exist. The
racial bias to capital verdicts in the United States has existed since
record-keeping of such matters began. Wealthy people can afford expensive
attorneys, whereas poor people often have to settle for overworked public
defenders. The unfairness of capital verdicts reflects and magnifies the
unequal treatment of minorities and the poor throughout the judicial system.
·
Virtually all other countries have abolished the
death penalty: About 140 nations worldwide, including the vast majority of countries in Western Europe and the Americas, have
abandoned capital punishment. The United States remains in the bad company of
Iraq, Iran, China and other human rights abusers as countries still engaging in
state execution. In the 21st century global
village, capital punishment may have become “cruel and unusual punishment” and
therefore inherently unconstitutional.
·
It
demeans society. Capital punishment reduces society to the level of the
murderer. As a society, we are supposed to be better than our worst
elements. Sparing the killer’s life makes us more human and more humane
than the killer, and increases the value that our society puts on human life.
Sparing the killer is an affirmation of our social contract to live in peace.
Sparing the killer tells him or her, and the world, that when we say that human
life is holy we mean it.
Of course, what the
Pope is saying supersedes all these reasons. Even if capital punishment served
as a deterrent, it would still be immoral. Even if it were no longer expensive
for society or biased against racial minorities and the poor, it would still be
immoral. Even if every country in the world allowed state executions, it would
still be immoral.