Death Penalty: Why I Stand in Opposition

The following was a comment posted on Protest: Execution of Elkie Taylor:

There is absolutely no reason for you to protest the execution of this scum. The 87 year old man who he and his friend killed with a coat hanger was my Great-Grandfather. Imagine being 4 years old and having just been to his birthday party and then being picked up from school and your mother in tears because someone killed him, just so they could steal his stuff to pawn it for drugs. And then for years watching everyone in your family suffer because the courts are constantly changing their minds about the rulings of this man's fate. Tell me then that you wouldn't want the person responsible to pay for his crime, and all of the pain he caused.
-thedarkroom

Standing in opposition to the death penalty is not a position that I have come too lightly, and it is not a position that I have come to without considering the fact that in opposing the death penalty I am defending the rights worst of humanity. However, it is necessary to defend the rights of everyone, even those among us who we have little compassion or empathy for. In fact many times it is those people who need their rights defended the most.

It is not that I do not want people to pay for their crimes; I most certainly want criminals who commit heinous crimes to feel the full brunt of the law. However, I do not believe that putting someone to death is an acceptable form of punishment in a civilized society. Mohandas Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

The truth is that no one can know for certain what they would want or feel if they were in a similar situation. However, I can say that it would not be improbable for me to desire the death of someone who had murdered one of my own family members. In fact it is hard not to think that I would want anyone who would do harm to any of my family members to feel the pain and suffering that I would wish upon them.

That is exactly why we have the law, to protect us from the blinding fire of hatred and vengeance. The law is cold, and it is slow. However, it has to be this way because that is how we are all afforded equal protection under the law. Justice should be swift, but it should never be hasty. We should punish people for their crimes, but that punishment should never be cruel and unusual even if their crimes were.

It is the words of this sister of a murder victim, who spoke at the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice hearings on the fairness of the death penalty, that have had the largest impact on my view of the death penalty.

“I understand that this sense of revenge is a very legitimate emotion, but it is not a legitimate basis for public policy. And I think that we denigrate our own noble ideals when we use revenge and we use the public fist for the purpose of killing our fellow human beings when that really is not going to solve the problem. It’s certainly not going to bring back the loved ones that people have lost, and I just am amazed that we are still having this conversation in the 21st Century, that we just haven’t gotten smarter about really addressing the causes of crime instead of trying to treat the symptoms.”

We shouldn’t measure the strength of our justice system by the severity of our punishments, but on the unyielding protection that it should provide all citizens. We must continue to fight for the rights of those that no one else wants to protect, because if we do not it is our rights that will be taken away next.

Yes we can, begins today.