And as a FYI, the one thing a day at eight AM should keep going, though there is more of a risk of being late or missing a day due to the resurgence of school, so I'm quite likely to work on a buffer just in case if I get the time. This shouldn't affect you, unless you habitually read this stuff, in which case: Good on you! You're groovy. You're cool if you don't, too, I don't exactly spend my time reading peoples'- that's a lie, I kind of do, and had to stop... Anyways... Enjoy!
The Death Penalty by Mackinley Clevinger, February 3, 2016
In society, there exist a body of laws that any individual within the confines of that country are expected to abide by. An infraction of these laws can lead to consequences; anywhere from a fine to imprisonment for a set period of time. However, for infractions of the law of a nature more severe than the standard fare, there exists another tier of punishment that raises a moral quandary for everyone involved in this judiciary process.
The choice is given to a jury, a body of men and women chosen at random, to decide the manner of punishment for the guilty. Depending on the crime committed, different sentences are decided upon, and thus does the justice system move on, dispensing the punishment to malefactors of the law. The justice system hits a snag, however, when it comes into contact with an individual accused of a crime so severe, neither imprisonment nor a fine are deemed sufficient to properly punish them.
There is a great difficulty in the choice of a jury to make the decision to send an individual to their death, regardless of their crime. They are a fellow human being, after all, so how is a rational minded person able to, in a group of their peers, come to the decision to execute a man or woman? There are a few reasons for this kind of decision being made.
First of all, it’s satisfying. This person has removed a beloved individual from the world, and destroyed the lives of everyone around them, so for their crime, they must have the same done to them. Some of the oldest laws in the world amount to ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ It’s the kind of justice you hear about in old stories, in wild west stories, where murderers get shot and the shooter is lauded a hero instead of another murderer. By their act of murder in the first place, they have upset a balance that, to this way of thinking, can only be rectified by their being killed.
There’s a flaw here, however. It doesn’t bring the person back; it just ends up with us having two bodies instead of one. To quote again; ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’ This kind of revenge driven justice isn’t the gleaming society we strive for; it isn’t the civilized world we’re trying to build; it’s us dressing up murder as justified so we don’t feel bad about it. Who are we to say that this unique, unquantifiable thing we call life is ours to take away from someone? That’s the same crime that person is up on trial for. It’s hypocritical to call killing a murderer ‘justice’ so that we can wash our hands of what we’ve done.
The Death Penalty is also easier on society’s wallet; it’s easier to just kill the person than it is to jail them for decades until they die of natural causes after resting their feet in a government payed jail. Except none of that’s true. The trials held for people at risk for the Death Penalty cost far more than a regular trial followed by imprisonment for any amount of time, and there is a large human rights crisis for people in jail who are worked in sweatshops for a pittance to supply corporations with the goods they sell normal citizens, many of these prisons run by private companies instead of the government.
Another way of thinking is that the Death Penalty is an effective strategy for keeping other people from committing these same crimes, the fear of being executed keeping them in line. It sounds effective, but it’s more likely to produce smarter criminals than it is to stop people from doing the things they do, and beyond that, is that how we want our society to function? The fear of a quick and ultimate reply to our actions supposed to keep us in line instead of us creating an environment to live in that stops these crimes from happening? The threat of a government official showing up at our door to execute us is supposed to be the only thing stopping us from killing another man or committing treason? What does that say about the state of our society, if that is our preferred tactic at crime prevention; a Batman style of instilled fear to keep the criminal masses down instead of attacking the root causes of crime to remove from our society entirely?
All of this is along the assumption that the decisions the jury are making are impartial and that the individual convicted of the crime did, indeed, do it. Of course, the police do their job, and they make sure the right person is standing trial, and the jury are made up of the accused’s peerage so as to ensure that everything is fair and right in the court. Unfortunately, one of the biggest reasons for abolishing the Death Penalty entirely, is that the courts are racist and the police are wrong too often.
To start: There have been too many occasion where the police have, after executing someone convicted of a capital crime, found further evidence that clears them of guilt. Innocent lives have been ended over a mistake by a group that is supposed to protect the people, lives that could have been freed after incredible inconvenience if the Death Penalty had not been used against them. The fact that there exists a chance that we could be wrong in convicting a man or woman to death, that we can’t be absolutely certain that it’s the right person or that all the facts are known to us, means, plain and simple, that we cannot kill these people in the event that we are wrong. We understand that a life cannot be replaced after it is taken, not even by the taking of another life, and what is the execution of an innocent if not murder? How many jurors, by the definitions used to execute thousands, have committed a horrendous crime in the willful murder of someone not deserving of it, not even by their standards that accept death as a justice and not a crime against nature?
Furthermore, the courts deciding who lives and who dies are not without bias of a racial and socio-economical kind. African Americans are sentenced to far more drug related crimes, and sentenced more harshly, than white people who have been found to use more of these drugs without any kind of larger presence in the purview of the police. Rich people are far more likely to get away scot-free from their crimes than people from poor families, regardless of the crime. With such bias in the courts in these fields, it is no surprise to find similar cases in regards to capital punishment against these social groups. Justice, as a concept, is blind to the accused and to the accuser, it only cares about the events as they interact with the laws laid down. It is our bias and our flaws that allow these crimes to not be treated the same in every occasion, and when true justice cannot be had for the people on trial, how can we in good faith allow ourselves to sentence anyone to death, knowing a different jury might have had a completely different result?
As well as all that, these aren’t just stories you read about or fictional people in a game; these are living, thinking people like you. They’re human, as much as the trial process tries to demonize them to convince the jury to treat them harshly for their crimes. They are human, and humans make mistakes. That doesn’t mean they get off scot-free from their crimes; we make a mistake, we pay penance, we make things right if we can, and then we return to our normal lives. We commit a crime, we go to jail where hopefully we change and come out better for it, or warded off from making that mistake again. We commit a bigger crime, and perhaps we spend the rest of our lives in jail, but that is because that is the rule we agreed on, and in return we received civic protection and government services underneath he understanding that we behave ourselves for the good of other.
Granted, the Death Penalty is another rule that we have abided by for centuries, but things change. We, as a society, certainly have. This isn’t the wild west, with bodies strung up all over the place, or wartime where the actions of a single man or woman could get thousands killed for espionage; this is the twenty-first century. We’ve grown from the times where violence was a natural part of our lives to survive, we’ve evolved from the uneducated and uncivilized selves we once were. Humanity means changing, and society is a result of our humanity coming together to protect itself. If we’ve changed, then it is most certainly time for society to change as well, and respect the unique gift that we all have, a gift the United Nations has listed as a human right that may not be taken away from us: The right to live. The Death Penalty flies in the face of that, and should be abolished wherever it is still practiced.