The Pointlessness Of Capital Punishment
On 10/20/2021, Dan Green — the head of the American Values Coalition — tweeted the following:
Of course, Alabama has one of the highest rates of capital punishment in the nation. When Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey first took office in April 2017, it took her less than one month to sign a bill that bans judges from overriding the jury recommendation of the death penalty in the case of capital murder. One month later, she signed a bill that sped up the death-penalty appeals process in her home state. Despite this, the state still currently has 169 different death row inmates.
Yes, Kay Ivey is an unapologetic supporter of the death penalty. However, among the points made regarding the execution of Willie Smith, one point that constantly seems to be ignored is when his crime was committed. Here’s an exert from a Newsweek article on Smith:
Smith was executed on 10/21/2021 for a crime he was convicted of back in 1991. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, in 1991 the internet as we know it was not in existence and would not exist for another five years. In 1991, Donald Trump was nothing more than a real-estate agent from New York who had sued the NFL. In 1991, the Twin Towers were still standing tall over New York City. The world Willie Smith committed his horrible crime in was one that simply no longer exists, and it was this new society — after keeping him peacefully in a prison for over thirty-years — that decided to kill him.
In 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would start performing executions once again — something they had not done since 2003. On 7/14/2020, the first of thirteen executions performed by Barr’s Justice Department took place when they killed Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist who had committed his crime in 1996.
Lee was not the exception. Corey Johnson, executed on 1/14/2021, was killed for a murder he committed in 1992. The execution that got the most public attention, that being Brandon Bernard’s on 12/10/2020, was done for a murder Bernard had committed back in 1999. None of the people executed were done so for murders that occurred after 2005.
It turns out, this is far from abnormal. The Death Penalty Information Center writes that:
If someone has already spent the past quarter century sitting in a federal prison, what is the point of executing them? Especially considering, as we have seen time and time again, allowing murderers to stay in prison brings no major harm to civilization.
As I write this, the idea of releasing and granting parole for Sirhan Sirhan — the man who shot Robert F. Kennedy back in 1968 — is being seriously considered. After Charles Manson — quite possibly the most infamous American serial killer of the 20th century — was put in a federal prison in 1971, he remained in one until his death in 2017. You might notice that the world did not turn to chaos, nor did it end.
The reason is simple: The death penalty is pointless. If we did not have it, the people who have been executed would simply remain in prison, as they had been for years before and as we have let several murderers do in the past.
What just society gives people a stronger punishment when a lesser punishment would do? I would argue that — whatever you would want to call such a civilization — you could never call it a just one.
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