Capital Punishment

Has a ring to it, doesn't it, "capital punishment?" The term probably had to do with beheading, since the caput is head in Latin. We think of beheading as particularly savage now; it's something "terrorists" do; civilized people don't. In the fifth century, beheading was the reserved and preferred method of execution for erring nobility; common people got much worse. I'll go into that below.

Actually, most "civilized" people around the world do not have capital punishment at all; they regard the whole idea of the American death penalty as barbaric, too, akin to those "terrorists" we condemn. The arguments in favor of capital punishment overtly have to do with deterrence: that if you have the death penalty, then would-be murderers might think twice about killing someone.

Think about that for a moment: true there are the calculating killers we read about in detective stories; you know, the ones who kill their step-mothers in order to inherit the family manse, or something like that. But most murder doesn't happen like that; it's highly emotional; the killer is deranged, not thinking straight, or is acting on impulse. I knew one man who had killed his wife in a drunken rage, with a cleaver, in front of their children; he couldn't understand why the children didn't come to visit him in prison! Doesn't sound very rational, does he? Or think of the young men, out on the town, wildly holding up liquor stores, who, in the moment, shoot the proprietor to death, usually because they are afraid he'll call the cops, or because he's reaching for a gun under the counter.

What deterrent value does capital punishment have in the above instances? Are the young men or the drunken, enraged husband going to stop and say to themselves: "Now, wait a minute! I could be executed for this?" Most don't think they'll ever get caught; they aren't calculating; they're acting in the irrational power of the moment.

Then, of course there's the problem of executing the insane, the feeble-minded, or the innocent; too many of the latter have been found to have been killed (or have been sentenced to death) by states where law students are given the chance to comb carefully over cases. That's why Illinois instituted a moratorium on the death penalty.

Not much of a deterrent when you execute the innocent and let the guilty go free, is it?

There is another reason not voiced in favor of the death penalty; it is vengeance. I suspect that at least some of the "victims' rights" movement is about vengeance, too.

The incidence of murder has been dropping everywhere, but it has dropped faster in states without the death penalty, or where it has not been used in a long time. That doesn't favor the deterrence theory. An explanation for this is that when capital punishment is frequently used, the state is sanctioning murder (by the state), and the atmosphere surrounding crime is brutalized, encouraging more brutality. The frequency of murder is falling for other reasons, demographics and better policing mostly.

There was a brief period in the 70's, when there was no capital punishment. The return to the death penalty in most states has been part of the whole "conservative" trend that this website is about, paralleling the Roman response to rising crime as their Empire became more and more dysfunctional.

As I pointed out in the beginning, beheading was seen as relatively humane in the late Roman Empire, and was reserved for the nobility. Everyone else, when sentenced to death, ended up in the coliseum, to be torn apart by wild beasts--except that, when crime rates continued to rise, the Emperors attempted to devise ever more horrific methods of execution: slow burning on lampposts, for example. The idea was deterrence: no one on the street could avoid seeing, hearing and smelling someone burning there.

But it didn't work. Crime isn't primarily controlled by punishment; it's created by social conditions. When conditions get worse, crime will rise inexorably, and as the Emperors discovered, even the most horrible punishments they could imagine did not deter it one bit; the empire was falling apart.