This piece, originally published by the Oakland
Tribune,
was posted
on “The Policy Think Site” with the
author’s annotations.
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Copyright
© 2006 by Jay B. Gaskill
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Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail: response@jaygaskill.com
As first published by
THE
And the ANG
Newspaper group
on March 9, 2006
MY WORD
Footnotes were added
by the Author,
and did not appear
in the print edition.
Death penalty serves a vital purpose
Bless those sincere death penalty opponents who
are grounded in traditional morality.
They have the gift of intellectual honesty. As Sister Prejean – of “Dead
Man Walking” fame – said in
The death penalty (including lethal injection) is cruel – to those who don’t deserve it, but it is not unusually so when compared with other punishments in the same class, i.e., other forms of execution. The United States Supreme court will never outlaw execution in all its forms.
In the latest lethal injection controversy,[1] death penalty opponents are playing chess: Move one was to press for lethal injection as “more humane.” Move two was to press to mandate the presence of a medial professional on scene. Move three was to get the physicians to back out.
Checkmate? Hardly. The goal is not to save a killer’s life, but only to minimize his pain. San Quentin could get by with a vet.
Those humanitarian souls who oppose the death penalty lack a sufficient grasp of the workings of the brutal mind. Here’s the hard truth:
Whenever a region is infected with a critical mass of brutally minded, homicide-prone males (the sub-group is 95% male), the genteel rules of drawing room justice (“Kill somebody and go to another room”) are ineffective.
I no longer oppose the death penalty because of the answer to one question: What if the legal execution of 50 actually guilty murderers worked to prevent the illegal slaughter of 800 actually innocent men, women and children?[2]
If the death penalty deters murders at all, the moral calculus changes dramatically.
There is a
suggestion that the 9th Circuit’s intervention in the Morales
execution might create a de facto
According to
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, between
1991 and 2000 the homicide rate fell 47 percent. The Department of
Justice’s “Homicide in
Last year, the Brookings Institute and the American enterprise Institution jointly published the study “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs”.[3]
Here’s the relevant pull quote: “Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many as eighteen or more murders for each execution.”
The people at large, the ones who work, protect their children, pay taxes and vote, have already got it figured out. Society already has been infected with a critical mass of brutally minded, homicide prone males.
Many of these brutal minds are functionally undeterred by the threat of more prison time. Some are deterred by the prospect of death row, and some is better than none.
An increase of as few as 6 murders per 100,000 would represent roughly another 1,000 murder victims.[4] Can we really afford another death penalty moratorium?
Jay Gaskill, an attorney and criminal justice consultant, was the Alameda County Public Defender from 1989 to 1999.
[1] The Morales case, where a lethal injection is being challenged because of the concern that the convicted murderer might feel pain because of inadequate anesthesia – the 9th Circuit was entertaining the issue at this writing.
[4] A conservative estimate based on a calendar year at the higher rate and a base population of only 14 million.