We Americans pride ourselves on our uniqueness: We have yet to adopt the metric system, we use Fahrenheit and we even write our dates differently. We also lead the world as one of the only major developed nations without universal healthcare.
So it should come as no surprise that we also differentiate ourselves from one hundred and two countries when it comes to keeping the death penalty. Japan is the only other major developed country that still has not repealed the death penalty. And the truth is, America will not have fully entered the civilized world until it repeals the death penalty.
And this November, Californians will have a crucial role in making that happen.
By voting yes on California Proposition 62, we will be collectively choosing to repeal a barbaric, outdated practice and instating life without possibility of parole as the maximum punishment for murder.
California Proposition 66 is also on the ballot, but its aims are very different. This disgusting proposition proposes to change death penalty procedures to speed up the appeals process to minimize the costs and make sure the process of moving a death row inmate to the ‘chopping block’ is as fast and efficient as possible. In other words, it represents the opposite of the direction in which we should be heading.
The choice is clear. By voting yes on Prop 62 and no on Prop 66, we will ensure the death penalty – an unpopular, immoral, financially irresponsible and unwieldy practice – dies a painless death in California.
The strongest case for repealing the death penalty is also the most obvious. The death penalty is morally abhorrent – human life, whatever the actions undertaken in it, is sacred. By supporting the death penalty, we are no better than the criminals who are sentenced to death. In fact, the death penalty violates Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. According to Pew Research, the American people are slowly, but finally, coming to this realization as support for it drops below 50 percent for the first time in forty years.
It’s even unsound philosophically. Modern morality is largely based on utilitarianism, or the maximization of happiness. It is illogical to believe that one can continue to maximize goodness by killing someone, and therefore increasing suffering. The death penalty is not only morally reprehensible, it is inherently worse and more inhumane than any of the crimes for which it is doled out. In capital punishment, hope is taken away. The torture of knowing, for months, that there is no escape is the worst psychological torture imaginable. The state should not be given the power to commit acts of such unspeakable violence in the name of its citizens. To be clear, murderers should be kept from doing more harm to society, but that should not be accomplished by the state carrying out that same kind of harm.
On top of that, empirical evidence shows that the death penalty fails to perform its most basic role: deter crime. An Amnesty International report on the subject concluded that research had failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. This research has been corroborated many times including by the National Research Council, by a team of researchers from Berkeley, Columbia and Hawaii, and by a pair of researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Yale. In fact, there is evidence that the death penalty achieves the opposite and actually brutalizes society by diminishing the public’s respect for life. A study by Northeastern University, concluded that in New York State over the period 1907-63 there were, on average, controlling for other factors, two additional homicides in the month after an execution.
In addition, innocent people are often sentenced to death. Staggeringly, a study by the Michigan School of Law found that of 7,482 death sentences handed down between 1973 and 2004, 117, or 1.6 percent, were exonerated, but that with enough time and resources, at least 4.1 percent of death row inmates would have been exonerated. In other words, if our judicial system had been perfectly accurate, more than 200 other prisoners would have been cleared during those three decades. The fact that research suggests that most of the wrongly sentenced are not being effectively pardoned makes it clear that giving the huge, clumsy judicial arm of the state this much power is atrociously irresponsible.
Of course, some may remain unconvinced of repealing the death penalty because they think it’s cheaper to kill criminals than attempt to reform them or keep them isolated from society. However, even if it was acceptable to put up with all these moral and empirical shortcomings in the name of cutting costs, those people are wrong. This was thoroughly demonstrated in a study by Judge Alarcon and Paula Mitchell, which concluded that, since 1978, California’s current system has cost the state’s taxpayers $4 billion more than a system that has life in prison without the possibility of parole as its most severe penalty. Similar studies across the US have corroborated the findings in almost every single other state.
Regardless of our political leanings, we must savvy with the facts: the death penalty isn’t cost-effective, it kills innocent people, it doesn’t deter criminals and it’s inhumane punishment.
Let me leave you with these immortal words from Albert Camus, a French philosopher, “capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be compared.”
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