I watched an episode of West Wing last night, and thought about the death penalty.
The plot was, basically, that a murderer was going to be executed, and his defense team was trying last minute efforts to delay or stop that. The President's senior staff each become involved, each coming to the conclusion that capital punishment is wrong, and that the President should commute the sentence. In the end, the President does not, the man is executed, and in the last scene, a Catholic priest from the President's home town, called down to provide comfort, solace, and insight, hears the President's confession in the Oval Office.
I don't have strong feelings about the legitimacy of capital punishment. I'd just as soon we did not do it, but I don't feel strongly about it. When I hear of someone freed from death row after DNA analysis conclusively shows that the person was not guilty of murder, it doesn't drive me to think that we ought not to do it at all. Even when I contemplate the image of Texas as the execution factory that it apparently is, and shudder at it, I don't think that we should not do it at all. In my soft way, I think that there are people who are so foul that they should not be allowed to pollute society. I wish that we could lock them away and forget about them, as they did in Superman's Phantom Zone, but that's not practical; when I compare the idea of paying for them to be guarded, fed, and housed for the rest of their lives, versus executing them, I usually come down on the latter side. It doesn't tend to be a matter of philosophy so much as economics.
I think that its the desire for the ability to be able to just fix these people, catch-and-release them back into society, that drives intensely liberal people to support rehabilitation programs. I believe that in many cases these programs do work, though I suspect that they work more for lesser crimes than for this. People who kill accidentally can be rehabilitated. People who kill with purpose, probably not. For those people, the death penalty is our solution.
I wish we didn't have to have it, but I don't see a plausible alternative.
6 comments:
It's all complicated.
Yes, except in the minds of True Believers on either side. There, the air is clear and the solutions plain.
I'm liberal as well (not pretty liberal, but fairly). I don't believe that people become murderous who, with different upbringing or opportunities, would not have.
This is, I know, a strong extrapolation, but I think of my cousin, one of six in a family, who was the bad one -- angry, defiant, eventually (we suspect) criminal. Not a murderer, fortunately, but if he had been, I doubt any of us would have been all that surprised. He was raised in the same environment as the one who became the cop, one who became the nurse. Could he have been keep straight and clean? If so, what would it have taken?
I want to believe it's possble to keep them all on the good side, but I'm not sure that it's possible, nor am I sure that if it is, we'd be willing to put the resources to it.
Ah, the bad seed. Yes there is a very small percentage of pathological types who would require stringent changes in their environment to be reliable in their behavior...but I think even some of these may be attributed to chemical bombardment when they were young or chemical attacks on the mother when she was pregnant. There is so much we don't know about the mind and body. And we cannot keep everyone on the good side as you say.
Wow ... this really makes me think.
I find that I agree with you. If convicts truly COULD be re-habilitated ... actually, HABilitated ... because you can't be REhabilitated until you have been HABilitated ... and also taught to read, because without an education they come back to crime over and over ... annnd if society could be taught not to judge them and to accept them back into society ... truly embrace them and help them ... not rescue them ... not not hold them accountable ... but believe in their ability to make it ... IF we could do all that, I'd go for the rehabilitation. Wonder if that's possible though?
And about Rob's Birthday? Yup ... I am feeling grateful for what HE has and sad for what I DON'T have. But if it had to go one way or the other, I'm glad HE is the happy one on his birthday. That gives me comfort and peace.
one other thought:
We all have "darkness" and "light" inside of us ... I believe it's the experiences / traumas we go through that fan the flames of the one or the other ... perhaps your cousin suffered a trauma he never told anyone about?
I wonder.
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