Death to the death penalty

Before launching into a diatribe on inconsistent criteria for sentencing, widespread racial disparity, or the immorality of capital punishment, a framework for discussing the death penalty (and other similarly contentious issues) must exist. I often avoid discussing the topic of capital punishment because I begrudge the rather predictable outcome—sensible debate cheapened to a series of emotional, unfounded arguments.

With that being said, I support abolishing the death penalty for many reasons—the most unsupportable being the moral objection. By steering clear of the hazy pitfalls of moral assertions and instead focusing on effectiveness, a better claim for abolishing the death penalty can be made. Then, perhaps, one can indulge in a bit of Beccaria-, Camus-, or Kant-influenced philosophy, which I know most fellow Columbians are itching to do.

But before discussing the fun stuff, hard, cold evidence must be dragged to the forefront of debate.

A simple yet important starting point resides with geography. Geographical arbitrariness is one of the most evident demonstrations of unequal application of the law. Just by the nature of our judicial system, state courts have the right to impose the death penalty as outlined in their respective statutes. Therefore, a large degree of variability exists among states, leading to gross inequalities in nationwide executions. Since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court reinstatement of the death penalty, 80 percent of all executions have occurred in the South, in comparison to less than 2 percent in the Northeast. Therefore, the exact same crime in Maine or Texas could result in vastly different outcomes—which in itself is an inherently questionable precedent. Choosing to invoke the death penalty therefore is also a localized, provincial statement of what a particular group of people (not necessarily representative of Americans as a whole) deem a particularly heinous crime.

Overall, the most incorrectly argued facet of the death penalty debate lies in cost analysis. Time and time again the uninformed debater claims that the death penalty saves Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. But life without parole is inarguably less expensive to the state than the death penalty—a California commission estimated life without parole costs $11.5 million per year versus the current capital punishment system that costs $137 million per year (though mostly in legal dues). So please, don’t try to tell me that the death penalty saves money—it just plainly does not.

However important cost may be, I find studies detailing the impact of race on death penalty rulings one of the most compelling reasons for abolition. One Philadelphia study found that blacks were 3.9 times more likely to receive a death sentence than similarly situated, non-black defendants. The race of the victim is also a determining factor. In Georgia, it is estimated that black defendants whose victims were white were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than defendants whose victims were black. The research illuminating the huge amount of racial disparity is vast and thorough.

What perturbs me the most about the racial disparity of the death penalty, though, is what the presence of racism in our judicial system says about the state of race relations today. It seems that the courts are one of the remaining bastions of legitimized, state-sponsored discrimination in an age when street-level racism is deemed unacceptable. If we want racism to be wiped off our streets, then maybe we should start with our courts.

The presence of racism in the application of capital punishment doesn’t just demonstrate a poor state of race relations—it also reveals a judicial system that is influenced by irrelevant, biased factors. If racism is virulent enough to influence judicial rulings, can’t capital punishment be vulnerable to other external, equally undemocratic forces?

With a foundation of facts, discussing the death penalty can be a fruitful endeavor—one leading to an interesting set of connections, potentially disturbing discoveries of our tainted judicial system, and extrapolations to larger theories of justice and law.

But without evidence, using Kant to argue why you support the death penalty will not only be obnoxious, but also erroneous.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.