Letter to the editor

To the editor:

The various articles on the death penalty (“Til death,” Nov. 30, 2009) miss the point. There are many practical reasons to revamp the capital punishment system in the United States. Lawmakers can make capital punishment work better, and at lower cost. The court system could be retrofitted, to make it even less likely that we execute an innocent man, perhaps while even spending less on legal proceedings.

That, however, is irrelevant. As long as capital punishment exists, there is a chance that we may be wrong in killing someone, either for a crime they did not commit or by imposing a death sentence on a crime that may warrant a lesser punishment. For ordinary crimes we can accept the potential for mistakes—if you are almost entirely sure that someone robbed someone else, then the thief can be imprisoned, but that opportunity for a flawed decision is still there.
Society responds to this potential by devising various systems for reversing the wrongs of the judicial system. Fines can be refunded and even jail time can be compensated. But death is final. If someone goes to the electric chair, it matters not whether they are later found innocent, for death is irreversible. Once dead, no one can be brought back to life, even if the killer was mistaken.

However, even if there was, by some magic, an absolute certainty that a person was guilty and deserved to be killed, no person has the right to kill another person. We acknowledge that murder, in and of itself, is wrong, for it is the killing of another, just as much as murder. Executions, by whatever means, are the same, merely in a judicial setting. Killing people for having killed, though, does nothing but extend the murderous streak and makes no rational sense. It's like having sex for virginity.

Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, CC ’12
Dec. 2, 2009

Tags: Opinion, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, Death Penalty