Summum jus, summa injuria.
So says Cicero: Extreme justice is extreme injustice. In his blog Confessions of a Small Church Pastor, Chuck Warnock writes about the recent execution of Christopher Scott Emmett:
While I realize there is a lot of disagreement on the issue of capital punishment, it seems to me that followers of Christ would oppose capital punishment on the grounds that Jesus himself was an innocent victim of the Roman Empire’s capital punishment system. When we think of Jesus’ death, not as a theological doctrine, but as capital punishment gone wrong, it casts a different light on the subject. […] I can’t help thinking of Jesus’ short stay on death row. Is this the best solution we have to society’s problems? What do you think?
Not wanting to clog Pastor Chuck’s comment section, I’ll reply here.
The litany of problems with capital punishment seems endless and ever-growing. It disproportionately targets those with less money, less education, and more melanin. Its value as a deterrent has always been questionable, at best. And, as has been documented on countless occasions, the innocent are as likely to go to their graves as the guilty. Any of these issues, taken by themselves, would be disturbing enough; taken in tandem, they serve as an indictment of an idea and attendant practice that need sorely to be rethought, if not disassembled altogether.
But then, the debate over capital punishment is only about the death penalty on its surface. Once you start to dig deeper, it becomes evident that the debate is over the nature of the justice system, and has been around for as long as there’ve been criminals. Stripped to its essentials, the question is what the system’s for, and whether it exists to rehabilitate, or merely to punish.
To return to Warnock’s central question: Is this the best solution we have to society’s problems? Extreme crimes, we’re told, require extreme punishments. And so the death penalty stems from, and speaks to, a kind of Newtonian view of justice: for every crime, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
But if we’re to take the assertion that we live in a Judeo-Christian society at face value, we need to put some serious thought into what that means for our justice system. Rehabilitation, it seems to me, goes hand-in-glove with redemption. I’ll admit it’s a while since I read the Bible cover-to-cover, but I don’t recall ever seeing Jesus–or anyone else, for that matter–admonishing us to only forgive the little stuff. Therefore, it might be instructive to start with the example of a man who forgave his executioners, even as they killed him.
None of this is to say that we should simply look the other way at criminal misconduct of any kind. But if your starting point is a “culture of life,” and/or the idea that rehabilitation, and with it redemption, is possible, then there needs to be regard for all of life, and an equal regard for the redemption of all, not just of some. And I don’t believe that there’s redemption to be found at the wrong end of a noose, or of 50,000 volts.
December 20th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I’m sorry I’m 18 months late to this discussion, but you state that the Capital Punishment debate is only about the death penalty on the surface. How right you are.
If it came to a free vote here in the UK, I would vote for the re-introduction of the death penalty. Absolute fact.
If I was sat on a jury where I knew that the accused could be put to death because of my vote, I could never return a verdict that could take some-one else’s life. Fact again.
Logically, then, the death penalty is no good, because for a deterrent to deter you must be prepared to use it. If 1 person out of 60 million that live in this country aren’t prepared to use it, then universal justice cannot be served.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:01 pm
That’s fine, Roy. Not for nothing did I name it “A Slight Delay.”
I’m curious: you say you would vote for the re-introduction of the death penalty, but that you wouldn’t vote to impose it if you were serving on a jury. Why vote for a law about which you’re conflicted, and that (from the sound of it) you’d prefer not to see carried out? I can understand supporting the death penalty (although I don’t agree with it) and I can also understand why one would refuse to impose it, but these strike me as a dichotomy, an either/or rather than a both/and. Could you shed some light on your thinking?