The Case Against the Death Penalty

...So the question here really amounts to whether this legal right can be made a moral one by analogy with justifiable homicide, as Assemblyman Salzburg evidently wanted to imply...

...A superior guide for the handling of traitors can be found in the Hague Convention, to which our nation is a signatory and which specifically proscribes shooting prisoners...

...Last year, only 48 persons were executed, a record low...

...Let us rather help him who did so human a thing...

...A DIFFERENT version of the argument from deterrence was produced in the New Jersey debate by Assemblyman John Davis...

...THE arguments advanced in New Jersey this spring in defense of the ancient practice of killing as a punishment achieved their purpose...

...Assemblyman Davis was quite misleading...

...But is parallelism for parallelism's sake a good reason for killing anyone...

...In her plea, she complained that supporters of the Haines-Stepacoff bill were guilty of "maudlin sympathy" for a murderer, since they expressed more concern for him than for his victim...

...Yet the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent is not as vital a question as whether the death penalty is a better deterrent than imprisonment, and whether it is the only effective way to combat certain types of crime...

...This advice may seen unduly sentimental...

...Second...

...But, in fact, the contrary has been proved...

...In Ohio, Governor Michael DiSalle sent a special message to the legislature recommending abolition, but without avail...

...Perhaps...

...Such a record of parole success is typical...

...But a convicted traitor surely presents even less of a threat...

...Or by indifference or disbelief: Assemblyman Salzburg and all his legislative colleagues had been appraised of these facts well in advance of the debate...

...Opposition to capital punishment has been declared by a number of religious and secular organizations (the American Baptist Convention, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Protestant Episcopal Church, National Association of Social Workers, Americans for Democratic Action and United Presbyterian Church of America...

...Let no feeling of cave-man vengeance influence us...

...The Lindbergh Law provides the death penalty only when the kidnapper has killed his victim: nationally, there has been a total of only 16 executions out of 803 convicted kidnappers since 1932...

...Most of these arguments can be found in the remarks of four of the legislators who opposed abolition on the floor of the New Jersey Assembly last April 6, during the debate on the Haines-Stepacoff bill to replace capital punishment by a mandatory prison term of no less than 30 years for the crimes of treason, first-degree murder, kidnapping for ransom, and assault on a high government official...

...Rather, the defense of the death penalty ostensibly consists in a variety of powerful moral and sociological arguments...

...I did it...

...go lightly punished...

...Although it is not much of a consolation to the victim and his relatives to have him murdered at home rather than in a neighboring abolition state, no one wants to see any state turned into a "dumping ground" for the victims of out-of-state killers...

...This clash of attitudes has once again thrust itself upon us through the current national movement for the abolition of the death penalty...

...The final argument against the New Jersey bill came from Assemblywoman Mildred Hughes...

...It is an unsentimental idea, as it calls upon us also to admit that life or destroyed property cannot be restored, no matter how much vengeance is wreaked, and HUGO ADAM BEDAU is a teacher of philosophy at Princeton University...

...There is a kind of futility in debating this question: Obviously, the state has, or can have, a legal right to do so...

...The death penalty, like nothing else, is the dying symbol of this attitude...

...There are now only about 150 more men awaiting execution in our prisons...

...Advocates of the death penalty trot out "a life for a life" when it serves their purpose, and they ignore it when it doesn't...

...This is the real absurdity: it is not too much to expect that we will shortly come to our senses and stop it...

...Furthermore, by keeping traitors alive, we might learn something...

...It is now used so sparingly in this country that it is unnecessary and absurd...

...HARDLY anyone, of course, openly defends legal vengeance as a social policy, least of all in the state legislatures...

...Relying on a newspaper report, he said that last March an escaped convict from a Southern prison released his hostages before he crossed the state line because kidnapping was a capital crime in the next state, and, after his capture, "he told the police he feared the electric chair...

...Quite the contrary...

...Furthermore, even if one did consent to the doctrine of "a life for a life...

...The answer is too obvious...

...But is the alternative any less so...

...Why hasn't it happened...

...It hasn't happened anywhere so far...

...The next day, an extraordinary letter, written by Anatol Holt, the father of the dead child, was widely reported in the press...

...Sympathy aside, her argument focused on the repeal of the death penalty for treason...

...342 men convicted of first-degree murder had been paroled and only nine convicted of another felony (in one case, second-degree murder...

...I have been told, to press for its outright abolition...

...The man who commits murder with malice aforethought forfeits his own life...

...hence that we may as well take the one road that will protect us against repetitions: This may involve special, thoughtful, even lenient handling...

...Probably because professional killers, although they prefer the risk of prison to the risk of execution, never run a very great risk of being apprehended, convicted and executed...

...In California, for instance, between 1945 and 1954...

...There is no way of knowing if the Lindbergh Law has been an effective deterrent, because there is no data on the volume of kidnapping prior to the enactment of the Law...

...undoubtedly, traitors are willing to run the risk of death...

...Does the state have a moral right to take life as a punishment...

...Support for this argument was presented later by Assemblyman John Wilson...

...In other words, this version of the argument from deterrence—usually regarded as the strongest rational basis for capital punishment—is not supported by evidence, but by ignorance...

...She did not clarify how our current practice of killing murderers expresses a more suitable kind of sympathy for the victim...

...After Assemblyman David Stepa-coff opened the debate with an impassioned summary of the bill's merits, it fell to the next speaker, Assemblyman Paul Salzburg of Atlantic City, to present the main arguments against the bill...

...Rhode Island, for instance, is surrounded by death penalty states (Connecticut and Massachusetts), yet, according to its police officials when they testified before the Massachusetts Special Commission on the Death Penalty, nothing of this sort has ever happened...

...First of all...

...Within the past year...

...This tidy parallelism may seem appropriate...

...To some New Jersey observers, the argument from deterrence must have been irresistible when Assemblyman Salzburg went so far as to threaten that the Garden State would become an abattoir for gangland murders from across the Hudson and the Delaware...

...This worthy end was to be achieved with a bill which provided, among other things, that a 16-year-old boy could be put to death for the "attempt" to "carnally abuse"—which is not rape—a girl under 12, even with her consent...

...Not one of these abolition, moratorium or study-commission bills has become law...

...Among other things, Holt said...

...After more than two hours of debate, the Haines-Stepacoff bill was defeated 30 to 19 (with 11 abstentions...

...Something just came over me that I can't explain...

...Yet could it really have been these arguments—a confusing tangle of fiction, fallacy and falsehood—which caused this defeat, and the others like it...

...Delaware repealed all its capital statutes, and Alaska and Hawaii, neither of which has had the death penalty since 1957, have been admitted to the Union...

...What is to prevent gangsters from New York and Pennsylvania from luring people into this state and murdering them when they know they won't be executed...

...But J. Edgar Hoover reported to Congress in 1957 that "the FBI has investigated a total of 524 major kidnapping cases and has solved all but two...

...Once enemy soldiers have been captured and disarmed, they no longer present enough of a threat to warrant being killed...

...He claimed that the death penalty must be an effective deterrent because kidnappings decreased after the Federal "Lindbergh Law" in 1932 imposed the death penalty for kidnapping...

...THE CASE AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY By Hugo Adam Bedau ON THURSDAY, JUNE 4. a Philadelphia high school student confessed to strangling a neighbors three-year old daughter after she "resisted his advances...

...If the primary reason for executing murderers is the principle of retaliation, why can't reten-tionists and abolitionists get together over the repeal of all capital statutes save for murder...

...Had I caught the boy in the act, I would have wished to kill him...

...Why then, should we allow on the home front under civil law that which international agreement has long ago outlawed on the battlefield...

...It was further pointed out that in this country, the rate of fatal attacks on the police in states without the death penalty was slightly lower than in death-penalty states...

...The vast proportion of all capital offenders, including most of those who have been executed, could eventually be paroled without endangering society...

...The law says you have the right if you catch someone raping your wife or burglarizing your house...

...Yet is it really likely to happen...

...In implying the contrary...

...Largely through the combined efforts of these two groups, bills have been debated this year in the legislatures of California...

...Third, abolishing the death penalty "would encourage the murder of policemen and aid in the creation of riots and murders within prisons, since longtime prisoners would have nothing to lose by shooting their guards...

...How can we accept the responsibility for putting 200 people to death by asphyxiation, strangulation and high-voltage broiling, without having the faintest idea what good it does...

...It was pointed out to the Canadian Parliament in 1955, during its investigation of capital punishment, that "in the United States...

...As for the alleged deterrent efficacy of the death penalty for murder, it is one of the commonplaces of criminology that nowhere in the world has abolition ever been followed by an increase in homicides...

...Now that there is no undoing what is done...

...Behind the indifference to the whole issue, the ignorance on the facts, and the invalidity of the arguments, lie the all-too-human fear and frustration, hatred and malice, which find a socially acceptable outlet in our repressive penal policies...

...I don't know why...

...They are being paroled safely every day...

...Two hundred is not a large number...

...In New Jersey, between 1949 and 1958, 117 "lifers" had been released on parole and only four of these had been found guilty of another crime of violence (in no case a murder...

...Death for traitors, she insisted, was fitting (at least she didn't claim it was a deterrent) : Since American servicemen "are called on to die for their country, traitors should die for their crimes...

...Unless the police and the prosecutors in death penalty jurisdictions become substantially more efficient than they have ever been in the past, there never will be any pressing need for gangsters to transport their victims into abolition states...

...Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Washington, which would affect capital punishment in several ways: by repealing it for some or all crimes, by suspending it temporarily, by making it optional rather than mandatory, or by creating special legislative commissions to study the issue...

...Fourth...

...it is quite clear that . . . assaults with intent to kill . . . occur more frequently in prisons in states which have the death penalty than they do in those which do not...

...Its greatest support has been found within the ranks of the Society of Friends, who for three centuries have fought for penal reforms in England and America...

...and that convicted capital offenders would not hesitate to commit murder in police and prison officials in the nine ever, show a regrettable lack of curiosity about what actually happens, according to the experience of the police and prison officials in the nine abolition states in this country (not to mention the 30 or so foreign nations which have no capital laws...

...This is a mature idea and not easy to achieve, as we may have to watch with acquiescence the murderer of a child, perhaps our own...

...It is of some interest also to note that four out of the six states which do [not] have capital punishment for murder were among those having no assaults with intention to kill...

...The analogy requires, therefore, that the state does not have the right to take the life of a criminal unless it proves that the criminal is such a menace that his death alone preserves public safety...

...But under common law, homicide is justifiable only where no less drastic measure suffices to prevent a criminal assault: furthermore, the burden of proof in court rests on him who claims to have killed justifiably...

...A more plausible defense for the death penalty can be made on the hypothesis that if it were abolished, criminals would assault the police more readily than they now do...

...Moreover, the real teeth of this law lie not so much in the severity of its penalties as in the certainty of its enforcement...

...Yet legal vengeance, at least so far as it is embodied in the death penalty, is by means in universal disrepute...

...With Assemblyman Wilson, she was also co-sponsoring a bill to turn certain sexual offenses into capital crimes, in order, she said, "to protect the women of the state...

...In the face of such facts, it is not surprising that the 1958 Massachusetts Special Commission on the Death Penalty asserted: "Unless they can establish that the death penalty does, in fact, protect other lives at the expense of one...

...In New York, even with the support of New York County's District Attorney Frank Hogan, the attempt to make the death sentence optional for first-degree murder lost in the Assembly by two votes...

...in only 15 states for only three crimes (murder, rape, armed robbery...

...I did it," he confessed to the police...

...he said, "Stepacoff savs we don't have the right to take a life...

...Yet what kind of blunted, atrophied sensibility does it take to accept with complacency the deaths of 200 men...

...Would we ever have begun to understand mental illness if we had not stopped killing the insane...

...Vengeance will get us nowhere, because, like war, it begets only more vengeance...

...he would have to look elsewhere to justify the death penalty for treason, kidnapping, rape, narcotics peddling and other crimes...

...We know that very few murderers do in fact forfeit their lives for their crimes—no more than two out of every hundred...

...This letter expressed a view of crime, punishment and the nature of man which, for all its sense and simplicity, too few people seem to share...

...As for those who cannot be paroled, they can easily be kept under maximum security, if necessary...

...The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for instance, and of any others like them in the future, deprives us of an opportunity to penetrate the dark recesses of a certain cast of mind and character...

...Nominally in charge, but often only quite remotely, is the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment...

...there is no moral justification for the state to 'take life.' " Does the murderer, however, really "forfeit his own life...

...Not even in the 1840s, when the anti-gallows movement swept up and down the Eastern seaboard, have we seen anything quite like this...

...Justice Curtis Bok of Pennsylvania's Supreme Court writes in his current book, Star Wormwood: "Hatred, malice and vengeance are the worst forms of sentimentality...

...This attitude, the repudiation of legal vengeance and the demand for rehabilitative punishments, runs head-on into the conviction that only a few offenders can be rehabilitated, and that, in any case, society is under no obligation whatever to give any criminal "special, thoughtful, even lenient handling...

...I only wish to help him...

...The State does not snuff out a life...