Hallo Genossinnen und Genossen
Not sure who else was watching yesterday but a condemned man was given a two week reprieve to review certain particulars of the case. Convicted only on word of mouth, and due to be killed with an extremely painful, unreliable poison, Glossip is the current face of death penalty resistance.
Of course, it helps his case that he's white- Troy Davis obviously didn't have this advantage, and while Clayton Lockett did provoke major outrage it was only posthumously.
I thought I should take the moment to weigh in on the death penalty.
Of course, whenever anyone raises questions about the morality or desirability of killing prisoners, they are asked to personalize it- "wouldn't you want someone who killed your wife to die?" Asking whether we would want revenge in the case of a family member being taken from us is wrong, distracting and misleading- it's also highly insulting, because it suggests that opponents of execution are hypocrites. The answer there is the assumption of personal vengeance. Is the justice system to be about revenging ourselves on those who wrong us, or about maintaining the safety of society? If it is meant to be about maintaining the safety of society and its constituents, then arguments based on revenge or desire to hurt someone are automatically insufficient. Every example we see shows us that systems based on revenge are less sustainable and less efficient than those based on safety and rehabilitation, or even restoration.
Asking "don't you want revenge?" isn't the only question we should ask, even if we accept the bloodthirsty view that the system exists to hurt people who hurt others. We also need to ask the uestion "Do you trust the government not to make a mistake in something so irrevocable, and if so, why?" Our justice system has ordered and carried out the deaths of some 1500 people by execution since the reinstatement of executions. Scores of condemned prisoners have been exonerated in that time, proof that our justice system is far from infallible. Estimates based on systemic biases suggest that as many as 1 in 4 death row prisoners may be innocent.
So we also need to ask- why is a given person to be killed? Is it because they are guilty of a heinous crime, or is it because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because they are too poor to afford quality legal representation, or even just because they are Black or Latino? African-Americans are represented at more than double a proportionate rate among condemned prisoners despite the lack of corresponding disproportionality in crime statistics. Meanwhile, court after court has held that it's totally ok to execute someone even if the prosecution deliberately concealed DNA evidence, or the defense literally slept through the courtroom portion of the trial.
Our system is riddled with errors which tip the scales of the death penalty away from a blind tool of enforcement to a racist tool of oppression against the poor and oppressed. It's also wildly expensive compared to life in prison.
And yes, after all of that, there is also at least one limit this Socialist wants to put on the government: we must not allow anyone to be needlessly killed in our names. Having someone in prison is guarantee enough of safety without spending untold quantities of money and prestige in a barbaric ritual like execution. We could fix all of the problems I mentioned before, and I would still oppose execution. The scariest problems are the ones we can't ever fix- in that regard, killing someone is much like permitting climate change to continue unabated.
We have to stop it.
Solidarität, Genossinnen und Genossen.
Elise
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