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Murderers Deserve the Death Penalty
| Article
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16551 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1989 |
2,613 Words |
| Author
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Ernest van den Haag
Ernest van den Haag, recently retired as John M. Olin
Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham
University, is currently a distinguished scholar at the
Heritage Foundation. This is a revised version of a paper
first read in January 1990 at a conference on "The Ambiguous
Legacy of the Enlightenment" held at the Claremont Institute
in Claremont, California, to be published in a forthcoming
book. |
According to polls, more than 70 percent of Americans feel that murderers deserve the death penalty. Innocents should never be punished, but the punishment for people who have committed crimes should be reasonably proportionate to their culpability and to the seriousness of their crimes. Hence, if a burglar deserves imprisonment, a murderer deserves death--the only punishment appropriate to his crime. Murderers do not deserve to survive their victims.
Currently the law in the 37 states that have the death penalty provides that only those who have committed particularly heinous murders be sentenced to death. Usually, if a defendant is found guilty of murder, the jury, in a separate proceeding, is asked to determine whether the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating ones (both listed in the law) and impose the death sentence only if that is the case. Thus, of the about 20,000 homicides committed annually in the United States, fewer than 300 lead to death sentences in any year. So far there have been fewer than 20 executions per year (after an average waiting time of six to seven years)--too few to reduce the number of death row immates (currently about 2,100), which continues to climb.
Nonetheless, the death penalty retains great symbolic and moral importance. It indicates strongly that each of us has a right to only one life--his own--and that he risks losing it if he takes someone else's.
Obviously the death penalty totally prevents the executed person from committing other crimes--whereas even lifelong imprisonment incapacitates only partially. The imprisoned murderer may escape and commit additional crimes. He may be furloughed and do so, as in Massachusetts, or he may receive clemency from a governor. (No governor can bind future governors to denying clemency.) Not least, the imprisoned murderer may need not fear further punishment. Thus, the belief of abolitionists that lifelong imprisonment would protect society as well as execution does is clearly mistaken.
Does the death penalty deter other prospective murderers? Certainly not all. Is did not deter the man to be executed. But it seems equally certain that some will be deterred by the risk of execution, however small. People buy lottery tickets even though the chance of winning is much less than the chance of a murderer's being executed. One's hopes and fears are not determined by calculate risks, and anyway, they are seldom calculated. The young (and murder is a crime almost exclusively committed by the young) fear nothing more than death.
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