Why I support the death penalty
From a New Yorker piece on America’s high murder rate:
On July 23, 2007, authorities say, Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the Cheshire home of William Petit, Jr., an endocrinologist, and tortured the family through the night, raping Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and at least one of the couple’s two daughters. In the morning, Hayes and Komisarjevsky are said to have forced Hawke-Petit, a school nurse who suffered from multiple sclerosis, into the family car and taken her to a local bank, where she withdrew fifteen thousand dollars, after which a suspicious teller alerted the police. The two men allegedly then took Hawke-Petit back to the house, killed her, set the house on fire, and fled in the Petits’ S.U.V., though not far: they crashed into a police barricade, just past the driveway.
Inside the house, a four-bedroom Colonial, police found three bodies. Hawke-Petit, forty-eight, had been strangled. Seventeen-year-old Hayley Petit, who, that September, was to start college at Dartmouth, died of smoke inhalation. Her eleven-year-old sister, Michaela, was found tied to a bed, her body badly burned after having been doused with gasoline. Only William Petit, who had been bound with rope, beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and left for dead in the cellar, survived.
This is a pretty clear-cut case: There are eyewitnesses, police were on the scene before they could flee, and the evidence is both plentiful and obviously interpreted. As far as I am concerned, those two have made their lives forfeit. I want the state to take vengeance upon them for the evil that they have done. If they were to be drawn and quartered and their remains were scattered to the four corners of the continental United States, you wouldn’t hear peep out of me.
Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty — as I did in the wake of another New Yorker piece, about a possibly-innocent man who was executed — I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line. I’m all for containing prosecutorial abuses. I’m all for reforms to the way prosecutors seek the death penalty: Only in cases where there’s an eye witness or a confession or videotape evidence, perhaps. Maybe raise the bar for “scientific” evidence* to include only DNA evidence that conclusively proves the perpetrator was there.
But those monsters — the animals who would do that to a family of human beings — don’t deserve to live, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s a harsher penalty for them to live out their lives in prison. I want the state to wreak vengeance upon them. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens. If this makes me a bad person, then so be it.
*I put scientific in quotes because it was “scientific” arson evidence that sent Cameron Todd Willingham to his death.
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14 Comments - add your own
Dudley Sharp — November 5, 2009 at 5:53 am
With regard to the Nw Yorker article, reconsider.
Read:
Cameron Todd Willingham: Media meltdown & the death penalty:”Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man?”, by David Grann(1)
http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Cameron%20Todd%20Willingham.aspx
William A Petit Jr MD — November 5, 2009 at 11:31 am
Thank you very much. I concur completely.
Bill Petit
Genuine Realist — November 5, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I wrote about this issue. I think both proponents and opponents will find the post interesting.
http://grealistink.typepad.com/wordplay_language_politic/2009/04/an-anecdote-about-the-death-penalty.html
Raj — November 5, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Totally agree…in the bleeding heart frenzy we are now focusing on the rights of the criminal while totally forgetting about the victims. If the worthless criminal suffers while being killed, so be it…they deserve it. We need to quit whining, get a backbone, and start purging criminals like this.
Jamie — November 5, 2009 at 10:11 pm
I certainly can’t complain with your sentiment here. As strongly as I oppose the death penalty, if those guys get the chair, I won’t be upset about it.
That doesn’t really change anything though. Trusting imperfect people to carry out something as weighty as the death penalty seems like folly, especially when there are no practical benefits. (It is expensive and it doesn’t work as a deterrent.)
I don’t identify myself as a conservative, but what’s good and admirable about conservatism is it’s distrust of human nature. We should always be suspicious of power. I part ways with conservatism there, but as a founding principle for political thought, you could do worse. It seems to me that capital punishment is pretty deeply UNconservative if you are a libertarian/individualist conservative, and downright wicked if you are a social conservative. (Because you’d be a Christian most likely. I know that conservative Christians tend to like to electrocute people, but that’s just them not reading the Bible very honestly.)
I know that actual conservatives mostly don’t come down on capital punishment in this way, but it seems that they should. Of course, a few conservatives are against capital punishment for exactly that reason.
Yeah, those guys should die. They should be roasted alive. But what would that really accomplish? And what governing body would you trust with that kind of power?
My objections to capital punishment are the more everyday liberal ones (The way that it is administered tends to be racist and classist, defendants don’t get always get a fair shake, we might kill an innocent, etc.), but I really don’t think see how conservatives can support it either.
James N. Markels — November 6, 2009 at 2:41 pm
If jail is a punishment, then it seems to me that the difference between the death penalty and life in prison without possibility of parole is that the perp gets less punishment in the former case than the latter, since he’s going to die one way or the other. If you are really stoked by vengeance, why opt for less punishment?
Ridwell — November 9, 2009 at 11:33 am
Any rational person would choose death over jail. Duh. One and done, son, or day after day of merely remaining alive, breathing the same air, under the same sun as the decent. Let’s see, do I want the agony of the certainty of always knowing where my next meal and medical care is coming from, for the rest of my life, or nothingness? I think the case is clear. That’s why every convicted murderer would choose less punishment over more. It’s common sense.
Punisher — November 9, 2009 at 11:41 am
Jamie asks, “But what would that really accomplish?”
A: Only the dispensation of our duty to honor the dignity of man.
Oh, and also some justice (at the very least the justice of not committing the severe injustice that any civilized people commits by keeping the defiled and legally convicted brutes among them alive).
law student — November 10, 2009 at 11:06 am
Isn’t it kind of arbitrary to limit the death penalty to the cases where there happens to be the most evidence? The death penalty, if we are going to have it, ought to be reserved for the worst of the worst, and I don’t think there’s any necessary correlation between solidity of evidence and gruesomeness of crime. You could commit a heinous crime and leave no physical trace. Indeed, this rule could incentivize murderers to do just that. I think you either need to buck up and make the argument for the death penalty despite the likelihood that someone innocent will get executed at some point, or, if that possibility bothers you too much, than accept the death penalty can’t be defended under a framework where the goal is never to execute anyone innocent.
James N. Markels — November 11, 2009 at 10:20 am
Ridwell: What makes you think that someone facing life without parole will ever see the sun, eat satisfying food, or get anything other than the most basic medical care? Jail is no picnic for LWOPers. Do you think Charles Manson is enjoying himself? Besides, the fellow inmates are a danger in themselves. Consider Jeffrey Dahlmer.
Drew — November 11, 2009 at 11:14 am
“If the worthless criminal suffers while being killed, so be it…they deserve it.”
I struggle to understand what this means: someone “deserving” some particular sort of abuse. I mean, if that abuse were an predictable & unavoidable _natural_ result of someone’s actions, like someone drinking 10 beers and then getting a hangover, that’d be one thing.
But we, having the option, are choosing to kill these guys… so I don’t really see how the concept of deserving fully applies. Either we have good reasons to kill them or we don’t, but I don’t see any moral sense in hiding behind some ill-defined cloak of “deserving.”
I’m not exactly upset by killing these guys as opposed to the people they chose to kill. But I don’t think I can justify the idea that they deserved to die. They hurt many many people. We found them and stopped them from doing so, and then kept them locked away so that they could never do again what they revealed they were both willing and capable of doing. Problem solved. “Dessert” for their fate doesn’t really enter into it.
Dudley Sharp — December 4, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Cameron Todd Willingham: Media meltdown & the death penalty:”Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man?”, by David Grann
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/10/04/cameron-todd-willingham-media-meltdown–the-death-penalty.aspx
Other articles on the Cameron Todd Willingham case
http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Cameron%20Todd%20Willingham.aspx
laurel okeefe — December 20, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Do you think Charles Manson is enjoying himself? Besides, the fellow inmates are a danger in themselves. Consider Jeffrey Dahlmer
In response to the comment above-um I think you need to do some research here re the manson thing-as you may or may not know that cretin wa sgiven the death penalty along with his troupe of worshipper-baby killers-and when california rescinded its death penalty in the 70’s after the supreme court declared it inhumane punishment for a spell, those killers were all commuted to life sentences which i find abhorrent. many of them including Charles Tex Watson proceeded to get niceties like congugal visits and indeed married and sired children whilst in prison for murdering a pregnant woman in cold blood among many other innocents. He also has a website touting his new found christian status and he has also managed to obtain a college degree as well as SOMEHOW BECOMING a minister of some sort. This is but one example of how horrible murderers do not suffer enough when given a life sentence rather than the death penalty; on top of it all Wtason along with all the manson killers has been petitioning the state incessently along with family sup[porters for parole for many many years. If the case wasnt so well known one of them might get it. What a great country we live in.
laurel okeefe — December 20, 2009 at 2:27 pm
PS
And re the parole issue-when a state does away with the death penalty as New Jersey and New hamshire have done, this then makes it much more sifficult to get guilty murderers and child killer rapists to plead guilty since they are not afraid of possibly rolling the dice with a jury trial and being found guilty and thus getting the death penalty; So what this means is that they now have nothing to lose by going to trial and indeed could easily wind up with a sentence that includes the eventual possibility of parole someday;this means that like the families of sharon tate and the other victims of Manson and Co. will now have a lifetime of having to show up at every single parole hearing for the killers of thier loved one, in order to plead thier case of why the killer should not get paroled-and they may or may not be listened to and sunsequently some of these killers will be paroled-giving those families now a life sentence of anger and unabated grief at the injustice of thier family members murderers/rapists walking free among them.
If a life sentence is truly worse than the death penalty why then do so many defense attorneys do evrything in thier power to avoid this for thier clients!? These people are cowards-they infict pain terror death
upon others but abhor the idea of death for themselves. Prison is often a very familiar place to many of them and a life sentence there is not the end of the world espcially in many of our prisons today where things like congugal visits are the norm. And when an inamte is well known and a case in the media that inmate is always given protection by the very system he defrauded and terrorized. Ironic isnt it.
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