Justice, punishment and revenge

While I was in Savannah* my post on the death penaltykicked up a mild fuss. I thought it might — stridently worded missives calling for the implementation of government-authorized disembowelment tend to — and I wanted to respond to a few critics.

But first, I’d like to clarify my own thinking on the justice system. I take the view that the justice system is best understood as a means of meting out punishment. I think that, 1.) the state needs to punish those who transgress against its laws, 2.) separate criminals from proper society for proper society’s own protection, and 3.) rehab the few criminals who can be rehabilitated. And that third item comes in a very distant third as far as I am concerned. For the record: I do not think that the death penalty deters first degree murder in any real sense. I simply view the death penalty as the harshest punishment that should be saved for only the worst offenders we have.

Over at The Plank, Chris Orr writes:

Bunch adds, “I want the state to wreak vengeance upon [Hayes and Komisarjevsky]. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens.” Here, again, he is offering an emotional remedy that I don’t think he would actually want to become law. The purpose of the death penalty is not, after all, to cause suffering–quite the contrary, as our gradual shift from hanging to the electric chair to lethal injection attests.

He also notes that I probably don’t actually support drawing and quartering.** That being said, I don’t have a real problem with the electric chair or hanging (the latter of which actually causes minimal pain if done right). Again: I see the death penalty as a punishment, and punishment shouldn’t necessarily be painless. Drawing and quartering probably runs afoul of constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishments, but I see no reason why a hanging does, certainly when looking at the document in an originalist light.

Over at the League, Will touches on something I’ve long found confusing:

I also think that the alternative to execution – lifetime imprisonment without parole – satisfies the demands of retributive justice without risking the lives of innocent defendants.

Will doesn’t say it this way, but you often hear the argument that life imprisonment is worse than execution because the criminal has to suffer in prison*** and then he dies anyway. But if life imprisonment is just as awful — nay, worse — than execution, why should we be happy that supposedly innocent people have been stuck in prison with no hope of parole for the rest of their lives? And how many of these innocents will manage to prove their innocence without the neverending legal process that has freed the innocent from death row?

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, writes

I do not believe the point of the law in the West is revenge. It’s justice.

This is a fair enough point, I guess, except for the fact that I’m not entirely sure I understand the difference between revenge and justice, especially in a case as personal as this one. What does justice mean for the husband and father whose wife was raped, one of his two daughters was raped, and all three were burned alive by a sadistic pair of monsters? The first definition of justice in Merriman-Websters is thus:

The maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.

I guess that definition hinges on what we decide is a “merited” punishment. But you will never convince me that those two’s actions do not merit death.

*It was lovely; I recommend visiting in the offseason when it’s cool, as I did.

**For the record, I do not.

***Often, people taking this line of argument say that they suffer in prison with the general population instead of the segregated death row inmates; the implicit point being that the beatings and rapes suffered by people in jail are awful. This is an argument for another day, but I tend to agree with Eli Lehrer that the conditions in our prison system are shameful.

(UPDATED with links and spellcheck.)