The death penalty is incompatible with the liberal tradition (however that tradition is defined)

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

[ this post was originally published on a weblog called What Is Liberalism ]

David Elliot, writing at Abolish the Death Penalty, points out that increasingly abundant evidence that some innocent people are on death row has made a significant impact on public opinion regarding the death penalty:

For at least the past five years and maybe a little longer, the death penalty debate, in part, has been dominated by news of the number of wrongfully convicted people who have been sentenced to death. That number stands at at least 122. You can see one list of people who were wrongfully convicted here.

Now the debate appears to be shifting in a fundamental way. People are no longer content to just discuss wrongful convictions. The debate has moved to the question of whether we have executed people who were innocent.

This rings true to me, especially given my the way my own convictions have swayed. During the 1990s the strongest argument against the death penalty, I thought, was the racist application of the law, and therefore I was willing to oppose it here in America, till such time as we lived in a truly color-blind society. But if you had asked me, in 1995, hypothetically, to imagine a society without racism, and would I then object on principle to the death penalty, I would have had no strong convictions on the matter.

These last few years we have all been confronted with the reality that America sometimes kills innocent people. And that changes everything.

I try to be broad minded about the liberal tradition. I realize that people on the political left and right both draw inspiration from the books that have helped define and advance Western ideas of freedom over the last 366 years. In America there are those who call themselves “liberals”, others who call themselves “classical liberals”, others who call themselves “libertarians” and others who call themselves “neo-liberals”, and all of whom insist they represent the true liberal tradition. The liberal tradition is occassionally self-contradicting, and the great works can be interpreted in multiple ways. Liberal ideas on justice, social utility, retribution and forgiviness are often mixed with ideas from older (often religious) traditons, with diverse results. Thus one person, inspired both by Old Testament ideas of vengence, as well as liberalism’s need for strict adherence to the rule of law, may think it makes sense to support the death penalty, while another person, inspired by both Biblical as well as liberal ideas regarding the failability of all wisdom born of mortal flesh might oppose the death penalty. But confronted with clear evidence that the courts have put innocent people to death, then the liberal, as well as the rational, arguments for the death penalty all get swept away.

There is nothing in the liberal tradition that justifies killing a person who is innocent of a crime. It would be a perversion of the idea of the rule of the law to insist that the rule of law allows the murder of innocents so long as due process is followed. The only argument that could even comes to close to imitating liberal reasoning on this issue would be an argument based on social utility, asserting that society is better off with a few dead innocent people, so long as their death’s ensure that all the guilty people are also killed. But for this argument to work, there would have to be some social utility to killing the guilty, some goal other than vengence, and even proponents of the death penalty no longer claim a social benefit for capital punishment. Thirty years ago it might have been common to assert that the death penalty deterred crime, but that idea has been thoroughly debunked and most proponents of the death penalty now argue that the family and friends of the victims have a right to vengence. But clearly, no one can have a right to vengence against innocent people, and no larger cause of social utility is served by allowing vengence of any kind. Therefore, nothing in the liberal tradition, no matter how you define it and no matter how you want to stretch it, comes anywhere close to justifying the death penalty.

Those who favor the death penalty (and especially those who consider themselves loyal to “classical liberalism” or who call themselves libertarians) should now reconsider their position, admit they’ve been wrong on this issue, and change their minds. Those who don’t change their minds on this issue, despite evidence that the courts have sometimes killed innocent people, need to ask themselves what, exactly, they expect from the courts. Is it justice, or is it something else?

Post external references

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    http://deathpenaltyusa.blogspot.com/2006/01/innocence-argument-tipping-point-in.html
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