I supported the death penalty when I was a teenager, but I stopped during my senior year. I remember my parents discussing it on occasion; my mother supported it while my father did not. My stance was pro-capital punishment, initially. But then two things happened that pushed me into the “anti” camp, and for the most part, that’s where I’ve remained.
The first thing was one day my physics teacher, Mr. Eaton, talked about it. Mr. Eaton was a fun guy and he knew his physics, but he also tended to go off-topic in his classes. Like, wildly off topic. He’d veer into stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with physics. (This made his wild dash to cover required material toward the end of the year when time was running out…interesting.) So one day he talks about the death penalty and how he doesn’t support it, and the main point of his that I remember is pretty obvious now, but I hadn’t considered it then: “Does anybody really think,” he mused, “that our criminal justice system actually gets the right person one hundred percent of the time?” The point was that there is no way we’re not incarcerating innocent people…and it follows that in a country with capital punishment, there is also no way we’re not executing innocent people.
That should be a deal-breaker, right there. But I have heard people shrug at even that point, saying that executing the occasional innocent person is a price they’re willing to pay. Often times they’ll couple that creepy point with an even creepier observation that the “innocent” person is probably not a good person, and they’re probably guilty of something. When you couple this creepy logic with the simple fact that capital punishment in America–and honestly, punishment in general, of any kind–is wildly tilted against people of a certain skin tone, well, the whole “I’m sure they’re guilty of something” logic crystalizes as something else.
(By the way, where I lived was a very conservative area–still is, actually, and there are many parts of New York State that are as red as any Alabama county you might name–and I remember that day listening to multiple 16-and-17-year-old classmates saying “I don’t want my tax dollars going to keep some murderer alive!” And I was thinking, “Dude, we’re teenagers, we’re not paying taxes yet.” Obviously they were getting this from their parents. Suffice it to say that rhetoric along the lines of “My tax dollars!” isn’t convincing, applied to positions on either side.)
The other thing that happened during my senior year was the execution of Ted Bundy. Now, if you made a list of the Top Ten Human Beings Of All Time Who Deserved The Death Penalty, there’s a pretty good chance Ted Bundy makes the cut. That’s how purely evil the man was.
But I remember watching news footage of his actual execution and noticing something disturbing. There were people at the prison gates and along the road to the prison, hundreds of them. Way more than could ever have been actually personally affected by Bundy’s crimes, as prolific as he was. And they were cheering and hooting and hollering and holding up homemade signs like at a football game: FRY BUNDY FRY!!! and BARBECUE TED!!! (The execution method was the electric chair.) There was dancing and fireworks, and the finale of the celebration came with cheering the departure of the hearse with Bundy’s body aboard.
They were having a tailgate party for the execution of a serial killer.
I couldn’t support capital punishment after that. Turning it into an occasion for vocalizing societal bloodlust did not sit well with me then, and it doesn’t sit well with me now. I cannot get there. And this has all been brought home over the last few days, following a botched execution of a Tennessee woman who also committed a jaw-droppingly horrible crime. I guess I still want to believe in the idea that we’re better than our worst criminals, and that our treatment of them needs to reflect who we are, and not who they are. Unfortunately, a lot of the time our treatment of our worst criminals actually does reflect who we are, and I think that’s something we should think about more.
Ultimately, my final reason for not supporting the death penalty is that time and time again I have seen that, as a response to the actions of the worst of us, executions do not bring out the best of us.
