| James N. Markels | ||||
|
|
Personal
Information Constitutionalist
Party Political/Policy
Writing Creative
Writing Resume |
by
James N. Markels I didn’t
see what all the hubbub was about over state prosecutors trying to
figure out who should get the first crack at John Allen Muhammad and
John Lee Malvo over the sniper shootings. Unless the pair is discovered
to have killed someone in Texas, it’s pretty obvious that Virginia
should go first—it’s the most death-penalty-friendly of all the
states in line. As death sentence makes every other sanction moot,
it’s obviously most efficient to go with the state that has the
highest odds of levying that punishment, regardless of how many people
were killed in other states or where the suspects were finally caught. It would
also be the understatement of the year to say that the defense attorneys
for Muhammad and Malvo have an uphill battle ahead of them. Fairfax
County prosecutor Bob Horan and Prince William County prosecutor Paul
Ebert have a slam dunk on their hands and they know it. And I’m
probably not alone when I say that I’m already convinced that the
alleged sniper duo are guilty of the heinous multiple murders that held
our area under a siege of fear for weeks. Yet I still
don’t think they should get the death penalty. I don’t
come to this conclusion by thinking that a death penalty is “cruel and
unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment. It’s not. At least
not when compared to the suffering borne by the killer’s victims and
their families. Plus, if sentenced to death, convicted felons get the
chance to wrap up their affairs and say goodbye to their families and
friends—an opportunity not shared by their victims. As Justice Antonin
Scalia once noted, a quiet death by lethal injection is enviable indeed
when compared to what the felon has most often dealt out to others. And,
in a way, this has brought me to the conclusion that the death penalty
is actually too good for odious murderers. I mean, we
all die eventually, right? All the death penalty does is accelerate that
which was already going to happen to the felon anyway. If left in jail
to rot until they die, it’s the exact same result only this time
you’ve added on a few decades of prison hell to boot. Instead of dying
young(er) with only a couple of years in custody, the felon gets to have
a (hopefully long) life full of walls, bars, isolation, and fear.
Counter-intuitively, life in prison without opportunity for parole is
ultimately a worse punishment than the death penalty. Some may
worry about the costs of housing these inmates for the rest of their
lives. But when compared to the costs of acquiring a death penalty
conviction, it pretty much evens out. A prison term costs about $30,000
a year, while the average death penalty case after all the appeals,
sentencing, the trial itself, and the costs of the various procedural
protections, can easily top $1 million—not counting the time spent in
jail by the suspect. And don’t forget those expensive trials that ask
for the death penalty but don’t get it. Life imprisonment is an easier
punishment to levy and the trials would be cheaper. I will grant
that life imprisonment leaves the felon alive to potentially do more
damage to society, either by escaping or just being around to
communicate with others. However, when we consider someone like Charles
Manson, who surely would have been strapped in the chair were it not for
the Supreme Court’s temporary ban on capital punishment, we see that
the odds of this just aren’t too worrisome. If push comes to shove, we
can make these people effectively disappear if need be. And what’s the
problem with fellow lifers interacting with each other? Life
imprisonment also has the advantage of being reversible should error be
found, while the death penalty is not. And error is not a small part of
capital punishment, unfortunately. A Columbia University study that
tracked the results of capital convictions from 1973 to 1995 found that
an astonishing 68 percent of those cases were overturned on appeal, with
7 percent found not guilty on retrial and 75 percent given lesser
sentences. Between incompetent defense counsel, improper jury
instruction, and police misconduct, there’s enough out there to give
one pause about the reliability of our system. That same study found
that Virginia averaged an 18 percent error rate over the same
period—better than average, but troubling just the same. Besides,
there’s no real evidence to show that the death penalty reduces murder
rates by serving as a suitable deterrent. States with capital punishment
actually tend to have slightly higher murder rates on average, and
it’s not been shown that the murder rates would have been
significantly higher but for the threat of the death penalty. I guess the
main advantage of the death penalty ultimately comes down to the
satisfaction of revenge for the victims’ families, but even this is
dubious. Maybe if people saw life imprisonment as the worse punishment
they would relent. Sure, the killer is still alive, but it’s an
unpleasant life and they’ll die eventually anyway. Why let them off
the hook so quickly? |
||
