It’s unfortunate that capital punishment no longer grips the attention of the public the way abortion or gun control does.
According to a yearly Gallup poll on attitudes toward the death penalty, two-thirds of Americans support it — at least in theory. Yet it poses an extremely important question: are we collectively willing, through government action, to put an end to a person’s life for punishment and deterrence of future crimes?
If the idea behind capital punishment is not an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” but deterrence of future murders, then can we take the punishment a step farther?
Suppose that in a hypothetical country, B-merica, a man named Jim robbed a woman, Jane, at an ATM and then shot and killed her because she saw his face and could thus identify him. Jim is then quickly apprehended due to the cameras at the ATM and the DNA evidence at the scene; there is no doubt he is the murderer. Jane’s family is rightfully devastated that their loved one was taken away in an act of violence that can never be erased.
The typical punishment in America for Jim would be death by lethal injection, which is about as peaceful a death as one could hope for. It just so happens that in B-merica, instead of lethal Injection, the punishment is that one of Jim’s parents is put to death while he spends the rest of his life in prison.
At first this sounds frightening and backward. It was Jim’s own fault that he killed Jane, how can B-merica do this? What if it turned out that due to the threat of this punishment, murders rarely occurred. People who had previously been so consumed with anger that they were able to disregard personal safety and their future to commit murder were able to step back and change their behavior, due to the fact that their decision would jeopardize the life of someone they love.
The founders of B-merica argued that since murder is by definition a senseless act of violence, it must be repaid by a senseless act of violence. They also believed that in their society it is the parents’ duty to raise their children and their responsibility to teach them right and wrong. The result is that parents take better care of their children and the ones who need psychiatric help are able to receive it before they commit crimes.
What if this situation worked? Would you go along with it? It seems to me that it is a natural extension of the logic behind capital punishment. For those of you who support our death penalty, ask yourselves: since I am OK with the state sponsored murder of a guilty person to deter crime, would I be OK with state sponsored murders of a guilty person’s parent if it was shown that it actually deterred future murders? Your answer to this hypothetical situation is critical. Do we as a society value order and safety over human life? How much would we have to sacrifice before we, as a society, became the guilty ones?