Life without parole is the cure for America’s death penalty disease

Three executions are scheduled in America on August 13. The states set to kill men that day are Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Alabama. The terrible crimes the men committed were reprehensible, and this writing is not meant to diminish, minimize, or hide from the ignominy of their offenses. I’m not arguing any of these men should receive anything less than languishing behind bars.

What I’m arguing is the death penalty is a chronic, metastatic disease, sickening our justice system and diminishing America’s standing and perceived moral authority around the world.

Overwhelmingly, civilized countries long ago abolished capital punishment, but the U.S. has stubbornly been a flagrant exception despite a few years in the 1970s when the death penalty was held to be unconstitutional. Some take consolation that the number of new death sentences has been falling considerably over time; among other reasons jurors are less likely to vote to kill defendants these days, they are much more knowledgeable about the classist and racial disparities the death penalty creates as well as the vagaries and impreciseness of forensic “science” evidence (science in quotes because most of it has turned out to be junk, other than DNA, which has its own reliability issues and is often not present at crimes scenes). Partly as a result, prosecutors are less inclined to seek death due to the expense and likely unfruitful drain on already scarce resources.

Still, “Most Americans Favor the Death Penalty for Those Convicted of Murder” according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted this summer. And, “support for the death penalty is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago,” highlighting the challenge that the good people who oppose the death penalty face if they ever want to see the U.S. embrace abolition. For years, a variety of professional pundits have claimed that “the death penalty is dying” while emphasizing that this purported “death” is happening at an excruciatingly dawdling, turtle-like pace.

Understandably, these repeated predictions of an undetermined date sometime in the far away future—when death penalty abolition in America will be possible—have provided no solace or satisfaction to those who believe the intentional killing of another, especially by the state, is an abomination and sacrilege like Pope Leo and many other diverse religious authorities have said.

Even absent any religious fervor, more and more reasonable, pragmatic voices have been making themselves heard. For example, in a pointed letter this month in the Akron Beacon Journal, James Weyrick wrote: “There are worse things we can do to a man than strapping him to a gurney, sticking him with a needle and squirting poison into his veins. A sentence to a life wasted in prison without parole can be a living death, damned to a hopeless, pallid existence….Why can [some Americans] not accept as a deterrent life without parole being a daily death of mind, hope and spirit, [and eventually] body?” Experts consistently produce studies showing the death penalty doesn’t deter murder; less studied is the deterrent effect Weyrick endorses where potential murderers know in advance they won’t ever be able to—like Jeremy Williams in Alabama on August 13, who dropped his appeals and volunteered to be executed—escape from a foreseeable long and bleak incarceration.

One reliable conclusion that requires no studies to produce: The current batch of bumbling, botch-prone American executioners—including in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Alabama—can’t turn executions into bloody, gut-wrenching, torturous experiments if capital punishment is abolished. Blood-thirsty, ambition-filled politicians who use the death penalty as a crutch to bolster their own interests, would also, like those correctionally employed killers, have nowhere to go but the way of the Dodo bird if there was an end to the death penalty.

And abolition would end piercing, perceptive questions like the one Weyrick asked about legislators in Ohio: “Why do they insist on punishing taxpayers by wasting $3-5 million for each death penalty case? That estimate is from the non-partisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission.”

No studies are needed to show the abolition of the death penalty will inculcate in our children, and all our populace, the type of justice, morals, and high values that we should all want where the killing of another, by anyone, is strictly verboten. Just ask Pope Leo and other people of conscience, not those politicians merely playing politics with “law and order” gusto, blindly demanding an “eye for an eye.”