On the brink of Carey Dean Moore’s Aug. 14 lethal injection — Nebraska’s first execution in over two decades — it’s worth revisiting how, three years ago, World-Herald columnist Erin Grace exposed Gov. Pete Ricketts’ hypocrisy for advancing Catholic teachings as a reason to resume executions.
In a piercing, prescient piece, aptly titled “In death penalty crusade, Pete Ricketts not as in sync as he thinks,” Grace highlighted how long-existing Catholic publications and official statements from church leaders (including Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis) had all thoroughly denounced the death penalty.
In so doing, Grace convincingly demonstrated the fallaciousness of Ricketts’ invocation of purported Catholic dogma to push his pro-capital punishment agenda; Ricketts maintained at the time: “If you look, almost without exception the church fathers believe the state has a right in certain circumstances to use the death penalty.”
And so, in the wake of what was already a rickety Ricketts rationale being categorically rejected more recently by Pope Francis’ express change to the catechism — declaring capital punishment unacceptable in all cases because it is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” — it’s easy to acquiesce in Grace’s conclusion: “Ricketts says his Catholic faith is important to him”; however, “maybe the governor shouldn’t try to give a Catholic argument for the death penalty.”
Ricketts himself now appears to have acknowledged as much. He released a muted statement offering respect “for the Pope’s perspective” but stood resolute that Moore’s impending execution — and all other capital sentences in Nebraska — will not be affected, at least not on his watch, by the change to official Catholic church doctrine.
Ricketts is doubling down on his other main talking point to justify his zeal for the death penalty, saying it remains “an important tool to protect our corrections officers and public safety.”
But under any kind of reasoned scrutiny, this secondary Ricketts rationale, that the death penalty provides a deterrent, is just as much an empty husk as the first.
I’ve written about the “shibboleth” of the “death penalty deterrence argument” by highlighting the work of Stanford University law professor John Donohue, recognized as one of the leading empirical researchers in legal academia. Donohue, after studying the subject closely, concluded: “There is not the slightest credible statistical evidence that capital punishment reduces the rate of homicide.”
A plethora of scholars, including in other countries and other epochs, have arrived at the same or similar determinations by considering all manner of reliable data and evidence.
Take, for example, the anecdotal account of a prison chaplain in England, the Rev. W. Roberts, as given in evidence before the Royal Commission of 1866 and recounted in “The Ethics of Punishment” by Sir Walter Moberly (Faber and Faber Limited, 1968): “When executions were still public,” prison chaplain Roberts “interrogated 167 persons under sentence of death as to whether they had ever witnessed a hanging. All but three had done so, yet had themselves been undeterred.”
The notion that the death penalty has a deterrent value — and therefore, the theoretical capacity to advance the safety of law enforcement, corrections officers, or the public at large — has been debunked.
And so, what remains of Ricketts’ most recited reasons for dragooning Nebraskans back into the dark ages? Only a wilted, weakened, wrongheaded cornucopia of ignorant ideas not worthy of further discussion.
However they can, in whatever way they can, Nebraskans must thresh this ignorance; they must shelve capital punishment again, soon, and this time, forever.
Source: omaha.com, Stephen Cooper, August 12, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde