Enlightenment thinker Cesare Boccaria wrote about the problems of state executions in “On Crime and Punishment” in 1764.
It can take your money, steal your time, send you to war, but, my god, don’t let it kill you. We Americans are in a strange position of building highways, national parks, middle schools and electric chairs. The United States currently has 2,000 inmates on death row, which ought to prompt a moral emergency on the basis of repudiating human sacrifice and oppressive state power.
The history of capital punishment is not confined to the vibrating bolt; gas chambers were introduced in the States in 1924 as a humane method of execution compared to hangings. Murdering prisoners is woven into American history.
However, if the United States would have indulged WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” where he describes his comrades as drowning “under a green sea,” while fumbling to fasten on a mask, perhaps we would’ve scrapped the project before it started. The hideous cruelty of “guttering, choking” and “drowning” on poison is not just inflicted by the enemy — it is carried out by the state.
Unfortunately, we paid little attention to what Owen had to say. In 2015, Oklahoma introduced death by nitrogen gas as an alternative to lethal injection. Five years prior, in Utah, Ronnie Gardner was put to death by firing squad. The immediate association of gas chambers and executioners with 20th century fascism is accurate, but there is no excuse to ignore the contemporary cases in this country.
If citizens wish to have control over the state and not the other way around, they should make sure they know which end of the barrel they stand on. It is barbaric to lodge bullets into our countrymen’s hearts, blister their lungs and poison their blood when we get the right guy. A state-sponsored killing of an innocent man, on the contrary, can lay seeds for revolution.
The establishment of capital punishment is self-defeating. The state exists to prevent murder, not carry it out.
Support for the death penalty, it ought to be noted, is un-American. After publication of “On Crimes and Punishment” in 1764, Italian criminologist and enlightenment thinker Cesare Beccaria convinced founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin that state executions have a perverse message.
Why would law permit precisely what it wishes to prevent, Beccaria asked. The pens which forged the republic are anti-death penalty, yet America pretends capital punishment is a legitimate enterprise. America ought to adhere to its founders’ reasoning.
State murder is, unfortunately, ubiquitous.
In “Reflections on Hanging,” British novelist Arthur Koestler elucidated the “hanging days” celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries. Koestler also states that during King George III’s rule, over 100 public executions took place every year in London. Crowds gathered with a vim, spry attitude to see the man’s feet dangle. Shopkeepers, tailors and the like talked about the event as if it were a football game or a new film premiere. The influence of Victorian-era British policy echoes in our courtrooms today.
The dark tale of escorting a man to his death, as democratic socialist George Orwell documents in his essay “A Hanging,” shows the reverse end. Orwell’s aid in “cutting (a) life short when it is in full tide,” is a recognition of the cruelty and backwardness of executions.
If citizens wish to have control over the state and not the other way around, they should make sure they know which end of the barrel they stand on. It is barbaric to lodge bullets into our countrymen’s hearts, blister their lungs and poison their blood when we get the right guy. A state-sponsored killing of an innocent man, on the contrary, can lay seeds for revolution.
The utilitarian argument for capital punishment regards the death of a guilty man as a lesson or symbol of what is to come for those who commit similar crimes. Murder a murderer, and you have fewer murderers on the whole.
But why not teach a harsher lesson? Why not, as defense lawyer Clarence Darrow inquires, “boil them in oil, as they used to do? Why not burn them at the stake? Why not sew them into a bag with serpents and throw them out to sea?” If the goal is to prevent cruelty, we should see to it that we do not embody the attitude we wish to dispel.
Darrow points to the previous hanging of “old women for witchcraft” and killing those who “worship God in the wrong way.” The celebration of human sacrifice can be owed to the religious. Christians walk around with a symbolized machine of death around their neck, foolishly believing it a sign of love and forgiveness. What would be in fashion if the Messiah was killed in this generation? Jewelry of a death chair? A syringe?
The United States was built on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom — the groundwork for the First Amendment and separation of church and state. Pope Francis altered the Catholic Church’s position on capital punishment, throwing a blanket ban on the death penalty. Bringing in Christian dogma to support capital punishment, in other words, is equally un-American.
This is not only a matter of the head, but of the heart; you should ensure your heart wants others to pulse as well. Civilization demands the abolition of the death penalty. Do not let the state kill you. Keep belts where they belong — on the waist.
Source: fordhamobserver.com, Riley Moore, October 3, 2020
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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