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| Evil and its penalties |
| 2002-02-24 |
| Iain Murray posts a thoughtful article on his conversion to favoring the death penalty for "truly evil" killers. My thoughts on the subject, for what they're worth: I make many passing references in the course of my rantings and ravings to yard-long necks and one-round splitting headaches. Every once in awhile I get an e-mail taking me to task for this attitude, but not many. Rantburg confines itself for the most part to terrorism, and the people who engage in such activities are willing participants in evil. But still the controversy remains in the USA, with candlelight vigils every time a murderer is put down. In Europe the professionally sophisticated affect to view this American practice as barbaric, despite sizable portions of the Europublic being in favor of it. Anyone who favors the indiscriminate use of the death penalty is probably either bloodthirsty or a loon. The Pearl killing illustrates the justice of its use where appropriate. In days of old, before we became interested in Social Justice (not the same thing as garden variety justice by any means) murder was divided roughly into three categories: Murder One, Second Degree Murder, and Manslaughter. Of the three, only Murder One was generally rewarded with the death penalty. Murder was defined as "homicide committed with malice aforethought." Premeditation was generally the factor that popped the act into the First Degree, and mitigating circumstances and lawyerly quibbling over the meaning of "malice" could then pop it back into the Second Degree. Think hard on the implications of actually sitting down and premeditating the killing of a human being. Think of waiting in ambush with a gun, or buying poison or sneaking up behind a human being with a rope and strangling him. Or think about the thought process involved in kidnapping a person and cutting his throat - and then cutting his head off. Is it appropriate from a moral standpoint to punish these people in the same manner as, say, a drunk driver who kills someone with his car? Or the person who in a sudden fit of rage smashes his neighbor's head in with a hammer? The victim is just as thoroughly dead, never to rise again, but the minds that committed the crimes are of two entirely different sorts. The second sort is susceptible to rehabilitation, because it is capable of feeling shame, of realizing that what it has done is wrong. The first values the life of the victim less than its own immediate ends, be they monetary or political or religious. Deliberate cruelty and the degradation of the victim - for instance those worms who kidnap children, use them as playthings and then dispose of them - aggravates the act, but the level of cruelty is on the same order. Probably the driving force behind the reluctance to apply the death penalty is that we, the majority, are too nice. We don't share the mindset of the premeditated killers, and we have a difficult time bringing ourselves to commit a similar act upon them. There must be some reason we shouldn't, so we search to find them, accepting them even when they are demonstrably specious. We're helped along in the process because our press doesn't dwell on the gory details, the cruelty and the inhumanity, of the mechanics of murder, as they did 50 years ago. We dwell on reasonable doubts and indulge in a bit of class warfare to let as many off as we can - too many blacks, too many retarded, not enough Asians or Eskimos. We draw the process out for year after year after year, hoping that something will come to light to allow us not to commit the act of killing. When we finally do commit justice, we put our killers down like dogs - not cruelly, as they killed, but simply by putting them to sleep so they don't wake up again. There is a difference between killing and murder, and that difference lies in the malice aforethought. The existence of that malice on the part of those trying to destroy our country says we have to both protect ourselves - the best thing about the death penalty is its lack of recidivism - and promote justice by putting them down. Capital punishment made sense under the rule of kings, who presumably were God's Elect and provided for worldly justice as a reflection of Divine Justice. Of course, in dispensing with kings and princes and established churches, we also dispensed with affronts to the Divine Justice which called for the ultimate, capital penalty. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |