The Death Penalty
What is the Death Penalty?
The death penalty is when a government executes someone as a form of criminal punishment. Cases of killings by police or soldiers in the heat of duty are not considered to be cases of the death penalty, even though they may be cases of killings on behalf of the state. The death penalty is different in that nothing is at stake in the heat of the moment, because a prisoner has already been apprehended, but it is also different because in normal cases - at least under constitutional regimes like the one we live under - the death penalty is also only administered after a criminal trial and conviction.
Like many of the issues discussed throughout this class, the death penalty involves the case of an action - killing another human being - which hurts another human and would not be morally okay under other circumstances, but which is believed to be morally permissible or even required under special circumstances. That is part of where its interest comes from, and it is the basic structure that makes it a controversial topic. But the death penalty is also a case of state action, not of individual action, and so it raises issues about the relationship between law and morality like those we have discussed elsewhere, and also issues about whether there is any special significance to when the state does something, as opposed to an individual, which again has come up elsewhere, as when we discussed self defense in class and in Steinhoff's discussion of Dirty Harry. And finally, the death penalty, as we will see, raises issues about whether it involves an unfair distribution of burdens - again, another common theme we have seen again and again.
Some Basic Facts
When discussing the death penalty, it helps to start with a solid understanding of the facts surrounding the death penalty, because many people find some of them very surprising and unintuitive. For example, most people who have not researched the question find it obvious that it must be more expensive to sentence someone to a life in prison than to execute them. But in fact, studies have consistently shown that it is far more expensive to use the death penalty. A study in Nebraska, for example, found that each death penalty sentence cost the state about $1.5 million more than a life sentence without parole. And our own state of California, for example, has been estimated to have spent over $4 billion on maintaining its death row since 1978, while executing only 13 inmates over that same time period (these numbers are slightly misleading because there are many inmates on death row in California who have not yet been executed and about $1 billion of these costs are costs of incarceration that would be incurred anyway with life sentences, but the costs are still quite substantial). A 1988 study by the San Francisco Bee estimated that California would save $90 million every year by getting rid of the death penalty - mostly from extra costs associated with trials and appeals for the death penalty.
The Death Penalty Information Center has a large collection of interesting data about the death penalty, together with links to original sources. You should take care to watch out for where their numbers are presented without context, since they are an advocacy group rather than just a pure collector of information, but in general, these facts are not controversial: it is more expensive - usually much more expensive - to maintain the death penalty under our current legal system in the United States than to sentence to life without parole, both executions and death penalty sentences peaked sometime roughly 18-20 years ago and have since been gradually on the decline, over 150 people who were sentenced to death have been later exonerated, and violent crime rates are not lower in states that have the death penalty.
These images are all prisoners in California who have been imprisoned on death row for over thirty years.
Louis Pojman
You can read about Louis Pojman here.
Today's Reading
Our reading for this class is an article by Pojman called "In Defense of the Death Penalty."
Handout 11.2
Here.