The Editor’s take on the Death Penalty.

Does the State ever, under any circumstance, have the right to deprive a person of his or her life? My own religious tradition, recognizing the authority of the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek Testaments of the book commonly called the Bible, answers yes. I shan’t go into a biblical defense of the death penalty since I intend to speak against the death penalty.

Although I am not against the death penalty in principle, I am against it in practice. Allow me to explain. This study review shows the extent of the problems our present legal system has with properly administering the death penalty. Read it carefully and allow it to sink in. Any system that results in 68% error respecting capital cases has serious problems that, in my opinion, render it incompetent to fairly adjudicate such cases.

One of the complaints often proffered by defenders of the death penalty is the tremendous expense and waste of time consumed by individuals on death row in the appeals process. Many want that process shortened. This study, however, shows why, in my opinion, limiting the appeals opportunities of the condemned will only exacerbate an already bad system and assure that more individuals will be executed erroneously, not fewer. Given the finality of death, the present state of affairs argues against the imposition of the death penalty.

What are the alternatives? We could expand the appeals process for individuals on death-row which would only increase the expense to tax-payers and expand the time between imposition and execution of the death sentence in the hopes that this will assure that all errors are found before execution. We could declare a moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty and replace it with life-without-possibility-of-parole until we can be certain that either errors are eradicated from the system or, barring that, that all errors are certain to be caught in whatever appeals system is in place. In my opinion, the erroneous execution of even one individual is unacceptable.