DP DA: Retribution Just Fine - Executing Innocents Not
He is a former Distict Attorney who cannot remember the exact number of capital cases were prosecuted under his office, and he still says that ”Retribution is an acceptable goal [...] so it’s really hard for me to identify with, you know, what I refer to is the ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ crowd.”
I have to stop here and interject a point or two about his perspective. First, I do not believe that retribution is an acceptable goal. I also don’t believe “turn the other cheek” is not a morally acceptable position to me. So, I guess, part of the disconnect here is the notion that one has to believe in “turning the other cheek” to be anti-retributionist. In fact most or all death-penalty abolitionists either do not believe in “turning the other cheek” or at least do not believe that it applies to the prosecution of violent criminals. Rather than offer a murderer another victim, most or all suggest imprisoning him or her, usually for life.
But even though this fellow doesn’t understand the deeper ethics involved, nevertheless he says he has now come around to an abolitionist position. This conversion follows a very simple piece of logic:
His statement made a small stir that faded quickly. But his wife’s reaction made him mad.
“You’re an opponent of the death penalty but don’t have the courage to admit it,” she said.
“The position that you’ve taken is that there should not be any more executions until we have a system that guarantees the protection of the innocent. [But] the system will never guarantee the protection of the innocent.”
Mr. Millsap eventually realized he agreed with her.
It really is as simple as that. There are two ways to increase accuracy when interpreting evidence to establish facts. One is to examine a large number of independent lines of evidence. Another is to gather large amounts of data on each line of evidence. Individual crimes are singular events and at best will yield a few lines of evidence with only the sparsest of data in each. Of course, no human endeavor can guarantee any result, but for many facts we establish a level of certainty at which it would be absurd not to conclude the matter. For individual crimes, the very best we can do is to establish guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”, fairly loosely defined.
Inevitably, answers determined “beyond a reasonable doubt” will be wrong sometimes. It’s hard to determine if that’s .01% of the time or 10% of the time. But, they will be wrong. And they will be wrong an unacceptably high number of times for the application of the death penalty, unless there is some tangible harm done to innocent people by sparing the death penalty. And there isn’t. States who have the death penalty consistently show the same or higher levels of violent crime than those who lack it. They spend more of the public money in their justice system, not less. It’s the same on the national level. Nations without the death penalty are consistently safer for the innocent citizens than nations with it. So, there is no ethical or just reason for employing the death penalty.
And contra Sam Millsap, “retribution” is not an acceptable goal for a justice system.
