I didn’t know where I stood on capital punishment for a long, long time. I do now.
Some questions are far too weighty to answer without a great deal of consideration; whether you’re for or against the death penalty is one of them. I fought with myself through my 20s and early 30s over which side I was on. Deciding was important to me. People’s lives are at stake. I felt I should have an opinion as a voting American.
I struggled with answers to the usual questions. Should someone be allowed to have a life if they’ve taken someone else’s away? That didn’t seem right. Yet, if killing is wrong and punishable by law, then how can killing by a government be right? I couldn’t find a logical explanation for that conundrum. And the biggest roadblock for me: In rare cases, innocent people are put to death. Are we to accept taking an innocent life simply as a cost of doing business?
I was in my car one morning when I suddenly knew the answer.
I was on my way to work, driving through the congested northside Indianapolis traffic, waiting to exit I-70 West and turn south onto Allisonville Road. The radio was tuned as most days to WFYI-FM public radio.
The parents of a murdered young boy were talking to a reporter about their son’s tragic death.
Looking back now, I’m lucky no one ran a light as I turned through two intersections. In awe at what I was hearing, I was driving on autopilot, blind to everything except this couple’s pain.
I turned a corner in my mind as well as my car that day. I became steadfastly opposed to the death penalty.
Those parents were heartbroken. You could hear the devastation in their subdued voices. But when the reporter asked if their son’s murderer should get the death penalty, they unhesitatingly said no.
Maybe they had religious reasons; I don’t know, but I can’t recall hearing any. What I do remember is hearing the love they had for their son and their belief that vengeance would neither honor his memory nor bring him back.
If killing their son was wrong, they said, then killing is wrong.
I pulled over, crying for their loss but more for the way they were being true to a conviction that they had every reason to abandon. No one could’ve faulted them for wanting their son’s killer dead.
All the thoughts and arguments I’d had for so many years suddenly crystallized into one clear thought: If these parents could still believe killing is wrong even though someone had taken their child’s life, then who was I to say that killing his murderer was right?
Of course, even without this epiphany, I knew plenty of statistics demonstrating the problems with death sentences across America. Racial bias simply cannot be ignored. (In one state, if a murder victim is white, the odds of a death sentence for the defendant are 97% higher than if the victim is Black.) Many studies prove the death penalty doesn’t deter murder. And for the last 50 years, almost 200 wrongly convicted Americans have been released from death row by evidence of their innocence — someone’s father, mother, son, daughter, sister or brother who almost died with the state’s blessing over a mistake.
We should abolish the death penalty. We have evolved as humans beyond the eye-for-an-eye way of thinking. Killing a convicted person turns the people who are “just doing their jobs” into killers themselves. And as that little boy’s parents said, it doesn’t bring anyone back to life.
Photo by Ye Jinghan on Unsplash
Source of statistics:
Death Penalty Information Center, Facts about the Death Penalty, updated January 4, 2023. deathpenaltyinfo.org
Update from my neck of the woods: In 1996, lawyers excluded every Black person from serving on the jury of a Black man accused of murder. He later was sentenced to death row in 45 minutes. "Legal experts and his attorneys call Tucker’s case one of the most blatant examples of jury discrimination in recent North Carolina history—and it’s why it’s back before the N.C. Supreme Court as part of four cases involving claims of racial discrimination in jury selection." The story by Michael Hewlett is "A Jury of One's Peers" at the ncassembly.com.