The Death Penalty

    I am opposed to the death penalty.  Always have been.  Yet I've also been nagged lifelong by the fact that perfectly decent people support it.
    Their conscience is good as mine, their moral sense as robust.  They feel the death penalty for certain crimes is appropriate -- even desirable and necessary.
     Some see it as a defensive resource. They note that, as a bulwark against crime, our criminal justice system can seem to be a screen door against the wind. But dangerous felons who've been executed can't be released to do further harm. At least one measure of public safety is thus guaranteed.
    Other proponents have in mind a concept of proportionate consequences.  The notion is familiar: Let the punishment fit the crime. It would not be right for murder to carry a $5 fine, or jaywalking a prison sentence. With laws that define crime and fix penalties, a society details its values. Proponents of the death penalty feel that some offenses are so vile they deserve ultimate punishment. And they feel it's important for society to say so in its statutes.
    On the other side of the ledger -- my side -- the ultimate punishment can be the ultimate mistake.  Innocent people can be executed.  To avoid this horror, a civilized country should go to every possible length..  Our country tries but does not always succeed.
    Even where innocents are not involved, capital punishment falls more often on minorities and the poor. Here, the penalty has nothing at all to do with proportionate consequences.  It has to do with the socioeconomic status of defendants, and vagaries of attitude among prosecutors, judges and jurors. Within one state or even one city, the same crime can send a white defendant to prison and a black defendant to death row.
    But of course these reservations beg the central question: Is it ever right  to impose capital punishment? Given a heinous crime and fully established guilt, can the state legitimately put someone to death?
    I say no, for reasons that are essentially personal:  I do not absolve myself of responsibility by licensing the state to do what I would not do with my own hands.
    Thus my disagreement with proponents is over the best location for a moral boundary.  The disagreement is fundamental and very likely intractable.
     Our system of government is designed to respect and mediate among fundamental disagreements. I have a right to my conscience, you have a right to yours. I may use the vote to assert my views, but my feeling that I'm in the right does not make my vote worth more. Those who cast more votes prevail, and experience suggests that my view on the death penalty will not prevail in my lifetime.
    Still, there is room and need for a larger discussion of the criminal justice system, which doesn't reliably work as it should.  Whether it is thought too harsh, too lenient or simply careless, the system is widely perceived to be capricious.  In the aggregate, the perception is valid. Too many facilities are overcrowded and underfunded.  Too much court process is driven by a need to settle cases expediently and keep the docket moving.
   The system denies the speedy trial promised in the U.S. Constitution.  It denies consistent and proportionate punishment.  It causes a chronic low fever of public fear that proven offenders are leaked out to do more harm.
    Issues of crime and justice in a complex society are themselves complex, of course. Along with symptoms, causes must be considered -- notably the causes rooted in socioeconomic desperation. But we should not push causal notions so far as to make them a libel on poor people or let them obscure another important point:  Timely, certain and consistent punishment does have a proper societal value.
    And on the issue of capital punishment, fewer might favor it if fewer considered it the only the only sure way to keep dangerous people away from the rest of us.