My View on the Death Penalty

I have flip-flopped, or evolved, or changed, or grown regarding my opinion on the Death Penalty. Any of those terms is appropriate for what has occurred, and it is appropriate that this happens to people, whether they are computer technicians, or preachers, or company executives, or governors, or presidents.  The only evidence of life is growth, and if you aren’t capable of growing, you aren’t fit to live. Occasionally when you learn and grow, your position changes. That’s acceptable, as well.

By the time I had an opinion of the Death Penalty, I figured I was in favor of it for pretty much every case involving loss of life. I was young enough and naïve enough that I even tossed accidental events into the pot. You know, when you’re young and naïve, you don’t make mistakes yourself, and you pretty much figure that nobody else does either, and every death was planned or negligent, and that negligence warrants the death penalty as well.

I am also pro-life, which I address in another post. In a conversation about that subject once, I was asked how I reconcile being pro-life and in favor of the Death Penalty. I found myself dissatisfied with my own answer, which was that babies are innocent and murderers aren’t. Over some period of time I  came to synthesize my opinion to  hold that the Death Penalty is appropriate only for premeditated murder, but not for other levels of murder or death.

That placated my conscience for a while. But only for a while.

Some people pass through your life quickly, but leaving an indelible impression. One such impression was granted by a friend who worked as a death row guard at a prison. One sentence in a conversation over the whole period of our friendship changed everything. We don’t get to hear much from the death row inmates. What we hear is filtered through their attorneys or organizations with agendas to fulfill. I think the next-best source of accurate impressions of such men and women would be the people who spend the most time with them. My friend gave a description of people who were, admittedly, not pillars of their respective communities. They are not the examples you would hold up for your children to follow. They will never be accused of having great character.  But here’s the one sentence that has stayed with me:

“Almost every one of those men I see every day got caught up in something they didn’t know how to get out of.”

No, he is not talking about a spur-of-the moment killing. There’s a different term for that. These guys, what happened to them is that they got involved with someone, or a few someones, or even acted alone, but once the plans were laid, they just didn’t know how to stop the plans, or even to extricate themselves from the situation in which they found themselves.

In those cases, I can see that the death penalty is misapplied. I feel that the death penalty should be reserved for those whose actions and words have demonstrated a complete lack of remorse for taking the life of another person, an absence of recognition of the value of life.

I believe that if California had a provision for the death penalty, Charles Manson would not be as brazen as he has been about his life. His actions and words indicate a complete dismissal of the value of the life of other people. There are plenty of other examples, but from my friend’s account of his encounters with the men on death row, that one property, dismissal of the value of life, is absent.

I have mapped out a few more posts that will all tie into an overarching thread on the value of life, but because I know that the death penalty is the counterattack to pro-life arguments, I wanted to get that out of the way first.

More to come.