What is the most remarkable point in the debate on the death penalty? It is probably the gap between those who have lived through the effects of inhuman behavior and those who discuss it in a living room. Compassion is not enough to transform the world of some into that of others. Which does not prevent these others from deciding that the world of some should be as they have idealized it. This is exactly what happened with the abolitionists. Let us examine their arguments one by one:
“The death penalty does not really alleviate the suffering of families who have lost loved ones”
A suspicious assertion that would be easy to confirm or deny with a brief survey: ask the relatives if they agree to offer a pardon to the condemned. The argument would probably not stand up to reality. But that is not its main flaw. It neglects the essential: we do not condemn someone to death to relieve the relatives but to symbolically point out the lack of humanity of the condemned. It is a gesture directed towards the whole of society before the relatives.
“Executing a person because he took the life of someone else is revenge. It has nothing to do with justice.”
It would be revenge if the relatives took charge of the execution themselves. There is no such thing in a death penalty applied by the social conscience and not by men. We could also substitute AIs for judges, because it is the burden of pronouncing the sentence that is inhuman in itself —no one can be reduced entirely to his social conscience. Note that there are many other executions of killers that are neither revenge nor breaches of justice: wars, special operations, anti-terrorism, tyrannicide —”Between us and tyrants, there is no society,” said Cicero.
“Execution – or the threat of execution – inflicts terrible physical and psychological cruelty.”
You have to have never met a psychopath or a remorseless murderer to impose your own sensitivity to the idea of execution on them.
“A society that executes offenders is responsible for the same violence that it condemns.”
A society is not an individual but a shared conscience. While the violence of one individual is directed against another individual, that of the social conscience is directed against murderous behavior.
“There is no credible evidence that the death penalty is any more effective as a deterrent than imprisonment. In fact, in countries that have banned the death penalty, crime figures have not increased.”
Not immediately after abolition, but secondarily, yes: today crime figures have increased dramatically. And has the death penalty really been kept as a deterrent, when it is almost always carried out more than a decade after the crime? It has in fact become life imprisonment, with a shortened life.
“It is unlikely that the threat of execution will stop terrorists who are ready to die for their beliefs. On the other hand, it is very likely that executions will turn them into martyrs, whose memory will help to rally more supporters within their organizations.”
A symbolic martyr rallies supporters, terrorists systematically sentenced to death after their crimes only rally suicide bombers, whose numbers are rapidly diminishing. They are not replaced by the “less extremist”, on the pretext that they would become the “more extremist”. People are not statistical entities.
“The death penalty is an easy way for politicians to fool their frightened voters into thinking they are fighting crime.”
A truly empty argument. First, the death penalty was not created by contemporary politicians in place of other measures. It is a legacy. Second, since abolition is no more a means of fighting crime, it has not advanced the problem in any way.
“Any method of execution is inhumane.”
Like the crime it is intended to address. It does not need to be carried out by a human.
“Strong public support for the death penalty often goes hand in hand with a lack of reliable information on the subject.”
If this is the information we have just reviewed, all of it deserves the dunce’s cap. But the support is actually quite different: it is that given to one’s own social conscience and to what it forbids us from doing. If the death penalty is not a deterrent for some psychopaths, it certainly is for those who support it, who are immensely more numerous.
Finally, Robert Badinter’s Great Argument against the death penalty, the Unstoppable:
“For all abolitionists, it is impossible to recognize in human justice this power of death because they know that it is fallible.” In other words, it is unacceptable to execute someone if there is the slightest chance that he is innocent.
Condemning an innocent person or exonerating the guilty party of a heinous crime, which is more revolting? Badinter has no trouble deciding: the first error seems immensely more serious morally to him than the second. Both of them deeply revolt me, I have more difficulty seeing such a fundamental difference between them, like most of you perhaps? What differentiates us from Badinter then? He puts himself entirely in the place of the condemned individual, while we look at the case from the collective point of view. Being in the place of the individual, with Badinter, only the 1st error is one: flagrant injustice, if I am innocent! The 2nd error is not so serious: a failure of justice that saves my ass, everything is fine for me. While from the point of view of the collective, the two errors are equally unbearable breaches of the principle of justice.
“In the 1st error there is one more death!“, say the abolitionists, and this lost life is more unacceptable than all the rest!! This is forgetting that in the 2nd error there is also an unacceptable death: the victim. Add to that a murderer on the loose in addition. And finally, only the 2nd mistake can be repeated, in case the falsely exonerated murderer takes advantage of it to make other victims. I do not know with what very personal measuring tool Badinter declares the unacceptability of the 1st mistake much higher than that of the 2nd. I do not believe that he is making a comparison in fact; he has already made his choice, which is that of the sacredness of life and not of the best collective choice.
Pragmatism undermines Badinter’s Great Argument. But I think that in reality it is unimportant for abolitionists, since their choice is already made before the discussion. I imagined myself asking Badinter about this: “OK, today the limitations of investigations rarely lead to absolute certainty and cause a certain number of miscarriages of justice. But let’s suppose that neuroscience had made such progress that a functional MRI could determine for sure whether a person is lying or not. Would you then reinstate the death penalty, since no innocent person could be executed?”
You guess as I do that such a character would never have answered in the affirmative, which puts the Great Argument into doubtful perspective…
We have finished with the mediocrity of the arguments listed by abolitionists. However, are there “executionist” arguments, or should we simply perpetuate a legacy that seemed effective justice to our ancestors? Society has changed profoundly, that’s true. But in what way? Progress in terms of tolerance? This statement would not meet with unanimous approval. Progress in terms of knowledge and individual responsibility? On the contrary, this is a discourse heard everywhere. The modern citizen wants to be more in control of his destiny. He considers himself better informed to make the right decisions, and would like to free himself from a large part of the constraints on his life that are still in the hands of institutions.
But then if he committed a crime punishable by the death penalty, it is because he decided to do so more freely than the convicts of past centuries. The ambient poverty being much less than that of our ancestors, it is a worse excuse. If I claim to control my life, should I not assume my full responsibility if I commit an unjustifiable crime? How could I reimburse the loss of opportunity of a person I killed? If we see something sacred in this eradicated life, is there not some in the death penalty that follows? My luck, too, has run out.
This article, intended to show the futility of the abolitionists, is not an executionist pamphlet. It does not encourage generalizing the death penalty but to restore its possibility. The goal of such a sanction is to eradicate inhumanity and not the crimes themselves. Because paradoxically, there are many human crimes. Some are similar to suicides: the criminal is in such a state of despair that he does not care about losing his own life. A suicidal person runs away and treats himself. Nevertheless, we must carefully differentiate, in any criminal act, what is related to self-hatred and what is related to others. As much as the role of society is not to help individuals kill themselves, it is to protect those who hope to see their lives continue.
So the death penalty has a collectivist justification and the arguments that are opposed to it are strictly individualistic, gathered in an ideal that is a deification of the individual because he has human genes. We could better understand a deification of conscience. However, this shows qualities with terrifying contrasts from one person to another. Some are so terrible that we prefer to say that they are absent. “In-human” means that we regret sharing the same genes as these murderers. Conscience is the best support for the death penalty: it is more important than genes and above all constructed. It is in it that we can attribute free will and responsibility.
Is there anything left to be saved from abolitionism? The best argument against the death penalty is not the potential miscarriage of justice but the possibility of resilience of a condemned person, especially if he is young. Barely sketched, can his conscience be judged as permanently vitiated? There is a way to find out: did the accused fully recognize the gravity of his crime or did he try to evade it? Life in society is based on self-observation, which allows us to let others into our inner world. If this social conscience exists, deep down, then it demands, in the very mind of the accused, the acceptance of the sentence.
But have you understood what this really means? If remorse is of an authentic sincerity, if it has silenced the instinct of preservation, then it will be a mental wound that will never heal, for life. A source of nightmares and perpetual self-loathing. In this situation, the death penalty no longer finds justification for the collective, which detects in this guilty party the conscience it lacked. While it finds some for the individual, who inflicts on himself the most intimate and profound of punishments. Let us quote Anton Chekhov:
“I find the death penalty more moral and more humane than imprisonment. Death eliminates in one blow, and life imprisonment slowly. Of the two executioners, which is the more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who, over many years, tears your life away?”
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