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Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
…
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
To interrogate this a little: do you think that attempted murder should have the same punishment as accomplished murder?
Historically attempted murder has often drawn a lower penalty than completed murder, with there being an underlying assumption that failure to complete the act indicates some lack of mens rea to do so, or that cosmically it is wrong to execute a man without another body on the other side of the scale. After all, for Hammurabi "An eye for an eye" represented a gentler moderation rather than a harsher extreme, by that logic one cannot execute one's enemies unless they have taken a life.
One can, of course, focus on the mens rea and say that it's the evil intent that is most important.
I'm just curious where you come down on that argument.
Complete aside, but I've always been curious about the word "interrogate" when used in this way. It's such an aggressive and presumptuous substitute for "investigate" that until more recently was most associated with criminal interrogation--an inherently manipulative, unfair, and coercive type of investigation. I can't say these connotations are inappropriate given the people who tend to use the term "interrogate" in this context, but usually they're better at picking their euphamisms to sound nice and cuddly.
To me the use of the term indicates to be that Walter and I are playing Socratics, where you offer an answer to one question and then your interlocutor asks additional questions meant to pull out more information about your original position. By contrasting the answers to similarly situated cases we produce more nuanced rules or better understandings of underlying logic.
In my mind it's the opposite of manipulation, I'm inviting Walt to play the game with me. He can choose not to.
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