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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 "steelman" the opinion you're reacting to, I imagine that the person who wrote "rest in power" didn't do so in spite of recognising that Littlejohn and his accomplice really were collectively responsible for the murder in question. If pressed, I imagine that the person who wrote that would argue that, institutional racism being what it was, he or she doesn't recognise Littlejohn's conviction as legitimate, followed by confecting some conspiratorial just-so story about the cops planting fingerprints on the murder weapon and hiring a lookalike to commit the murder etc. etc. you've all seen the ending of JFK, you know how this story goes.
The reason I put "steelman" in scare quotes is because this alternative interpretation isn't much more generous to the person who wrote that than your interpretation is. Either they're a nutcase who thinks that we should remember this villain fondly in spite of the indisputably monstrous crime he committed (your perspective); or they're more paranoid and deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system in particular (and American society in general) than the average person with QAnon in his Truth Social bio. Either evil, or hopelessly conspiratorial and deluded - not a good look either way.
The anti-death penalty campaigner position is that no one should be executed, and all of the obfuscating about ‘this guy is innocent! He was at the scene of the crime because he stopped to help an old lady change her tire on the way back from volunteering at the homeless shelter!’ Should be read in that light- they don’t want him back out of the streets, they want him not executed, and if calling him a choirboy gets him not executed then they’re happy to do that.
Well, maybe. It's one thing to say "We concede that Joe was a monster, but he still shouldn't be executed, because no one should be." I can imagine a progressive person saying that about a particularly monstrous white person e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy.
I agree that "this person is a monster but they shouldn't be executed" is a harder sell than "this person isn't a monster, therefore obviously they shouldn't be executed" so I can understand why someone would feel motivated to lie for tactical reasons. But I don't know - surely that can't describe everyone saying "rest in power" about a black criminal where overwhelming evidence exists that they are guilty of the heinous crime they were convicted of. Surely some of those people must really believe that they are innocent, even if they have to resort to extremely tenuous and unlikely distortions of the evidence to get there (or retreat into the methodic doubt of "a black man will never get a fair trial in Amerikkka").
I do think it’s likely that such a conspirator exists. Do you have any evidence this guy, in particular, is in that category?
It’s a genuine question, because I don’t have a Twitter account and can’t peruse his posting history. But I think a “steelman” should never look so much like straw.
Well for starters, I'd like to point out that your interpretation of this person's motivation for expressing this sentiment (advocating for life in prison without parole instead of capital punishment, and hence knowingly lying about this criminal's virtues for tactical reasons) is only marginally more sympathetic than mine (conspiratorially deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system), which was in turn only marginally more sympathetic than the OP's (straight up expressing admiration for a violent criminal).
As to whether any evidence exists that this specific tweeter is conspiratorial in the way I described, he recently retweeted (I believe in reference to Marcellus Williams):
and
and:
After scrolling through about four months of tweets and retweets, I have not been able to find a single example of this specific tweeter claiming that a non-black person was wrongfully executed (despite several men meeting that description having been executed this year) or unjustly shot by police officers (although I will concede it's possible that this person is trapped in an echo chamber/media bubble in which he genuinely never hears about white or Native American men who've been executed). This strengthens my opinion that the tweeter's outrage over the executions of Williams and Littlejohn has more to do with BLM than with principled opposition to capital punishment in general.
Yeah, @gattsuru had a pretty damning quote, too.
My interpretation of the original quote was not “knowingly lying.” It was “genuine preference for LWOP over death.” Given the rest of the statements, it’s clear I was being too charitable. I concur with your interpretation that he is culture warring first and foremost.
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