Capital Injustice

Each year a crime which shocks some people into impassioned pleas for strengthening capital punishment laws. In Massachusetts recently the Attorney General demanded the immediate execution of a youth who shot a state trooper, and in Mexico one of the plotters of a double indemnity murder insisted that the government condemn him to death because "desperate men will do the same thing I did if they did not make an example of me."

Such incidents invariably provoke bitter disputes on the efficacy of capital punishment, but in such cases passion and prejudice fair discussion of the merits of the death penalty. Similarly Communists will back the abolition of capital punishment not as humane principle, but to favor anti-social members of their own party like the Rosenbergs. Before the Civil War, slavery abolitionists also favored capital punishment abolition, and their belligerence convinced many that they would abolish the structure of society as well if given the opportunity. It is no wonder then that opponents of capital punishment are at times suspect in the public mind.

But throughout many centuries Western civilization gradually moved away from taking a man's life for a crime, capital or otherwise. England provides the most startling example; in 1780, there were more than 350 different crimes that called for the death penalty; by 1825, the number was cut to 220; by 1861, to 4; and in 1949 that nation experimented for a year with no death penalty, and experienced no increase in crime.

In the United States today, the movement to get rid of legal murder is linked to an attempt to make prisons what they should be; rehabilitation institutions to cure the criminally ill. Osborne, Lewis E. Lawes, and Miriam Van Waters the rehabilitation concept opposes the archaic idea that criminals should be punished for punishment's sake.

Psychiatrists contend that most murderers are mentally ill. Dr. Ralph S. Binay, chief psychiatric consultant of the New York Police Department, found that the greater majority of murderers were in desperate need of some psychiatric treatment. This fact would make the present system of assigning some murderers to the death house, others to an insane asylum, grotesquely illogical.

Advances in recent years toward a more humane prison system in America have been heartening, but capital punishment, the last remnant of the twist-them-on-the-rack-till-they-break philosophy, still lingers on. Many states have eliminated capital punishment entirely; in Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin the heaviest penalty is life imprisonment. But many have not. Some state statute books provide for the death penalty in crimes ranging from train wrecking to rape and arson. Those who defend these laws base their arguments on three basic points; retribution; protection of society; and deterrence of future crimes through example.

Retribution is pure emotion, in no way useful or just to the murdered, his family, or the murderer. The force of the deterrent argument is diminished by the fact that the greater majority of executions are conducted in secret, and with the exception of those few convicted after sensational court trials, newspapers seldom even report such occurrences. Statistics also prove that states with stringent punishments for capital crimes have as high a crime rate as states with no death penalty. Karl Scheuessler in Deterrent Influences of the Death Penalty concludes that "case studies consistently reveal that the murderer seldom considers the possible consequences of his actions, and, if he does, he evidently is not deterred by the death penalty."

As for protection of society, the November Annal of the Academy of Political and Social Science notes that the amount of protection society receives from the death penalty is nebulous and uncertain. No doubt there are some incorrigibles, but the majority of prisoners seem curable. Indeed Warden Lawes once noted: "I know of none released during my wardenship at Sing Sing who reverted to crime."

But the basic evil of capital punishment is its discrimination against the poor and against certain racial groups. By virtue of their wealth, the rich can retain able counsel, while the poor usually find themselves with a court appointed attorney. Warden Lawes wrote: "In the twelve years of my wardenship, I have escorted 150 men and one woman to the death chamber and the electric chair. . . They came from all kinds of homes and environments. In one respect, they were all alike. All were poor, and most were friendless. To what end or purpose were these victims sent to their premature deaths?" Surveys of executions in the South show that five Negroes offset every white condemned to death.

Confused and unfair, capital punishment remains on the books in 43 states. If, however, the trend continues toward more humane treatment of all prisoners, no matter what their crime, then complete abolition of capital punishment will soon follow. That it hasn't already is due mainly to the unhappy fact that too many talk in terms of tradition and not fact.