Christa Pike’s case has been in the news quite a bit. Everyone seems to be talking about her “botched” execution. Many of the discussions seem to revolve around better ways to execute someone. Much less energy is spent on whether we should be executing human beings in the first place.
The DOD put another log on the fire. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hasan, a former Army major, was behind the Fort Hood murders in 2009. Execution by firing squad has not taken place in the United States in a century.
I taught the death penalty for years, until I switched the segment to the prison system in general. I felt that once you understand the prison system, you basically have a grip on capital punishment.
What I learned in those years is that there are zero valid arguments in support of the death penalty. Zero. They are either wrong or amount to revenge and blood lust.
Here are three:
• The death penalty deters crime.
Wrong. There are no criminological data suggesting crime goes down in areas where the death penalty is used. According to Amnesty International, US states that have the death penalty have higher rates of crime than those that do not have it.
• The death penalty is cheaper.
Wrong. Capital cases are more expensive than non-capital cases. Legal costs, jury selection, specialized incarceration, and appeals all add up to costing the tax payer 2.5 to 5 times the cost, reports the Death Penalty Information Center.
• The death penalty is justice.
Wrong. The death penalty is revenge, plain and simple. The thinking goes: you have committed a crime so heinous that you have made it clear you should be removed from society. So the response to murder is murder? That, and the families of the victims want closure. “Closure” here means satisfaction. They want the perpetrator to experience fear and death. This is not justice. Justice is treating people like human beings and, yes, maybe removing them from society so they cannot harm others—but to get them care.
Another issue concerning the death penalty—and this applies to the prison system in general—is that it is racist and classist. Some 40 percent of those sentenced to death are Black (1977-present). Black men, however, make up 6.5 percent of the population. And those on death row are typically poor, to the tune of 95 percent of them. The numbers are clear: the death penalty applies more to brown and poor people than anyone else. And again, this can be said of the entire prison system. It is basically a storage facility for people we don’t like.
