Let`s Kill the Death Penalty
Let`s Kill the Death Penalty
By Tom Teepen, Columnist, Cox News Service
The U.S. Supreme Court has relieved the nation of the considerable international embarrassment of being just about the only nation that still executed juveniles, but that welcome progress still begs the larger question of the death penalty itself.
In recent years, the high court has been tiptoeing back toward that core issue in small steps. In 1988, it barred the execution of juveniles under 16. Three years ago, it ended the execution of the mentally retarded.
It now is barring the execution of 16 and 17 year olds, the court relied on the “evolving standards of decency” measurement that it has applied to such matters for the last 50 years but also, as it did in the issue of retardation, cited international practices. Since 1990, the seven other nations that still executed juveniles have abandoned the practice.
Most Americans are little aware of just how revolted most of the world has been at our persistence with juvenile executions. But while even the mention of international norms sent the court’s chief dissenter, Antonin Scalia, into one of his patented Yosemite Sam tantrums, that factor was cited only incidentally. The ruling was rooted in customary, very domestic jurisprudence. The majority noted that in recent years, five more states have on their own foresworn juvenile execution, leaving just 20 with the practice, and the ones that retain the option are resorting to it with increased reluctance and less frequency.
That adds up to the “cruel and unusual punishment” that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment forbids, an evolving judgment. The majority also found, soundly and in line with science, that juveniles have “a lack of maturity and underdeveloped sense of responsibility.” They are vulnerable to peer pressure and have unformed personalities, all of which, the court concluded, makes them less culpable than adults for the same actions.
The death penalty remains twisted by a whole array of distortions. Most crucially, we now know, thanks to the development of DNA evidence, that the process produces fatal errors in an appalling number of cases, and there is no sure hedge against that.
The death penalty executes minorities in such disproportion that the disparity invites suspicions of prejudice. Lousy lawyering is deadly, mostly to low-income defendants.
The death penalty fails to take even severe mental illness into account. And the penalty is applied unevenly among the states. Of the 22 juveniles executed in the United States since 1976, 13 were concentrated in Texas. Surely life and death decisions shouldn’t depend upon geographical happenstance.
The death penalty both ill-becomes us and ill-serves us. No study has ever been able to show that it discourages the crimes it punishes. Murder does not flourish where it has never been applied and murder does not rise where the practice has been ended.
The blunt truth is that the death penalty is simply vengeful and exists in this country to a degree otherwise unknown among developed nations as the product of demagogic and vindictive politics, not of reasoned justice.
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