Archive | Death Penalty

Gary Ridgway has pled guilty to the murder of forty-eight women, making him the worst serial killer in American history. His expected punishment? Life in prison without the possibility of parole. What kind of justice is this? What is the point of the State of Washington having a death penalty if a man like this [...]

Is the death penalty, by its very nature, “arbitrary and capricious” as the governor of Illinois and the Reverend Jesse Jackson have suddenly erupted into insisting? No. And they should be made to prove that it is. People cannot and should not be executed unless there is proof positive of their guilt. If you subscribe [...]

This month the Justice Department released “Capital Punishment 2001,” its latest annual survey of death penalty statistics. A prowl through the data prompts a few reflections on the capital punishment debate. 1. It is striking that a controversy so large revolves around numbers so small. The death penalty is available in 38 states and the [...]

Every argument opposing capital punishment — e.g., it fails to deter would-be murderers, it’s administered according to racial/economic bias, it kills innocent people — evades the fundamental basis for why state execution, when used with discretion, is just. One example of these evasions appeared in a New York Times editorial on the day Timothy McVeigh [...]

Two days after Timothy McVeigh’s execution, The New York Times published eight letters to the editor discussing the event and expressing an opinion on the death penalty. Six of the eight were against executing murderers, one was in favor, and one was in favor in a case of mass atrocity like McVeigh’s. Four days earlier, [...]

The execution of Timothy McVeigh has again raised the issue of capital punishment. Much of the case against capital punishment does not rise above the level of opaque pronouncements that it is “barbaric,” by which those who say this presumably mean that it makes them unhappy to think of killing another human being. It should. [...]