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Sunday, Jun. 14, 2009

Community Conversation: Thorough study helps conclude death penalty should be abolished

By Ray Warner, Benton City

Thorough study helps conclude death penalty should be abolished

The recent Community Conversation on the death penalty, sponsored by the Herald and facilitated by the Benton-Franklin Dispute Resolution Center, was a positive experience for me.

It was a comfortable environment for discussing an uncomfortable (to say the least) topic. I now better understand my own views on the death penalty, and other views as well.

I prepared for this conversation by looking for relevant information on the internet, and of course found sites apparently designed to bolster inflexible principles ranging from "thou shalt not kill" to "an eye for an eye."

Among the more pragmatic sites I found, one stood out. It contained the January 2007 New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission Report (tinyurl.com/npnzfq).

The New Jersey Legislature had instructed the commission to study and report on issues I abbreviate here as deterrence, cost, "evolving standards of decency," fairness in charging and sentencing, choice of qualifying crimes, risk of irreversible mistakes and whether alternative sentences adequately protect the public and serve families of victims.

The commission's work appeared to be thorough. The report contains majority findings and a minority view, plus additional statements.

I recommend it to all interested in the topic. As one who has come to feel that when and how we die is far less important than how we live, I was ready to focus on practicalities. These are dealt with dispassionately in the New Jersey report, and seem to lead to an obvious conclusion.

If some of my assumptions turn out to be false, my conclusion expressed below might change.

Washington residents would be wise to abolish the death penalty immediately - to stop wasting tax money, if nothing else. Incarceration without parole removes killers from society at much less than the cost of all the preliminaries required for execution and shortens the most intense suffering of survivors.

The resources saved would be better used to prevent crime. A frequent lament of death penalty advocates is that the appeals process is too prolonged and uncertain (and therefore too costly). Maybe, but not even Texas has figured out how to have efficiency and adequate protection for the innocent. Abolition would be simple. It requires no magic changes in human or bureaucratic behavior, and can provide society with the safety desired.

What if, we are sometimes asked, a murderer pleads guilty and requests execution? Indeed, a minor but significant fraction of recent U.S. executions were requested by the condemned.

I question the prisoner's mental state, especially after months or years of appeals and uncertainty.

As a further argument against satisfying such a request, it is not hard to imagine that someone seeking martyrdom might murder just to satisfy a personal death wish. In any case, I doubt that maintaining a death penalty capability just to satisfy such requests would be cost effective.

Let's end this debate by ending the death penalty, and improving education and social services to make a better society with fewer crimes and a lighter burden on the justice system.

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