The Death Penalty in a Civil Society

The history of capital punishment is as old as attempts to organize the human social impulse around ideas of security and comity, and mutual obligation and protection. Equally, however, that history demonstrates a pattern of conflating those ideas with ideas of retribution, punishment, and justice and manipulating them for the benefit of the most powerful persons and groups in a given society. Until the European Enlightenment, the Western discourse of capital punishment did not include debate about the social or moral benefits of capital punishment. In his study of crime and punishment, Beccaria says that the law must be "capable of being learned by all" in society and that there is a social evil in laws that are so obscure as to require interpretation, forcing everybody "to rely on a handful of men because it is unable to judge for itself how its liberty or its members may fare--in a language that transforms a sacred and public book into something very like the private possession of a family" (Beccaria 17).

Beccaria does not say that there should be no punishment of crime. He does say that punishment should be commensurate with the

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murdering his parents (Shapiro 22). Other wrongful convictions have been attributed to police fabrication of evidence (Shapiro 24). In 1964, years before Furman, Bedau abstracted 74 cases since 1893 "in which wrongful conviction of criminal homicide [were] . . . proved beyond doubt." In eight of those cases, the death penalty was carried out (Bedau, Death 436, 438). Since 1976 alone, 74 persons have been freed from death row after being wrongfully convicted of capital crimes, and an estimated one in seven death-row inmates has been wrongfully convicted. Such figures have reportedly caused many former advocates of capital punishment to change their views. Shapiro (22) cites a statement by a retiring Florida Supreme Court justice: "If one innocent person is executed along the way, then we can no longer justify capital punishment." Such opposition is difficult to answer with advocacy for capital punishment. But a careful look at the doubts associated with the death penalty--and they are many--will show that the problem lies with practical application of the death penalty, not with the question of whether there should be a death penalty. In other words, accusations of unfairness, racism, wrongful conviction, and skewed and expedient S
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Approximate Word count = 2549
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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