You Americans baffle me with your fetishism for violence.
Kant writes that one cannot morally/ethically condone capital punishment as a deterrent to crime. Doing so objectifies the condemned (reduces them to the status of a deterrent for other criminals), a human being, and Kant writes of the person as being valueless (but not wertloss, something in German that sounds closer to "beyond value") because of their faculty to Reason. Nevermind that Kant was not really anti-capital punishment, believing that one should be punished because one has committed an offense (and thus making the gradient of punishments arbitrary, which it is anyway).
Let us put aside Kant for a moment and assume that a person does have a value (which I do not believe in, Levinas-style, as theexistence of a person lies beyond language ... but that would be fitter for a discussion on Levinas). Please note that I am hypothetically using the language of consequentialism, somewhat in bad faith, and that therefore it does not apply to abortion (yes, I am rabidly pro-choice. Rabidly, I said). For that matter, I am also borrowing from game theory.
In a society that privileges the welfare of its constituents (which is redundant, because there aren't any societies that do not want the welfare of its constituents. Except maybe American society ... but I am getting too far ahead), let's assume that everyone starts with the same capital of humanity. Let's assume now that one of those constituents commits an offense so grievous that said society decide to condemn him to the death penalty. Has this offender lost any of his human capital? If so, where has it gone? (Or is it a zero-sum game?) And if this is not a zero-sum game, isn't this society itself diminished in its aggregate humanity/goodness? (because, obviously, in this hypothetical game, we are equating humanity with goodness/value)
You can use anything you want in the comment field to argue with me, even fundie Christianity (actually, I encourage arguments from that perspective).
Incidentally, this is post #666 on this blog.
Kant writes that one cannot morally/ethically condone capital punishment as a deterrent to crime. Doing so objectifies the condemned (reduces them to the status of a deterrent for other criminals), a human being, and Kant writes of the person as being valueless (but not wertloss, something in German that sounds closer to "beyond value") because of their faculty to Reason. Nevermind that Kant was not really anti-capital punishment, believing that one should be punished because one has committed an offense (and thus making the gradient of punishments arbitrary, which it is anyway).
Let us put aside Kant for a moment and assume that a person does have a value (which I do not believe in, Levinas-style, as the
In a society that privileges the welfare of its constituents (which is redundant, because there aren't any societies that do not want the welfare of its constituents. Except maybe American society ... but I am getting too far ahead), let's assume that everyone starts with the same capital of humanity. Let's assume now that one of those constituents commits an offense so grievous that said society decide to condemn him to the death penalty. Has this offender lost any of his human capital? If so, where has it gone? (Or is it a zero-sum game?) And if this is not a zero-sum game, isn't this society itself diminished in its aggregate humanity/goodness? (because, obviously, in this hypothetical game, we are equating humanity with goodness/value)
You can use anything you want in the comment field to argue with me, even fundie Christianity (actually, I encourage arguments from that perspective).
Incidentally, this is post #666 on this blog.
Comments
Executing a murderer does not devalue humanity anymore than incarceration does.
Execution is goven for the same reasons that all sanctions are given, that is it is a just and apropriate sanction for the crime committed.
Secondarily, if we were to just use your value calculus, the death penalty actually produces a net savings of life. By your methodology, this may require more executions.
The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters, contact info below
Often, the death penalty dialogue gravitates to the subject of innocents at risk of execution. Seldom is a more common problem reviewed. That is, how innocents are more at risk without the death penalty.
To state the blatantly clear, living murderers, in prison, after release or escape, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers.
Although an obvious truism, it is surprising how often folks overlook the enhanced incapacitation benefits of the death penalty over incarceration.
No knowledgeable and honest party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law.
Therefore, actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
That is. logically, conclusive.
16 recent studies, inclusive of their defenses, find for death penalty deterrence.
A surprise? No.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 16 studies. They don't. Studies which don't find for deterrence don't say no one is deterred, but that they couldn't measure those deterred.
What prospect of a negative outcome doesn't deter some? There isn't one . . . although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one.
However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. Yet, the evidence is compelling and un refuted that death is feared more than life.
Some death penalty opponents argue against death penalty deterrence, stating that it's a harsher penalty to be locked up without any possibility of getting out.
Reality paints a very different picture.
What percentage of capital murderers seek a plea bargain to a death sentence? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of convicted capital murderers argue for execution in the penalty phase of their capital trial? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of death row inmates waive their appeals and speed up the execution process? Nearly zero. They prefer long term imprisonment.
This is not, even remotely, in dispute.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Furthermore, history tells us that lifers have many ways to get out: Pardon, commutation, escape, clerical error, change in the law, etc.
In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to spare murderers at the cost of sacrificing more innocent lives.
Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have all been released upon post conviction review. The anti death penalty claims, that the numbers are significantly higher, are a fraud, easily discoverable by fact checking.
6 inmates have been released from death row because of DNA evidence. An additional 9 were released from prison, because of DNA exclusion, who had previously been sentenced to death.
The innocents deception of death penalty opponents has been getting exposure for many years. Even the behemoth of anti death penalty newspapers, The New York Times, has recognized that deception.
To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row . . . (1) This when death penalty opponents were claiming the release of 119 "innocents" from death row. Death penalty opponents never required actual innocence in order for cases to be added to their "exonerated" or "innocents" list. They simply invented their own definitions for exonerated and innocent and deceptively shoe horned large numbers of inmates into those definitions - something easily discovered with fact checking.
There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.
If we accept that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, we can reasonable conclude that the DNA cases will be excluded prior to trial, and that for the next 8000 death sentences, that we will experience a 99.8% accuracy rate in actual guilt convictions. This improved accuracy rate does not include the many additional safeguards that have been added to the system, over and above DNA testing.
Of all the government programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record and with greater protections than the US death penalty?
Unlikely.
Full report -All Innocence Issues: The Death Penalty, upon request.
Full report - The Death Penalty as a Deterrent, upon request
(1) The Death of Innocents: A Reasonable Doubt,
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times
copyright 2007-2008, Dudley Sharp
Permission for distribution of this document, in whole or in part, is approved with proper attribution.
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS, VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O'Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Pro death penalty sites
homicidesurvivors(dot)com/categories/Dudley%20Sharp%20-%20Justice%20Matters.aspx
www(dot)dpinfo.com
www(dot)cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPinformation.htm
www(dot)clarkprosecutor.org/html/links/dplinks.htm
www(dot)coastda.com/archives.html
www(dot)lexingtonprosecutor.com/death_penalty_debate.htm
www(dot)prodeathpenalty.com
www(dot)yesdeathpenalty.com/deathpenalty_com
yesdeathpenalty.googlepages.com/home2 (Sweden)
www(dot)wesleylowe.com/cp.html
"Capital Punishment: A Catholic Perspective", by Emmanuel Valenza (Br. Augustine) at
http://www.sspx.org/against_the_sound_bites/capital_punishment.htm
Religious positions in favor of capital punishment are neither necessary not needed to justify that sanction. However, the biblical and theological record is very supportive of the death penalty.
Dudley: ever heard of extermination camps??
You write:
"In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to spare murderers at the cost of sacrificing more innocent lives."
this is completely wrong!!! Prison makes people more accomplished criminals! ! ! it also embitters them to the system, and makes it harder to get jobs once out of prison. Are we then to exterminate all prisoners because the prison system contaminates them in the first place???
No! We must reform the prison system to make people who offend society realize their lives beyond the value structure that society places on them! How are we to teach murderers that their understanding of life is corrupt? by understanding their life in the same way? by murdering them? WHAT FALLACY!
There is no value to human life; putting a value there defaces the other. This is why, when you say, "Executing a murderer does not devalue humanity anymore than incarceration does," you reveal that you haven't understood the problem at all! The problem is precisely that it places value on the human, and corrupts it in the process. The problem is the valuation, not the devaluation!
The second problem is the gross inequity of racial and class constitution of the prisons. Most people put in prison are street offenders, not the rich criminals who make legal life unsustainable in the ghettos of the U.S. They are largely people who cannot afford to live in the system, and resort to extra-Capitalist means of production; prison industry forces their labor more cheaply; the American prisons are gulags for the poor and unemployed!
There should be social programs for the constitutive outside, not a prison system for everyone who does not obey the mighty eye of Capital. Listen to the jargon here: human capital, where people are treated like cattle, capital punishment, again, connoting a surplus value in the human relationship.
This is all, of course, sickening, and quite obviously instance of valuation on human life, which is relative to use value to 'society' that is overdetermined by the interests of overproduction and wastage - human wastage as well as material wastage.
Read Agamben! ! ! The problem does not end at the U.S. prisons, but in international prison structures, where so-called terrorists are held without trial - the liberal tenants of justice and truth are an apparition, a mirror game of money and power. There is no State in the mentality of the prison.
You who will always return to a fallacious analysis of life and death which absolutely ignores the balance of the two within existence (Dasein), not to mention the teleological striving that stokes the death drive, I appeal to your strength and wit: reflect on your powerful words for long enough to feel the fear that those threats cause. Imagine for an instant that your rights have been stripped and you have nothing but the language of that violent State, which has already persisted for centuries in destroying your societies and threatening your autonomy, to direct your will. While the politicians seem to wallow in their own crapulence as your neighbors and yourself suffer, and the system continues to kill, would you trust that anarchic system, or would you try to resist? As the state kills, it encourages more killings. I hope you can come to terms with that.
The Houston Chronicle Article presents the Federal Judge's 'blistering' decision, which called the Texas judicial system "by definition, insane".
On August 21, 2008, Federal District Court Judge Garcia order a stay, for Jeff Wood, based upon:
"Admittedly, the evidence of (Wood's) alleged incompetence now before this Court is far from compelling. (Wood) has never been definitively diagnosed with any mental illness."
"Thus, there is evidence before this Court suggesting (Wood's) alleged refusal to comprehend, or perhaps, possibly to admit, the connection between his role in the fatal shooting of Kriss Keeran and the death sentence imposed upon him may be more demonstrative of (Wood's) anti social behavior than of a true mental illness."
". . . the evidence at (Wood's) trial established (that Wood) participated in a pair of armed robberies of convenience stores which culminated in the fatal shooting of a store clerk by (Wood's) accomplice Danny Reneau on January 22, 1996." " (Wood) drove the get-away vehicle in both robberies."
Even with the "minimal evidence of (Wood's) delusional thought processes"(judge Garcia's words), the Court decided to issue a stay.
(Civil no. SA-01-CA-423-OG, page 10-11, US District Court Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, August 21, 2008, http://www.scribd.com/doc/4947243/Judge-Orlando-Garcias-Order-for-a-Stay-of-Execution-for-Jeff-Wood )
Oh wow, I didn't imagine an actual proponent of the death penalty would read this.
Anyway, I do not equate humanity with goodness/value (I did write "hypothetically, didn't I? And I generally don't equate humanity with anything, especially not with quaint values such as good or evil). What I asserted was that in a society supposedly based on humanistic values (such as human rights), the notion of humanity becomes a capital (therefore a value, something to be privileged, something good).
Secondly, I fail to see how my calculus actually produces a net savings of life. Isn't it paradoxical that we save more lives by executing more of them?
The problem lies of course in the fact that you are throwing statements without even properly backing them and without addressing what I am writing (which is why I am asking for an argument, that is to say a logical argument, where A->B, B->C therefore A->C ... rhetoric, friends, rhetoric!).
Finally, the text you are pasting is not addressing my argument either. I am not writing about the risk of executing an innocent, about the conflict between a humanistic discourse and the execution of a human being, regardless of innocence and guilt. And there are countries that are safer than the United States and that do not have the death penalty. The EU countries, anyone? Much lower rates of violent crimes than in the US?
Oh, you might want to know it's extremely amateurish of you (I work in publishing) to put a copyright notice at the end of your text. And I don't really care that you've been on TV, although I do appreciate that you are introducing yourself.
Where is Jasper Bernes when you need a good argumentator?
Once again this leads back to Foucault's notions of bio-power upheld by Agamben in his critique of neo-humanism via the perspective of the 'human/animal'. Agamben lifts the veil from the face of liberal idealism, revealing the world and humanity in its repressive force. This is not a humanism, but an ecological overview, developing beyond the Levinasian 'humanism of the other' in order to understand that we humans take part in a greater phenomenological consciousness (quantum physics anyone?).
The idea, now, is not to stop at the determinant mercy of butchery and violence simply because it seems 'natural', but to transcend the cyclical inhumanity involved with so-called Capital punishment. This is not a Utopian project of some metaphysical humanism, but a concrete project of the social sciences: to provide power and privilege to everyone born into society on an equal basis.
For me the foundation for all sanction is what is just and deserved.
The net saving of life would extend to Europe, as well.
As you likely know, there are counties with the death penalty that have similar and lower murder rates than Europe.
It isn't a paradox that more lives would be saved with taking life. Similarly, I would argue that we have more freedom because the freedom of criminals is taken.
Again, we are not having an argument here. All you are still doing is making unfounded assertions.
I am not arguing that a society that wants to be stable/normalized is not going to have any form of sanctions. This has already been agreed by many social philosophers from both sides of the spectrum, like Gramsci or Agamben (since Alex is mentioning him). Again, read closely what I have written originally and the comments that have followed (both Alex's and mine).
Secondly, I fail to see how the death penalty here would even affect Europe.
Finally, stating that there are" counties [in the US] that have the death penalty and a lower rate of violent crimes" does not mean anything. When was the last time those counties executed anyone? Where are they located? In rural or urban area? How dense are those counties? For that matter, I could give you Japan as an example, a country with the death penalty and an extremely low rate of violent crime. Yet, they haven't executed anyone in years (not even the leader of Aum Shinrikyo) and most people there don't even know they have the death penalty.
You stated: "And there are countries that are safer than the United States and that do not have the death penalty. The EU countries, anyone? Much lower rates of violent crimes than in the US?"
Then you go on to describe the error of my response, when you comment suffered the same error.
No need to act so juvenile.
Look up just and deserved in the dictionary and then apply those definitions to criminal justice sanctions, as they are applied around the world.
It is illogical to proclaim that by taking life you are defending it, because you are setting an unequal example where the State has more rights than the individuals even though the State is not formed by consensus, but, using your line of argument, by a coercive machine of Fichtean subjection. (Quick reminder that Fichte was one of the precursors of the 3rd Reich, returning again to homo saccer, bio-power, and the illegitimate power of the State to take human life.)
A prison is neither reformatory nor penitentiary, it is a cesspool of crime and a pit of self-destructive agony. It is draconian punishment that smacks of revenge and animosity. I would be shocked if anything in the world made you think that they work towards a more sensible society, but I am somewhat comforted to know you don't even believe in them yourself. The scary part is, you make an argument for the death penalty citing recidivism - this turns your entire way of thinking into a frightening picture of the rule of terror. Because prisons don't work, we should kill more people - this is how your argument runs.
I suggest a reform of the prisons and the deployment of social programs to protect the autonomy of the constitutive outside so it can gain political power and represent itself without the 'propaganda of the act', which, if you will, is more like a Lacanian 'passage a l'acte'. In other words, crime is often an impotent acting out of rage directed towards their own feelings of repression.
We must concentrate on reforming this kind of self-destruction before prisons step in so that prisons don't concentrate self-destructive persons in extremely dangerous circumstances. In doing this, we would avoid the problem of the death penalty - in most cases, right off the bat.
Otherwise, I fundamentally think that the logic of discipline and punishment in modern discourse - particularly the one concerning Capital punishment - is skewed towards the bio-power of a myopic and privileged 'class' (if we can still use this epistemology). I don't insinuate patriotism on any scale of magnitude, but at this point, is not the 'American' thing to do to take the side of the underprivileged and try to advance the Levinasian asymmetry of the face to face encounter as opposed to the Kafkaesque dissonance between the voice of the law and the material ethics of the disenfranchised?
Francois brought up Europe, saying that there are paradigms which don't include the death penalty and work very well. This is simply to say that there are functional systems that don't use the death penalty, and can't we study and discuss them.?
Now, there is a difference between suggesting an extrapolation of one paradigm that is speculative and doesn't really work in its home country, and suggesting an alternative look into a condition that is actually working and produces a system of lower levels of violent crime. We are finding countries with low crime rates and no executions (even in some instances, inclusive of the presence of the law of capital punishment). What we are not finding are the benefits of executions on the consciousness of the citizenry of any Republic.
The difference is speculative induction (Dudley) and logical reduction (Francois). Again, the problem returns to social sciences, where we must project a future where people do not do 'good' because they are afraid of the law, but because they understand that the quality of life relies on reciprocal beneficence.
"Of all the government programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record and with greater protections than the US death penalty?
Unlikely."
Check your commas before you copy and paste your articles. I feel like your syntax is a bit confining.