Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

[ Previous | Table of Contents | Next ]

Capital Punishment
Chapter Four

By every measure, the United States is the most violent nation on earth. The homicide rate in this country is five times greater than that of any European nation and four times greater than the murder rates of Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Rape is seven times more common here than in Europe, and in the three years between 1990 and 1993 more than 90,000 Americans were murdered—twice the number killed in the Vietnam war.

Despite more than 30,000 murders in this country each year, fewer than 300 killers ever receive the death sentence. And since no more than 30 prisoners have been executed for their crimes in any given year, convicted murderers are more likely to die of old age than lethal injection. Most, in fact, will repeat their crimes—some, many times over.

The first provision of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury . . . nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

Clearly, the Founding Fathers understood and anticipated the need for the sentence of "maximum punishment" for capital offenses.

The death penalty, while harsh, has been used since the beginning of time as the only suitable punishment for murder; and, as if to ensure that no one should ever consider it inappropriate, the Eighth Amendment specifically addresses the rights of prisoners by saying, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The death penalty was neither cruel nor unusual in their eyes; yet, this is commonly the grounds upon which opponents have challenged its use.

At least two issues, however, are at stake: Whether the death penalty is legal, and whether it is humane. In addition to constitutional approval, the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the legitimacy of the maximum penalty. Most recently, in the case of Gregg v. Georgia, in which the use of hanging had been challenged, the Court said they "could not conclude that judicial hanging is incompatible with the evolving standards of decency simply because few states continue the practice." If, by the Constitution and by precedent, the sentence of hanging is deemed legal, other forms of capital punishment, electrocution and lethal injection, must be legal, as well.

Some opponents argue that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime and is, therefore, pointless; while others say that sentencing criminals to death reflects badly on society—that it is uncivilized. In the first case, no penalty is a deterrent if it is never or only infrequently used. In the past, knowledge that capital offenses would always receive the death penalty helped to instill internal restraints in people, from childhood on, so that even in fits of rage one would be reminded to stop before things could go too far. That inner restraint no longer exists.

Regarding the second objection, concerning the civility of those who inflict such a penalty, how decent would we be if we routinely freed convicted murderers and allowed them to murder, not just once, but twice or three times or serially, as countless murderers have, in fact, done? How do humane societies explain to the families of those secondary and tertiary victims that freeing the criminal was the humane thing to do? Abolitionists always seem to feel the pain of criminals but not the pain of their victims or their families.

Justice & Deterrence

In his brilliant defense of the death penalty in the Harvard Law Review (1986), Ernest van den Haag points out that most opponents of capital punishment say they would favor abolition even if it could be shown conclusively that the death penalty is the best deterrent to murder. For such people, the argument of deterrence has no merit; and in terms of true justice, preventing future acts of violence is not the primary issue in the first place.

But crime always demands a suitable punishment, and to fail to punish crime is to degrade and disrespect the rights of every other citizen. Crime without punishment is anarchy, and laws without just and appropriate penalties for violators are merely pious pronouncements.

Some have argued that capital punishment unfairly singles out blacks, since blacks (collectively 13 percent of the population) are implicated in 45 percent of all violent crimes. The reality, however, is quite the reverse. Most violent crime tends to be black on black. In 1990, 83.9 percent of black victims of violent crime and 93 percent of black murder victims were assaulted by other blacks. Despite the numbers, black murderers have received the death penalty less often than white murderers convicted of the same crimes.

Is capital punishment degrading to the convict, as liberal Justice William J. Brennan once argued? How can it be? The philosophers Kant and Hegel argued that a just execution, far from degrading the convicted murderer, actually affirms and dignifies his humanity by granting him, at least in this act, responsibility for his own behavior.

Christian Perspectives

The religious implications of the issue are profound. From beginning to end the Bible speaks of the death penalty and how it is to be used. God Himself used it to judge both individuals and nations, and He ordered judges, kings, and rulers to use it to maintain order and sovereignty. The Mosaic Law established death as the penalty for murder—not for killing, which is a different word in Hebrew, as it is in English (see Genesis 9:6). As in times of war, killing may be justified; but murder, on the other hand, is a crime to be punished by death.

Some have said that Jesus set aside the Old Testament law in the Sermon on the Mount by telling His followers to "turn the other cheek." But in His sermon, Jesus is telling them to leave matters of the law to the authorities; Christians are not to seek personal vengeance but to love one another—even their enemies.

Later, when He stopped the Jews from stoning the woman caught in adultery, as Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries points out, Jesus is not making a statement about the law or the sentence of death. Rather, the point of the story is to show that Jesus recognized that the Pharisees were trying to trap Him between the Roman law and the Mosaic law. His brilliant response to the entrapment is not to deny the authority of judge and jury, but to say that no individual or group may take it upon themselves to kill another person at will.

Paul offered much the same counsel in saying,

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For [the legal authority] is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for [legal authority] does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil (Romans 13:3–4).

Paul recognizes the state’s authority to exact the death sentence, and in his appeal to the Roman Procurator, Festus, he said,

If I am an offender, or have committed anything deserving of death, I do not object to dying; but if there is nothing in these things of which these men accuse me, no one can deliver me to them (Acts 25:11).

A Bigger Agenda

Some have suggested that at the root of the conflict over capital punishment we will find the same antagonism toward authority and moral absolutes that motivates the evolutionist debate. Ultimately, to say that crime has no relationship to punishment, except as society may at any given point decide to define it, is to say there are no abiding standards, no eternal truths and, by implication, no such thing as sin. If there is no sin, in turn, Christ died in vain and Christianity is little more than a cult or a country club.

Perhaps such a view would satisfy those who have chosen human standards over the divine. And perhaps this humanist code may appease those who would rather not consider the historical Judeo-Christian roots of Western justice. But something has to be done to stem the
rising tide of violence in American society, and no ideology or "ism" can change that fact. Fully 8 of every 10 Americans can expect to be victims of a violent crime at some time in their lives. Every year, five million people are casualties of crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and assault, while 19 million are victims of property crimes.

There is no law against killing in self-defense; in fact, our laws specifically justify the use of capital force by police, military, and private citizens in cases when "defense of life" is an issue. The logic seems inescapable that if an individual may kill to save a life, surely an entire society should have the right to take life in order to stop violent offenders from preying, not merely on one member, but on society itself.

Robert Crowe, Attorney General of the State of Illinois, argues that it is the finality of the penalty that gives the death sentence its clout: "It is this fear of punishment which protects society," he says. Others have said that if the American legal system would, at long last, demonstrate that we are serious about using the death penalty to stop crime in this country—whether by one execution at a time, or by deterrent example—every citizen would gain a new reverence for the sanctity of human life. Potential perpetrators would be forced to reconsider their actions, both in moments of anger and premeditation.

Selective Vision

Those who argue against the death penalty tend to pick their cases and examples very selectively. Justice Harry Blackmun, on an edition of "Frontline" on PBS, described with pitiful detail the strapping down and injection of convicted killer Bruce Edwin Callins, the weaknesses of trials and lawyers, and the means by which verdicts are reached. Not a word, however, about Callins’ victim, a man left to bleed to death on a cold, stone floor with no chance of settling his affairs or making his peace with God.

Blackmun’s opponent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia, made the point:

The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that (the victim’s circumstances). It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional; for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!

You can contact these organizations:

Probe Ministries1900 Firman Dr., Suite 100
Richardson, TX 75081
(800) 899-PROB

American Center for Law & Justice
1000 Thomas Jefferson St., NW, Suite 609
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 337-2273

For further reading:

Ernest Van Den Haag, John Conrad. The Death Penalty: A Debate. New York: Plenum Press, 1983.
Frank Carrington. Neither Cruel Nor Unusual: The Case for Capital Punishment. New York: Crown Publishers, 1978.

Harold J. Rothwax. Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice. New York, Random House, 1996.

On the World Wide Web:

Probe Ministries: http://www.probe.org/
The Federalist Society: http://www.fed-soc.org/
Ethics Update: http://ethics.acusd.edu/death_penalty.html (abolitionist site, links)
American Center for Law & Justice: http://www.aclj.org/

[ Previous | Table of Contents | Next ]

Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.