Monsters and Capital Punishment

Let me say, from the outset, that my position — which I take to be the human rights position — is that, irrespective of our personal opinions about what people deserve, no one should be put to death. The death penalty in the United States is bad public policy: it is fiscally irresponsible; it is rife with racism and classism; it fails as a deterrent; it is out of step with criminal justice efforts around the world; and, at bottom, it is a violation of the right to life.

Thursday’s execution of Teresa Lewis in Virginia has raised anew one of the seemingly-timeless questions about capital punishment. In particular, because of Lewis’ purportedly-borderline IQ, there has been a lot of discussion about who deserves to die. Some have suggested that Lewis was not deserving of death because her IQ was low enough that she might not have understood right from wrong; other have suggested that her crime — the murder for hire of two famiy members — is particularly heinous because of the planning it involved and because of its targets.

When people say that someone deserves to die, what they’re saying is that an offense has been committed that is so far beyond the range of normal behavior that we cannot even begin to imagine the worldview of the offender and we cannot imagine continuing to occupy the same plane of existence. 

But where things get tricky is that we’re taking a pretty serious leap here: we begin by saying that the action is terrible and we end by saying that the actor is terrible. What needs to be considered is whether doing a particular action either a) tells us something about you as a person or b) changes you in some fundamental way as a person. In other words, if I commit a crime, am I telling you something about who I am as a person? Or is it possible for me to fundamentally alter myself through the commission of some particularly bad sort of crime? My sense is that people are keen to believe both of these things about crime.

A) It is convenient to believe that only monsters commit monstrous crimes because it allows us to compartmentalize things very neatly and, in this country, to destroy the monsters. But, of course, Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the banality of evil in her Eichmann in Jerusalem famously poked a hole in this theory about monsters. From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which shrinks the whole thesis into a few sentences quite nicely):

As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. From Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts.

Eichmann, on this reading (controversial at the time, but not really any longer), wasn’t some sort of monster, even though his actions were clearly monstrous. If we’re willing to accept this thesis about Eichmann — who was integral to the planning and execution of one of the worst crimes in human history, and who, interestingly, was hanged in the only instance of capital punishment in Israel — why are we not willing to consider it with regard to those on death row in the U.S.?

B) It is also convenient to believe that crime fundamentally alters a person, that it strips away one’s humanity (and, thereby, one’s rights). But this requires what I take to be an unusual understanding of personhood, one that relies on a set of societally-approved actions rather than one that’s simply a state of being. We see the problem most clearly, I think, if we apply the same understanding of personhood to the abortion debate: the fetus is incapable of taking any action, whether good or evil, and thus would not count as a rights-bearing person. Interestingly, the great majority of death penalty proponents argue in favor of a right to life for fetuses based on personhood as a state of being. Thus they are in the unenviable position of adopting two different standards of personhood in order to argue in favor of the right to life for some and against the right to life for others.

You might, of course, argue against the humanity of fetuses and murderers based on a theory of action-based personhood. But to do so you would need to make a case for the ways in which the actions we take alter our humanity. In other words, can it be demonstrated that when we do something particularly good, we actually become worthy of certain treatment (and vice versa)? I suspect not.

Even if it could be demonstrated — and I await such a demonstration — this idea stands in stark contrast to everything that we claim to believe about human rights. After all, at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the statement that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” We’re born with human rights, we don’t have to do anything good to be worthy of them, and we can’t do anything so bad that we forfeit them. It also stands in contrast to our own theories of crime and punishment, since not everyone who does something terrible is executed (and not everyone on death row fits so neatly under the heading of “the worst of the worst”). Indeed, almost all of the violent criminals who enter the American penal system are later released from it; if we truly held the belief that they became less human as a consequence of their actions, do we also believe that their time in prison restore their humanity somehow? I suspect that we don’t. But, if we did, why wouldn’t this also apply to those who commit murder and end up on death row?

The long and the short of it is this: It would be easier for us if there were evil people in the world, rather than normal people who do evil things. But this is a fiction, one that keeps us clinging to our occasional use of the death penalty despite the facts that it doesn’t accomplish much, that it’s bad public policy, and that it’s a human rights violation.