Thoughts Inspired by Gov. Ryan
by Mickey Z.
Dissident Voice
January 13, 2003
Nearly 3600 human
beings languish on death row all across the land of the free. Some are guilty,
some innocent, some mentally disabled; but all await a grisly,
taxpayer-subsidized death. Why?
The most common
justification given for capital punishment is deterrence, i.e. fear of death
will deter humans from taking another life.
"Deterrence?"
asks Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps America's best-known death row inhabitant, in his
book, Live from Death Row. "The March 1988 execution of Willie Darden in
Florida, exceedingly well-publicized here and abroad, should have had enormous
deterrent effect, according to capital theories. But less than eleven hours
after two thousand volts coursed through Darden's manacled flesh, a Florida corrections
officer, well positioned to absorb and understand the lessons of the state
ritual, erupted in a jealous rage and murdered a man in the maternity wing of a
hospital. Seems like a lesson well learned to me."
And whom is this
lesson geared towards? Forty-two percent of the death row population is
African-American, an ethnic group that constitutes a mere 12 percent of the
nation's people as a whole. In Georgia, defendants charged with killing whites
are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence then those charged with
killing blacks while in Pennsylvania, where African-Americans comprise 9
percent of population, over 60 percent of its death row residents are black.
The litany goes on. As Mumia muses, "You will find a blacker world on
death row than anywhere else."
A second
rationale, one that could only exist in a society indoctrinated to accept
predatory capitalism as a viable option, is that of cost. In purely dispassionate
financial terms, an execution is cheaper than long-term incarceration, they
declare. However, State-sponsored murders are rarely swift (although Clinton's
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act did eliminate some of those
pesky constitutional protections and sped things up a bit). In fact, the Dallas
Morning News once calculated that the average execution in Texas cost $2.3
million, compared to the cost of $750,000 to keep a human behind bars for 40
years. When you factor in new technology that may eventually make it possible to
monitor prisoners in their own homes, that figure may drop even further. Hence,
even if we insist on putting a price tag on life itself, it still falls short
as a justification for capital punishment.
Finally, we have
the retribution crowd. "An eye for an eye," they bellow, parroting
the best homicidal traditions of the Old Testament. "Let the punishment
fit the crime," is the rallying.
If this is truly
our idea of justice, we are obviously living in a society that is not held to a
higher standard than that of its "worst" criminals-a State that is no
better or more civilized than the murderer it chooses to punish. We do not rape
the rapist nor do we burn down the house of the arsonist, why then do we murder
the man or woman charged with taking a life?
A State that
wishes its citizens to respect human life must lead by example. How can anyone
expect the increasingly superfluous masses to lay down their weapons and be
pacifist when our own elected (sic) leaders solve all their problems through
violence and our own government is the largest arms dealer the world has ever
known?
Capital
punishment is not the way a humane, civilized society based on solidarity,
justice, and freedom operates.
Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists
and Activists Making Ends Meet and an editor at Wide Angle. He
can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net