Sixteen Volts

It's a shame that death penalty is not in use in most civilized countries, with the United States and practically all Far East countries being an exception. In my opinion, other Western nations should follow the majority opinion of their citizens and go back to having the death penalty.

First of all, anyone who doubts that the majority of people support the death penalty should go around asking a few people what they think is a proper punishment for a pedophile, a rapist or someone who commits a racist murder. The progressive crowd is not really so different here: for all their posturing to save Tookie and Mumia and all that, they support the death penalty just as eagerly, provided that it gets used against the right people. (As a side note, it would be so much easier to believe the opponents of death penalty if certain trends weren't so obvious in the members of the tiny minority of death row inmates who are given national publicity and celebrities to call for their clemency.)

Go on, ask any feminist what she thinks should be done to a man who beats his wife to death. It's more than likely that the answer is some form of torture leading to death. Also the rights of the accused seldom have much weight in these cases, since as we know very well that the woman's word alone should be enough to convict a man of rape. It's also amusing how the standard progressive line about how harsh punishments don't deter criminal and the criminals are innocent victims of patriarchal and classist capitalist society that forced them to commit the crime never seem to apply when the criminal comes from a non-favoured pool of problematic people.

As a side note, it would probably be hilarious if the burden of proof for rape was raised to the same level that the death penalty opponents apparently require for death penalty. After all, if feminists have ever taught us anything, it is that rape is a crime worse than murder and never has extenuating circumstances or varying degrees of severity. Therefore if the death penalty is used for any crime, rape should be this crime, right? Of course raising the burden of proof to this level would have the result that only the few most egregious rapists would ever be convicted of rape. Just remember all those complaints about the unfair death penalty because the defense attorney made some small mistake or some form didn't have all i's dotted properly. In most cases, the defense attorney would have to be a total moron to be unable to raise reasonable doubt.

Back to the main topic. Perhaps the best, or at least the most commonly used, argument against the death penalty is the possibility of executing an innocent. But if this is really the best argument, I don't see why the whole debate hasn't been dead and moot for a long time now. Of course it sucks to be the one who gets executed as innocent, but let's maintain at least some sense of proportion. Even in the most prolific death penalty states and nations, the probability for the average person to be executed as an innocent is so microscopically small that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to worry about it. The probability of falling down while taking a shower or developing the spontaneous form of the Creutzfeld-Jacob disease is orders of magnitude higher.

And most importantly, as small as these odds are, you pretty much get to pick them for yourself by deciding whether you embark on a criminal career. Most other risks that you face you don't really get to pick. In every single example of an innocent person being executed I remember ever reading, that person had a criminal background. This is not surprising, since the risk of practically all bad things are higher for people who don't contribute much to society. It is a ludicrous misallocation of concern to take away the minuscule probability of being innocently executed while ignoring the underlying reality that increases their risk of dying from many other, statistically vastly more significant causes.

It's strange that one aspect of government is put under such massive scrutiny for the innocent deaths that it causes, while every other aspect escapes such scrutiny scott free with merely more than a "meh". In practically everything the government does, they necessarily impose some small but unavoidable risk on some people. And the same applies to individual citizens. The average death penalty opponent imposes a several orders of magnitude greater risk on the lives of other people simply by driving a car, smoking in public or by having casual sex, especially the gay bathhouse sex. (I actually wonder which one is currently longer, the time the average death row inmate has to wait for his execution, or the time the average HIV infectee has to wait for actual AIDS.)

In all these cases, the benefit that these actions produce and the costs that the inaction would produce justifies the small risk on others people, even though with simple restrictions such as lowering the speed limits and abstaining from bathhouse sex, this risk could be significantly lowered. So doctors, heal thyselves. If an individual has a right to impose a risk on others for his own benefit, why doesn't the legal system have the right to impose a far smaller risk that will realize on only a few innocents to maintain law and order and organized society? Why does the requirement for absolute 100% certainly apply only to some people and some institutions, but no to others?

I guess that this is somehow related to the vague rule that some forms of death are worse than others so that whereas executing an innocent is a really bad type of death, a thousand people mowed down by speeding gaswasters is just a statistic. It is better for a hundred guilty man to go free than one innocent suffer, as the saying goes. I'm sorry, but I don't accept this at all. A death is a death, and all dead people are equally dead regardless what they died of.

Other arguments by the death penalty opponents often contradict each other in a very Catch-22 kind of way. With these people, you just can't win no matter what. For example, if the execution speedily follows the trial so that no string of endless appeals is allowed, this is wrong, because the possibility of executing an innocent is higher. But if the death row inmates are given decades to file new appeals, this is also wrong, since this is just a form of slow mental torture of the convicted man. If the death row inmate is told his execution date, this is also mental torture, but if the date comes as a surprise (as in Japan), this is also mental torture.

If the criminal law allows both death penalty and life in prison as punishments for murder, this is wrong, because it is unfair for the murderers that some of them get the former and some get the latter, even though they are all murderers. Where do we draw the dividing line, and besides, isn't the very existence of such a line itself unfair to those who fall close to it on either side? Who are we to judge, and besides, aren't all judgments inherently arbitrary? It is especially foul and unfair that some small aspect of the crime or which judge presides can determine the result, the same way that it is unfair that a small difference in the basketball trajectory can make a huge difference whether the ball goes in the hoop or not, determining the game result in the last second. But on the other hand, if the criminal law prescribes death penalty for every murderer, this is not fair at all but heinously wrong, since it ignores the differences between the killings and their perpetrators and lumps everybody together. How unfair!

If the execution method is painful, this is horrible because it's torture and thus unimaginably bad. But if the execution method is painless, this is also horrible, since it cheapens the human life by making it easier to take away. If the execution is done in public, as it is done in many Third World countries even today, this is wrong because it brutalizes people. But if the executions are done in secret and cameras are not allowed to broadcast it, this is also wrong, because this proves that the government has something to hide and executions are bad.

And let's not forget the eternal whopper that the death row doesn't statistically represent the population as whole in many important aspects such as education level, wealth or race. You know, I will start listening to these complaints the exact moment that women comprise 50% of death row inmates. Why isn't it considered unfair that the legal system fills prisons with mostly men? Of course, I can already hear the progressives protesting that women commit far fewer crimes than men (and even most of those are because the patriarchy forced them to do so) and are therefore rightfully underrepresented in prisons, but why doesn't the same argument apply to other statistical underrepresentations as well? In the real world, people who move to wealthy neighbourhoods instead of slums do so and happily pay the premium for a very good reason.

(As a side note, I remember watching a documentary where some famous American female reporter, can't remember exactly which one, voluntarily spent some time in a women's prison. In that prison there was one female death row inmate, sequestered from the population. In the voiceover, the reporter explained how she had hired a contract killer to murder her husband. Then the reporter complained that giving the death penalty to her instead of the hired killer was wrong because she wasn't even the one who actually pulled the trigger. I am gradually starting to understand why Elvis shot his television set.)

As we all have learned well, IQ is not a meaningful concept at all and especially doesn't predict anything whatsoever other than perhaps the ability to take IQ tests. (Bill Gates, by the way, disagrees and has become wealthy by betting on the opposite.) But this song immediately takes a 180 degree turn when it comes to death penalty, since the IQ distribution of the death row also tends to be somewhat different than in whole population. (After all, there is a good reason why the word "moron", that is, someone whose IQ is between 50 and 75, is a pejorative.) What do the death penalty opponents tell themselves when they go on and argue that someone shouldn't be executed because their IQ is under some arbitrary limit? Weren't the IQ tests supposed to be pretty much subjective and measure the cultural programming of the test subject?

So no matter what you do, it's always wrong when the progressives start opposing something. Unless when it is the progressive's own utopia... well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, as they say, and you can't expect perfection from any system or work-in-progress. Because the progressives care and are really conscious, the small but very real risk of ending up with a system where a couple of million kulaks get starved to death doesn't seem to hinder leftism and its proponents in any way. For this reason, and for the general idea of fairness, I propose that from now on, all policies that the progressives propose are put under the same requirement of total perfection that they demand for the death penalty.

So from now on, for every single proposal that the progressives make, if it is statistically expected to cause at least as many innocent deaths as death penalty (perhaps 1/year), that proposal is then immediately rejected. Arguments how the proposal would save many more lives than it takes as a side effect are also meaningless, since the opponents of death penalty don't consider this to be a relevant factor with death penalty either. (There can be a debate of how many lives death penalty saves by being a deterrent, but the point is that even if the deterrent factor was proven to be true, the death penalty opponents still wouldn't accept it as validation of death penalty in principle.)

Perhaps the death penalty could be made more acceptable by making it possible to survive it with a small probability. The convicted murderers could be put on an arena to fight each other gladiator-style. (Idea: arm each murderer with the exact weapon that he used in his crime, with other possible weapons occasionally popping on the arena video game style.) Or if there was a group of murderers who were telegenic and interesting enough, put them on a Survivor-style show in which the contestants would each week vote someone to be executed, and the last few standing would get their freedom. Incidentally, this would also solve the supposed problem of the cost of death penalty, since the hundreds of millions of dollars the government would get for the international TV rights would nicely cover this cost.

Another possible solution would be to allow volunteers to be pay the freedom of the murdered with their own lives. Of course this wouldn't work, since the criminal gangs could threaten or buy an innocent to do this. But I'm pretty sure than in a system like this, when the convict is an especially exciting and charismatic sociopath, there would be a horde of young leftist women willing to take his place. I can imagine the smile on their lips when the needle goes in, knowing that they boldly thwarted the evil patriarchy that wanted to silence the authentic voice of the cool and exciting rebel and misunderstood nonconformist. After all, he reminded them of the fact that even though they are themselves ultimately powerless against capitalism, reason and freedom that has so triumphantly towered over the other, there may some day come a man or men who is powerful and brutal enough to destroy these curses of humankind. And in the end, isn't this pretty much what most opposition of death penalty is really about?

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 8:19 AM