BRUTALITY OR FAIR PUNISHMENT?

    Why do we kill people to show that killing is wrong?
    That question, a rallying cry from those of us who want to abolish capital punishment, has no sensible answer and spotlights the bizarre policy of a society that says it's a terrible crime for you to murder someone, but perfectly okay for government to kill you for doing it.
    Thus, the state's solution for settling the score is just as brutal and insane as the act of the offender it so fiercely judges and condemns.
    On the death certificates of the 24 convicted murders who have been executed by the state of Missouri since it resumed the killing nearly 10 years ago, the cause of death is listed as "homicide," then the word "legal" appears in parentheses.
    The hypocrisy is astounding.  The citizenry and its leaders preach endlessly about stopping the violence, then as a government step up and take a turn at it in the death chamber of a state prison.  What a supreme moral contradiction, what a dismal role model for the promotion of peace and civility.
    It is high time that Missouri put a stop to this failed policy, to break the state's link in the cycle of violence, to reduce the dehumanization and vulgarization of our culture that the death penalty feeds.  The death penalty symbolizes the desperation of a society that doesn't have a grasp on a reasonable crime and punishment policy, or a sense of its own fallibility.
    "Society proceeds sovereignly to eliminate the evil ones from her midst as if she were virtue itself," wrote Albert Camus in his 1957 essay, Reflections on the Guillotine.  "Like an honorable man killing his wayward son and remarking: 'Really, I didn't know what to do with him'.  To assert in any case, that a man must be absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind will believe this today."
    The traditional arguments against using the ultimate punishment are many and persuasive.  There is no credible evidence that the death penalty has any deterrent effect on the homicide rate.  Even knowledgeable supporters of capital punishment agree on that.
    Some people claim the death penalty is a public safety necessity, to keep a murderer from killing the innocent.  Research shows that 23 people in America have been legally executed who were later proved innocent.  Since 1973 there have been 69 people released from death row, including several in Missouri, because of faults found in their convictions or sentences.  One of the worst cases of injustice was that of two Hispanic men from Illinois, convicted and sentenced to die in 1985 for the killing of a 10-year-old girl.  They were released after further investigation showed they were the victims of false prosecution.  Three former prosecutors, including one who became a judge, and four law enforcement officers were indicted for obstruction of justice.
    The death penalty is often imposed in an arbitrary, capricious and prejudicial fashion.   It falls more heavily on the poor and minorities.  Either they don't have the money and support to mount the high-level defense needed to counter the much greater resources of the prosecution, they are subject to the racial bias of the criminal justice system , or both.
    Prosecution and appeals of death penalty cases consume huge sums of tax dollars, relative to the cost of keeping a killer in prison for life with parole.  A Texas study found that it cost $2.3 million for a death penalty case, three times the cost for convicting and keeping a murderer in prison for 40 years.  In North Carolina, a study showed it cost on average of $2.16 million more for the prosecution and imprisonment relating to death penalty cases than for murder cases not involving the death penalty.  In Missouri, officials estimated that the state would save total of about $400,000 a year alone on reducing public defender staff now employed to defend death penalty cases.   Let's stop the killing and use the savings for better law enforcement, victims assistance and criminal rehabilitation.
    About the only semblance of a viable argument supporters of capital punishment have left is that it serves justified vengeance, necessary retribution.  It provides closure, relief from the loss and anger experienced by the surviving family members and loved ones of the victim.  Yet in a way, many of them become victims of the death penalty, infested with understandable but emotionally destructive hate and rage, anticipating the revenge for the many years between sentencing and execution.  They haven't been able to let go, to find reconciliation, and when the offender is dead, he may still be living inside their head.

Representative Mike Schilling