Weblog
04/18/01 05:04 PM: I was reading the paper
I was reading the paper today and I came across an editorial defending Timothy McVeigh’s death sentence. It cited many good reasons to oppose the death penalty, but basically said that what McVeigh did was so bad that we should disregard them all. So I wrote a letter to the editor.
To the Editor:
Timothy McVeigh committed one of the most heinous crimes in American history. Severe punishment is in order. But one of the few crimes more heinous than murder is state-imposed murder. How can a reasonable person condemn the murder of one person and at the same time call for the murder of another? “An eye for an eye” has its limits as a form of justice. Does the government burn down the homes of arsonists? Do people convicted of “identity theft” have their social security and credit card numbers posted on the internet?
There are plenty of good reasons why the death penalty should be abolished (a small sample of them pointed out but dismissed in The Citizen’s April 18 editorial, “McVeigh earned death sentence”). But there is one point that even the most ardent death penalty supporters should agree with: capital punishment should not be applied without strict standards that guarantee due process to all.
The United States justice system simply lacks the objectivity and regularity to ensure that all capital cases are conducted according to the same standards. Former U.S. Supreme Court justice Harry A. Blackman, who voted to reinstate the death penalty in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia, came to realize that he had created a monster. He had little faith that the system would ever devise a set of rules that would “provide consistency, fairness, and reliability in a capital-sentencing scheme.” He did state, however, that, “I am more optimistic though, that this Court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that it-and the death penalty-must be abandoned altogether.
Whether or not you oppose the death penalty in principle, it is only reasonable to oppose it in the capacity that it is currently imposed.
