Anyone who knows my politics knows of my ambivalence toward the death penalty. On one hand, I do not doubt the justice of it. If a man kills another, it is fitting that he should be killed. One need only look back to the Noahic Covenant: "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood me shed" (Gen 9.6) (of course, I'm not sure that this verse is a command for the state to kill murderers so much as it is a karmic statement like "live by the sword, die by the sword"). Also, as a man who has been face to face with horrific personal tragedy caused by another's crime, I feel a deep longing for justice. When I here about the nine year old child who had been killed in a drive-by, or I talk to the woman who has been raped, or see the body of a brutally murdered man whose only crime was to become addicted, I cry out for something to be done. There are some crimes for which only death can atone.
So it is not the justice of the death penalty that I question. Rather, it is the state's competence in deciding who should live and die. When people bring up the jurisprudence of the Bible as support for a state sponsored death penalty, I am quick to remind them that the Old Testament nation of Israel was a theocracy. Therefore, at least within the narrative context of the Bible, God himself was the appeals process. It was God who ultimately decided who lived and who died. From a historical perspective, it may be optimistic to say that God's oversight prevented the killing of the falsely accused, but it's not out of the question to say that this would be the Bible's perspective. In our own imperfect and secular legal system, on the other hand, we can make no claim to the ultimate oversight of God himself (although some probably would).
When one looks at our system, one must consider the examples of Willie Francis, whose story is told by Gilbert King in his book, The Execution of Willie Francis. Willie was a seventeen year old African-American sentenced to death for the murder of a Louisiana pharmacist. He was convicted on evidence so lousy that, today, he would not have even been charged. He was sent to the electric chair twice when the intoxicated jail trustee entrusted to electrocute him the first time botched the wiring, sending Willie enough electricity to torture him, but not to kill him. One must consider the cases of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz who were sentenced to death and to life in prison respectively for a murder they did not commit and who spent thirteen years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Consider the men sent to death row on the false testimony of Joyce Gilchrist whose testimony helped lead to the execution of eleven men (we may never know if some of these were innocent), and who was willing to trade men's lives for her own career ambitions.
I don't use these examples to say that our criminal justice system is irreversibly corrupt. Indeed, I don't believe that such is the case. By and large, our system is dominated by men and women who are trying to do the right thing, and I truly believe that our system gets it right almost every time. But the cost of failure is so high. Get it wrong, even once, and you've killed an innocent person. And killing an innocent person makes you a murderer. And so, while I long for the justice that seems to come with the death penalty, I find that I can't quite support it either. And this is the view that for a couple of years I have stuck with.
Then, a few days ago, I listened to stories about serial rapists and listened to a few interrogations in which these men talked about their crimes. Many of these men spoke flippantly about actions that had forever changed the lives of their victims. Some of them masturbated while speaking to detectives or even while listening to their victims' testimony in open court. It is easy to see the unmitigated evil in the hearts of these men.
This got me thinking about the reasons the Old Testament supported the killing of their worst criminals. Proponents of our death penalty will often argue one or all of the following points: 1) putting these criminals to death insures that they will never hurt another innocent person, 2) putting criminals to death sends a message to other would-be criminals that they too will be killed if they commit these crimes and 3) putting criminals to death saves on the cost of feeding and sheltering these criminals for life. Each of these arguments is easily defeated. Argument 1 is easily countered by saying, "so does putting them in prison for life," (and retort usually countered with argument 3). Argument 2, a logical anecdotal argument, seems to be invalidated by crime stats. Though we are the only developed Western nation that still has a death penalty, we are also the nation among these with the highest rates of violent crime. The fear of death seems to have done little to stem violent crime in our country. Thus, the commission of these crimes seems to have little, if any, correlation to the severity of punishment possible. Finally, argument 3 is just flat false. It costs more money to put a criminal to death than it does to feed them for life because of the expense of the appeals process. Even a wealthy defendant will become indigent after his first trial. This is because, in most cases, whatever he does not spend on his defense, will be seized for victim's compensation funds. Thus, his appeals will all be tax-payer funded. It could be (and often is) argued here that the appeals process could be expedited so that is is less expensive, but the types of injustices that I have already pointed out show the danger in that; If Dennis Fritz's appeals process had been expedited, he would have been executed.
Interestingly, you see no arguments like these in the Old Testament Law. I think this is explained by the differences in the way we see crime and punishment. Modern Americans see the law from a very individual perspective; what needs to happen to this individual for this crime. Hebrews, on the other hand, thought of crime and punishment as communal acts how does this person's crimes relate to us as a people. I don't mean this in the same sense as when we ask, "what is the danger to the public if we allow this person to remain at large." But rather, I think their question may have been, "what have we, as a people, done through this person." Hebrews saw a type of connectivity between people and other people and indeed through people and creation that we do not. Thus, scripture explains its use of the death penalty thus, "If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death at the evidence of witnesses. . .So you shall not pollute the land in which you are" (Num 36.30-33). As anyone who is even a little familiar with the Bible knows, there are many other offenses in the OT for which one should either be put to death or expelled from the country. Interestingly, in all these statutes, the idea of punishment is never really about stopping the crime from occurring again, sending an example to the people, or even about punishment at all. Instead, the OT is obsessed with cleansing the land (and the people) of evil. The Hebrew people killed their offenders, not because they deserved it (though they may have), but because they believed that the evil in one person remained in the community as a whole. I don't mean to say that they knew that if they allowed an evil person to remain that the person would continue to do evil to others and thus he had to be stopped. Rather, because the evil person belonged to our community, so did the evil within him. And the people of God simply cannot abide evil.
These thoughts do not necessarily change my mind about our death penalty today. After all, God no longer exists within a particular state as he did with Israel, but among a people, not defined by an earthly government. So I don't see OT Law as jurisprudence for our own secular law. Instead, these thoughts make me wonder how we, as a people, are effected by the presence of evil among us. Does the evil within one of the rapists I listened to the other day remain, at least in part, within me as well? Does it pollute not just our society but indeed creation as a whole that we abide evil? And if so, what do we, as a people, do about it?
2 comments:
Your conclusion is how I tend to deal with the OT passages that basically support genocide. I try to put them in the context of a priestly understanding of sin/contamination and the ANE concept of holy wars (not quite the same as jihad) without supporting such actions today. Rather, I like to use these stories to question how seriously we take the communal pollution and pervasiveness of evil. There are times I want to perform a Christian succession of these passages, trumping them with the Sermon on the Mount or even question their historical reliability do to how appalled I still am and always will be by these passages, but this does not change the fact that they are in our Bible and we have to do something with them.
Also, there are times I want to completely be a pacifist. I would love to one hundred percent commit myself, until I think of the rapist/child-abuser and the dignity they destroy.
Of course, as Christians, we have to keep in mind the vicious cycle, i.e., they were likely abused as well, and allow for the possibility of redemption, but we still have to decry the most appalling evils imaginable and not sugar-coat them. Thus for example, instead of simply praising Tamar's act of prostitution in Gen 38, I like to ask the question, "What kind of society have we created, when the only recourse for a woman to be righteous is to act as a temple prostitute?" This question allows me to acknowledge her righteousness in the text without having to necessarily gloss over the sinfulness of prostitution.
Wrestling with texts is one of my favorite metaphors, and I think what you have done here is an excellent job of how to do so.
Well done, sir.
Also, I would add, for what it's worth, that it seems that our justice system is based more on the concept of impartiality, similar to the Roman justice system. Many of the passages that deal with appearing before a judge and court scenes in the OT, are in some way related to standing up and fighting for the wronged, especially those who cannot do so themselves, i.e., it is more subjective. This is another reason to kick the person out of the community. Abusing those who cannot defend themselves (poor, women, children, etc.) is so appalling to God that God specifically lists it as one of the main reasons for Judah's destruction (Jer 7)
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