The Ultimate Price

I just spent almost an hour of my work day reading this article from the New Yorker: Trial By Fire. If you have some time, I would urge you to read it... I got sucked in by a Headline on the Google news front page saying "Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?", not noticing that it was an article in the New Yorker (which often tend to be longer than the general quick overview provided by many of Google's sources). But as soon as I started reading, I couldn't help but allow myself to get drawn in. If you are going to read the article, you should do it before you read any of my thoughts...

I have been an opponent of corporal punishment as long as I have had opinions on such matters, and my reasons are many: First off, though I do understand the view that by depriving another human being of their right to live, a person is giving up the same right for himself, I don't believe that any judge and jury have the right to make that decision. What gives any one person, or group of people, the right to say that another person deserves to die? None of us stand an unimpeachable moral ground, we have ALL wronged someone in our lives. None of us has any justification to say that we know better, are more moral, and have the authority to dole out death to those we deem deserving. That is the core of my opposition to the death penalty.

I also protest to the enormous cost of conducting the legal waltz that is rightly performed in advance of an execution. In the case of Cameron Willingham, he had twelve years of legal wrangling, from the date of his conviction to the date of his execution, and this time period is on the low side of the median time spent on the appeals process. I'm sure that this money could be much better spent providing disadvantages youth access to better education, or providing the same kind of unconditional health care that prison inmates enjoy to the outside world. Certainly this cost is justified when one is discussing the possibility of killing, murdering and innocent person, but if that fear was not present, couldn't we use the money in a better way? Politicians are constantly complaining of our ever expending federal deficit, and states can never seem to find the funding for many programs that are worthwhile. Guess what! I know where the money can come from!!

My final complaint about the use of the death penalty is directly in line with the tragic story of Cameron Todd Willingham. What if, even after decades of deliberation and appeals and interviews of "expert witnesses" an innocent man is put to death? That is a wrong that can NEVER be reversed. Even people who support the use of this final and absolute form of punishment live in fear of this thought. There is no way that we can take back what can only be viewed as a state sanctioned murder. It cannot be brushed aside with an "Ooops! Well, we will have to be more careful next time..." A person is DEAD at the end of this mistake.

In Willingham Arson case, the defendant paid the ultimate price for a crime it appears he did not commit, after enduring the death of his baby girls, the loss of his wife, the theft of his freedom, and countless other horrors of prison life which are only whispered about on the outside. Now, he will never be given the opportunity to grieve for his losses as he deserved. He will go down in many minds, regardless of the results of this government commission, as a Monster who murdered his children. Now certainly, this man was not the best of men, and maybe he deserved some difficulties in his life for things like hitting his wife and stealing things for his own amusement, but he did NOT deserve to die for those things. There are many worse people walking around the streets of every town, sitting in the pews of every church, and working in every office in the world. If Willingham did commit this terrible crime, if he really murdered his three daughters, then he was a terrible, awful person, and my sorrow for him is undeserved. But what if he told the truth, and, at worst, he was only guilty of not giving his own life in an attempt to save his girls?