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| Ben "Mouse" McShane is a junior telecommunications major and writes 'Classical Geek Theatre' for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. |
Last week, I showed how the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent and does not make fiscal sense. Now, let's look at the moral aspect.
The most common argument favoring the death penalty is serving justice.
Killing the man may keep him from murdering someone else in the future, but the death penalty is unnecessary to protect citizens from dangerous criminals. Executing the murderer is not necessary for justice to be served.
If a man serves a life-without-parole sentence in a maximum-security, solitary confinement prison, he will never murder another man again. He will not be able to vote. He will not be free. His right to live freely will be revoked.
He will never harm another. The sanctity of human life will be preserved.
Why then do we still execute our murderers? To serve on abstract concept called "justice"? Many supporters will tell you the death penalty is for the families of the victims.
Nowhere in our Constitution or our laws does it state that the job of the government is to exact revenge for private citizens.
To kill a man because he is a murderer, in order to satisfy the victim's family's wishes, is revenge. It is to make the victim's family feel better -- a gruesome, barbaric consolation prize for their tragedy. This is little more than expensive, state-sponsored revenge.
Even if the death penalty were not amoral, and even if the idea was supported in our Constitution, the system we use to determine who lives and who dies is biased and corrupt.
Fact: For interracial murders since 1976 that resulted in a death sentence, 178 of the cases involved a white victim and a black defendant. Twelve cases involved a black victim and a white defendant.
Fact: 80 percent of all capital cases involve white victims, although only 50 percent of all murder victims are white.
The U.S. General Accounting Office summed it up in 1990 when it reported, "In 82 percent of the studies [reviewed]... those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."
The experts are acknowledging the facts: Our death sentencing system is racist.
Other prejudices exist within our "justice" system. Damien Echols, one of the famed "West Memphis Three," is currently on death row for his alleged part in a brutal triple-homicide of three young boys.
The shocking thing is, not one piece of physical evidence links Echols to the crime scene. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley wore black clothes and listened to Metallica.
The only evidence linking Echols to the crime is a coerced confession from Jessie Misskelley, who was interrogated for 12 hours without representation before he confessed. Only the last 45 minutes of the interrogation were documented.
Experts testified that Misskelley was coerced into lying about the murder. Photographic documentation shows a baseball bat in the corner of the room. Misskelley has an IQ of 72, is mildly retarded and did not understand what was happening around him during the interrogation.
If you wish to be shocked even more, you can read "Devil's Knot" by Mara Leveritt and learn the West Memphis Police Department's shady investigation methods.
Unless true justice stumbles it way through, Damien Echols will die for three murders despite the lack of hard evidence. A dangerously imperfect system of bias and corruption has chosen his fate.
You can't un-kill a person.
If our nation abolished the death penalty, the consequences of the system's imperfections would not be a matter of life-and-death. Brutal murderers could still be punished and kept off the streets. True justice would be served.
Write to Mouse at bbmcshane@bsu.edu
Visit http://www.classicalgeektheatre.com
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