Just Cause: When Should the State Kill Someone?

I saw that John Couey was sentenced to death in Miami and it got me thinking. I have to admit that I’ve vacillated over the years on the death penalty.

When I was a teenager, a pair of muggers shot and killed someone on my block. I didn’t see it happen, but I remember the dead body. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life—right up there with watching the Twin Towers fall. I heard the shot. It wasn’t like in the movies. It sounded like one of those pretty weak firecrackers that went off in my neighborhood from time to time (Looking back, I was probably too naïve to realize that a lot of those “firecrackers” were really shots being fired, but I digress). I remember going outside in the night, completely oblivious to the possibility that I might get hurt and walking up and down the block to see what was going on.

And then I saw him.

Lying on the ground in the most awkward position I’d ever seen, was this…kid. He wasn’t much older than I was at the time—fifteen or so. It didn’t really register what had happened for a few minutes. I don’t remember walking or running up to him. I just remember seeing the small hole in his face, just below his right eye. His eyes were closed and a small trickle of blood ran down his cheek. It was only when I bent down to shake him, to see if he was all right that I noticed the mass of gore and grayish-white tissue that was where the back of his skull should have been.

My brother later told me that I screamed so loudly that he heard me from his room about half a block away. My brother’s prone to exaggeration, so I’ll never really be sure if that’s true.

The cops supposedly found the two people who did it. I never did find out what happened to them—a murder in Miami didn’t exactly make the evening news. I never even learned the name of the poor kid who got killed. I don’t remember much else about the whole thing, to be honest.

I just remember what I felt.

Rage.

I was pissed that this kid got killed for no good reason and no one really cared except maybe his family. There wasn’t a peep about it on the news or in the papers—I scoured them for days, looking. Nothing. I wanted those two murderers to pay.

I wanted justice.

For years after that, I was a strong proponent of the death penalty. Florida was pretty good about doing the deed when necessary and, when I could vote, a politician’s stance on the death penalty was often a deciding factor.

I’ve done a lot of thinking since then. Some growing up, perhaps. I’ve learned to recognize that what I felt was not really a desire for justice. What I had wanted was revenge. The more I studied the issue, the less appealing this whole death penalty thing became.

The numbers aren’t very encouraging. Minorities tend to see the needle (or gas chamber, or electric chair, as the case may be) at a disproportionate rate. People on death row have been later found to have been innocent of the charges. It costs more to execute a killer than it does to imprison them for life. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no justifiable reason for state-sponsored revenge.

I'm not one to pull out Bible quotes too often, but I do recall reading once "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."

I’m not one to tell anyone else what to think about a given issue, so I won’t start now. Instead, I’ll do what I always ask people to do on any issue. Read up on it. See what the opponents and the proponents have to say. Then decide for yourself.