The cruel and unusual reality of the death penalty by Cameron McGlothlin

In December of 1995, two skinhead GIs from Fort Bragg got drunk one night in my hometown of Fayetteville, NC. Fort Bragg is the largest military base on the East Coast and a large part of the Fayetteville economy. Highly involved in the skinhead culture of racism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism, the soldiers from the Fort, James Burmeister Jr. and Malcolm Wright, decided to go for a ride and kill some black people in the process. They promptly did just that, as Michael James and Jackie Burden, two black Fayetteville residents walking down the street that night, became the unfortunate victims of two drunk GIs with delusions of being Nazis. Arrested the next day, James Burmeister, the gunman in the murders, faced charges of first-degree murder and the possibility of the death penalty. My father became co-counsel for Burmeister, and the trial became something of a national spectacle as attention focused on racism in the military. I relate this anecdote not to propose any kind of personal revelation on the subject of the death penalty - the subject of this article - but more to relate my first "real" encounter with the punishment our society calls the death penalty. Condemning a criminal to death is the most severe form of punishment we as a society can give to a fellow human being. Thus, the death penalty has become, like many other issues, a moral dilemma as well as a political and judicial football. And, while the courts mete out "justice" by killing those who killed someone else and juries happily seek retribution in doing so, many Americans remain uninformed or shocked by the murder that takes place by the state in the name of "justice." Unlike abortion, the death penalty is an abstract idea in the American mind, and thus leads to a more subdued and less evangelical debate in the political arena. In fact, one could argue that it has very little presence in the political arena at all. It's not unreasonable to say that most Americans have little idea of the death penalty outside of simple abstractions of "human rights" or "justice." After all, there is some truth to the adage, "out of sight, out of mind." The populus has not been subjected to public executions for over a hundred years now. Thus, it can safely believe in the value of capital punishment and wield its power in jury rooms, spared the horror of watching its condemnation take effect. Meanwhile, the state continues to put people to death behind the closed doors and high walls of a prison. This article was written to present you with several arguments against the death penalty as it is used today. Viewing the death penalty policy from several different angles, one can see the problems inherent in putting criminals to death and the moral dilemmas that present themselves when the state decides that a person does not deserve to live.   Economics, Race, and the Death Penalty It would cost much more to put a person in prison for life than to execute them, right? Wrong. Though it may seem counterintuitive, it costs more today to execute a criminal through the criminal justice system than it does to send him to prison for life. According to a study by the Institute for Public Policy of Duke University, it costs approximately $329,000 more to execute a prisoner on death row than to incarcerate him for twenty years (the approximate duration of a life sentence). When this is compared to the fact that it costs roughly $28,000 a year to incarcerate one prisoner that is not on death row, we reach the ironic conclusion that it would be cheaper to send prisoners to Swarthmore for four years than to keep them incarcerated, which is in turn cheaper than trying to execute them with costly appeals and jury trials and retrials. However, many of the strongest opponents of the death penalty are not economists or statisticians and instead use moral and religious arguments to explain their position. While their arguments are of varying quality and zealotry, they often miss one of the most egregious sins of the death penalty: discrimination by race and class. And while discrimination by the latter is more a function of the legal system itself, discrimination by race in sentencing and enforcement of the death penalty is both blatantly obvious and unbelievably common. In a study sponsored by the Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania, two Penn professors studied the relationship between race and sentencing in eleven Southern and border states in cases of rape for a twenty year period between 1945 and 1965. Of a total of 1265 defendants found guilty in rape cases, 13% of black defendants (110) were given the death sentence while only 2% of white defendants (9) were sentenced to death. When the race of the defendant was combined with the race of the victim, a more striking comparison could be made. When the defendant was black and the victim was white, 36% of the defendants (113) received the death penalty, while with any other combination of defendant and victim, only 2% of the defendants (19) received the death penalty. Of course, the relationship between race and the death penalty has long been noted and studied, and the blunt racism of juries when meting out death sentences has improved in recent years. However, the fact that there is any relationship between race and the death penalty should be appalling enough to justify its abolition in the eyes of those who wish to destroy the current racial barriers in this country.   Recidivism When I first studied the death penalty five years ago, I came upon a book of current research on it. Included in the book was a study that I found fascinating. It consisted of a study of recidivism [a return or relapse to crime - in this case, a distinction was made between crime and violent crime] of convicted murderers released over a period of years. What I remember finding so amazing about this study was evidence that most of the convicted murderers released did not go on to commit another crime. In one study that looked at the release of convicted murderers of willful homicide and their possible subsequent regressions into crime, 11,502 convicts were released over a five year period, of which only 139 committed a new offense in their first year of parole and 10,216 continued on parole with no new offense, misdemeanor or felony. In another study, of 2646 convicted murderers released in twelve states between 1900 and 1976, only 88 were ever convicted of another felony and only 16 were ever convicted of another criminal homicide. The studies used above drew no actual conclusions from their data. After all, many different factors affected whether a criminal would return to crime, including age, sex, family, personality, and, perhaps most importantly, the rehabilitation, or lack thereof, achieved during the convict's prison experience. However, what I felt was so fascinating about this report was the possibility of reformation among these convicted murderers who, for the most part, would be used as examples of those for whom the death penalty was created. After all, one psychological trick used by anyone who is going to kill someone else is to dehumanize them so as to diminish any feelings of guilt. If convicted murderers were not, in fact, ruthless killers as many death penalty defenders would advocate, then there would be no basis for a punishment that cannot be reversed. As the James Burmeister trial drew near completion, my father become more and more nervous. No one likes skinheads, and the judge in the trial had allowed a lot of white supremacy hate propaganda into the trial as evidence. My father feared that the jury would be so angry at Burmeister that they would kill him in a sort of retributive justice.   Public Opinion Most public opinion polls show that a substantial majority of Americans support the death penalty as it is used today in our country. This, in and of itself, is not surprising. The majority of our country lives a middle-class life based on centrist or conservative values and usually favors using the heavy hand of justice against those who commit crimes. As Joseph Hoffman, a professor of law and Associate Dean of the Indiana University School of Law, said of the public attitude about the death penalty, "We like hearing it, but we don't care whether it is carried out." Too often, juries like to feel they've "put down" violent criminals when, in fact, they are not facing the crime they themselves have actually committed. A sociologist at the University of Missouri put it another way: "Most of us are sick to death of violent crime. Our murder rate is twice that of Northern Ireland and there's a civil war going on there." Unfortunately, this anger at crime in general takes a toll on human lives that as illogical as the crime that provokes it. Perhaps he was just lucky, but, after his conviction for first degree murder, Burmeister received life imprisonment from the judge when the jury returned deadlocked on his sentence. It became apparent that one woman had held out on capital punishment, and had refused to sentence him to death. The other jurors had pleaded and cajoled, and came out of the jury room angry. One was quoted as saying that she didn't think it was fair that one juror got to hold all the others back from giving the defendant what he deserved. Another came out of the jury room crying after she was unable to sentence death. As for the lone juror who held out, she wasn't really sure what to think. Her husband had lost his job recently because he had been forced to stay home and babysit the kids while she was on jury duty, and the family had just completed a move to a new home. However, she said she felt good about the decision and was glad she didn't send Burmeister to death because she was never sure of his guilt. One of the popular movements in recent years has been the push for lethal injection as a more "humane" form of the death penalty, in comparison with the gas chamber or electric chair. While some opponents of the death penalty scorned the idea of humanizing a murderous act, other sided with their retentionist foes and promoted the new method as more humane and less violent than the previous methods of execution. The issue has been mostly settled, with many states adopting both lethal injection and one other method of execution, and then "mercifully" letting the criminal pick one. However, the American Medical Association passed a resolution in 1980, when lethal injection laws were first being written, urging doctors not to participate in any executions since such an act would violate the Hippocratic oath. As one death penalty abolitionist wrote, ".... lethal injection is undeniably attractive to a society that wants to keep the death penalty but does not want its executions to repel those who must authorize, administer, and witness them, lest it thereby turn those officials (as it has so often their predecessors) into fervent abolitionists." Perhaps someday more people will see that the death penalty, which murders in the name of society, actually punishes society as much as it punishes the criminal it is trying to kill.

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