Neo-Progressive

New progress for new century

The major project I am working on presently is banning capital punishment in California.  I am working on organizing a activist group to collect signatures and funding to put it as a ballot initiative in California for 2012 elections.

                 Capital punishment is an archaic form of justice and has a considerable negative fiscal and moral impact on the State of California.  It effectively subsidizes lawyers who represent death row inmates in countless appeals and court proceedings.  We have realized that killing incarcerated criminals isn’t good policy yet politicians in Sacramento lack moral courage to champion the abolition of capital punishment.  As a ballot initiative, it will have an opportunity to bypass the states legislative bottleneck and bring the issue to the public.

                 I believe capital punishment to be immoral on several grounds.  First, it reduces moral authority of the state who is tasked by protecting our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  Life, by admission in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, is a universal and unalienable right.  Capital punishment question the inalienability of right to life.  A German philosopher, George Hegel, argued that personality (life), which distinguishes people from objects, is inalienable if one is aware of one’s surroundings.  It cannot be taken away without changing that person’s state of being. Thus the state, which is tasked with protecting and preserving the right of life for all its citizens cannot claim moral authority in ending it.  Consequently, if right to life is unalienable, then the argument that a criminal forfeits this right by committing a crime is without bases.

                 The second argument goes to the bases of the social contract; specifically, the ability and the moral duty of the state to protect an individual’s basic rights.  This argument ties protection of these basic rights to the discouragement of future crimes.  Thus, the punishment exists as a deterrent of future crimes as much as a settlement of a wrongdoing.  One of the most notable advocates of this principle was John Locke.  He argued that “In the state of nature…[we can punish] each transgression, to the degree, and with as much severity, as would suffice to make it an ill bargain to the offender, give him cause to repent, and terrify other from doing the like” (Locke, 2^nd treaty of Civil Government).  So, the prevention of a crime with the threat of the ultimate punishment is well within the moral authority of the state.  This argument has to be divided into two claims: punishment is a deterrent of future crimes, and punishment is a settlement of a wrongdoing.

                 If we look at the capital punishment as a deterrent, evidence and various academic research studies show that it falls well short of this goal.  In fact, in the past 5 decades, only one study has found that the capital punishment had an impact on a violent crime rate.  This impact was so insignificant that other considerations, such as inequity of the punishment distribution across the economic, racial, and geographic lines, make it a more of a liability for our communities than a benefit.  We can extract more value, in terms of deterrent, by spending money on crime prevention and after school programs, than on lawyers and court proceedings.

                 Second consideration, a punishment is a settlement of a wrongdoing, is little more complex.  Hegel put an administration of justice into a formula: wrong (crime) is a negation of right, punishment is a negation of that negation (restoration of right).  If we accept this formula as the means of distributing justice and punishment, application of capital punishment is inadequate and misplaced due to the interest of the victims themselves.  If a victim is dead (capital punishment is only considered in first degree murders), hence, no longer an interested member of a society, then restoration will happen to those who feel wronged by the crime and to the state as one of the interested sides of the social contract.  If we consider the interests of parties who are wronged by the crime, other than the state’s interest, equal punishment would be execution of not the criminal but someone for whom the offender has proportionally equal regard to that is held by the interested parties for the victim (Holmes, The Common Law, 2004). 

                 There are many other considerations, such as proportionality and equality of distribution of the punishment, etc., however, in the end, the real argument for supporting the capital punishment is very simple; it’s a retaliation, a revenge, by the state against and individual for undermining its authority.  Let me put this in a different perspective.

                 Charles de Montesquieu, in his work Spirit of the Law, argues that slavery is an establishment of a right which gives one man such power over another as to render him absolute master over “his” slave’s life and property.  He further argues that the master “insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel” (Montesquieu, Spirit of the Law).  In other words, absolute power concentrated in a master’s hands leads to absolute corruption.  Let’s look at the social contract which we have with our state (government): we give up our right and in return the state protects us.  A state to whom we resign our right becomes the master.  If we do not retain some basic rights, such as life, liberty, and property, which cannot be infringed upon by this state, the result of unchecked power will be a cruel, voluptuous, choleric, severe, hasty, and fierce master.  However, if in our social contract we do retain rights, which are outside of the sovereign’s realm of power, then we put some breaks on the growing power of a sovereign.  In the end, if we accept an idea that the government can convince us that under some circumstances even the citizens life can be snuffed out, is there anything else that we hold more dear to which we will say enough is enough?

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