SUPPORTERS OF THE death penalty see it as a necessary evil. They discount the immorality of taking someone's life in the name of deterrence and retribution. However, most are unwilling to accept torture on the grounds that it's so much worse than execution that they aren't even comparable. How can you compare a quick, painless intravenous injection that causes death to the slow, methodical infliction of excruciation, they ask. To say the two have any similarities beyond the superficial would be absurd. Or would it?
Execution and torture have more in common than is apparent at first sight -- or first thought. There are two reasons for which a person promotes the use of execution as opposed to imprisonment: as a deterrent against crime and as a form of retribution. These two goals definitively make execution different from imprisonment and, in some cases, more appropriate. Torture accomplishes them. Advocates of deterrence say that the best way to deter people is with a severe punishment, in this case death. But, as a recent New York Times article stated: "The dozen states that have not chosen to enact the death penalty ... have not had higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty."
Statistics strongly suggest that death is not a more effective deterrent than other forms of punishment. Society commits murder entirely under the unsupportable assumption that it deters. Since no one can say whether bamboo shoots under the fingernails strike more or less fear in the hearts of criminals than death by a bullet, torture and execution can be assumed to have an equal (or equally nonexistent) deterrent effect. In accordance with the "tit for tat" principle, many believe that for complete retribution, a society must punish murder with murder. However, this principle fails for the following reason: it cannot be applied universally. As Steven Nathanson states in An Eye for an Eye, if society must punish murder by killing, then it must also punish burglary by robbing or embezzlement by embezzling. The justice system just doesn't operate under a "tit for tat" principle. Nothing requires that each punishment be exactly equal to the crime. What the justice system does require is that the punishment fit the crime. Each punishment must be proportionately severe to the crime. For example, a mass-murderer must not face only two weeks in a detention center. The logical reason death is used to punish murder is because murder is a severe crime and should receive a proportionately severe punishment. The death penalty is not the only punishment for murder -- so therefore torture could replace execution as the severest punishment reserved for only the most heinous crimes and, in this way, accomplish the exact same amount of retribution.
In all practicality, two things that accomplish the same goals should, in theory, be equally acceptable. The problem is in the means through which one achieves these goals. People won't accept torture simply because they say it crosses a not-so-fine moral boundary past which society should not go. They insist that torture takes a society backward to barbarous times and destroys the already-decaying moral fabric that holds it together. But, how can anyone think that killing is better than that? Killing is taking away someone's life, his most precious possession. Life is the fundamental prerequisite of everything we do. Execution is inflicting an ultimate mortal loss and to do so is as cruel if not crueler than torture, which inflicts a temporary physical loss.
It becomes clear that the seemingly vast chasm separating the morally acceptable capital punishment from the morally unacceptable torture disintegrates. There is no moral difference between administering a lethal injection and administering a bashing of the knees. You are free to advocate capital punishment, just know that you are advocating torture, too.
Michael Wong is a student at Washington University in St Louis.
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