Capital Punishment and Other Homicide

 

     Thou shalt not kill is an obvious commandment, but, as usual, the devil is in the details. It isn't usually read to protect nonhuman life, except maybe family pets such as dogs and cats (with major exceptions). One friend includes pigs. I've never killed anybody and am not aware that any of my friends have, though combat veterans may omit the fact from conversation. Obviously, the commandment can't prohibit accidents, which are unavoidable, but does require us not to endanger fellow humans. 

     War, self-defense, law enforcement, and possibly abortion are exceptions. Hebrew law allows so many exceptions that the King James translation is clearly inaccurate. Thou shalt not murder is accurate but not very helpful. So homicide is wrong except when it isn't wrong? When exactly isn't it? When is it justified, even obligatory?  Besides, Murder is a legal category, and we know that not everything lawful is good.

     I accept the Catholic axiom that taking human life is justified only to save it. Human life is sacred. It shouldn't be sacrificed to lesser goods such as personal pride or non-essential property. If it won't kill you or an innocent bystander to spare an evil-doer, don't kill him, but use nonlethal force as needed. This too is riddled with exceptions and fuzzes on the edges, but it's a rule to work with. Simply put, all justified homicide is self-defense. You may shoot a thief stealing essential food but not for stealing your second car. Killing a burglar is justified only if you reasonably believe that he will kill if you confront him less lethally--and that you cannot avoid a confrontation. This high bar goes against rough-and-ready laws, and even the most justifiable self-defense entails negativity. Homicide is never saintly act. A priest told me that he would elect to defend himself only if an innocent third party was involved.

     Police in the United States used to be allowed to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back after yelling, "Stop, or I'll shoot," a clear violation of the self-defense rule, but Supreme Court rulings in the 1980s limited this to criminals reasonably believed to endanger public safety. Even this is a slippery slope, often granting a license to kill, but police in a gun-filled society such as the United States obviously need to be armed and use deadly force to defend themselves and the public. When police actually behave reasonably, the self-defense rule may be respected, but prejudice, cowardice, impatience, and anger lead to unreasonable killings. In a perfect world, the rule would work.

The question of abortion hinges on a definition. The procedure obviously can't be justified as self-defense. If it is homicide, it's murder, but it is homicide only given the debatable premise (taken on faith by the Catholic Church) that a fetus is an actual person, not just a potential one. I've wrestled with this in two previous posts (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/02/when-does-life-begin-paradox.html. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/12/the-dilemma-of-abortion.html).

     In war, there's no question that a soldier meeting a foe in battle is justified to shoot. Almost as unquestionable is the justification for a military unit to move aggressively to strengthen an army in battle, to prevent its being overrun. War becomes morally questionable, however, as we move up the chain of command. The highest commanders, the architects of General Sherman's "Hell," face the hardest moral questions. Catholic theologians have parsed these in the doctrine of Just War, a messy tangle of exceptions to simple self-defense, necessary when a nation is being defended. But even a just war--a measured, effective national self-defense against unprovoked aggression--kills innocent people. Wars are, almost by definition, unjust. The only war that doesn't involve massive innocent suffering is no war at all.

     Capital Punishment is a question to which, in a modern and well-ordered state, a much clearer answer is possible. Punishment in general performs necessary functions of (1) deterring destructive behavior in advance or (2) removing a destructive person from society. Today, these are functions of laws adjudicated by courts and backed up by secure prison systems. In such systems, a felon, no matter how vicious, can be held indefinitely in a secure lockup as death-row inmates are, sometimes for decades. This fulfills the need for communal self defense. No matter how murderous, a man is harmless when caged in a high-security prison, so killing him serves no self-defense purpose. It is no more justified as self defense than killing a child. True, the felon may be a monster, repellent and evil, but he remains undeniably human in species, and so his life is sacred and not to be extinguished except to save another life.

     For most of human history, in the absence of a modern judicial system, a family or clan was responsible for protecting its members. This is the background of literary works from Greek tragedies through Hamlet. In practice, this led to blood feuds, but the problem was mitigated by an institution (called outlawing among the Norse) whereby a tribal authority prohibited revenge for an outlaw's death, but then relatives of the victim still had to kill the outlaw. To mitigate blood feuds, kings gradually took over the job of killing offenders. In high profile cases, chiefly people with noble connections, there could be long prison terms, but no routine life imprisonment such as we have today. Capital punishment was the sensible way to protect the public from dangerous people and was a serious deterrent, augmented by bodily mutilation (an eye for an eye), which we find abhorrent today. Absent of this kind of brutality, a clean execution could be justified as the best means of communal self-defense.

     Imagine a mining camp in the American Old West. Like the Indians they displaced, the locals had no prison, at best a solid building with good doors. They had to settle threats of violence and establish order in a matter of days or weeks, there being no practical long-term detention. There weren't many options. When victims didn't revert to the ancient mechanism of the blood-feud, perhaps formalized as a duel, and if malefactors didn't successfully self-exile, hanging was necessary. It was self-defense in that it stopped a killer from killing again and projected strong deterrence, stronger than the alternatives of whipping, shaming, and exile. 

The death penalty, reliably delivered anyway, is indeed a strong deterrent. People want to live. But they also don't want to live in a cage. Research has consistently shown that today's long prison terms deter as effectively as death, that murders are no more frequent when life is the maximum penalty. 

     The fact that escapes from top-security prisons are practically unheard-of robs state execution of its justification. It is the butchering of a human being who has been rendered harmless--maybe a brutal sociopath, but also maybe someone who has repented and reformed, or even an innocent victim framed for crimes he didn't commit. Either way, it's state-sanctioned, cold-blooded homicide. If you don't threaten me or someone I should protect, no matter what sins you have committed in the past, I shouldn't kill you, and neither should my government.