Overturning the Death Penalty

When Illinois' governor recently commuted 167 death sentences on his way out of office, he had to know that the reactions would be swift, unambiguous, highly charged emotionally, and debated for some time to come. Hopefully, as the debate continues, both outrage and rejoicing will gradually give way to wider and more careful deliberation than our society has recently been able to generate on this subject.

One thing that the debates should accomplish is to make clear just how complex the issue of capital punishment is and how long it will take us to achieve anything close to a working consensus on it. Governor Ryan has at least made it possible, though, for a truly edifying debate to begin.

About this governor's particular decision, of course, there is much that can and will be said. I for one am bothered by its in-your-face quality, handed down at the very end of his term of office, perhaps to evade some of the responsibility for dealing with its full consequences. I am distressed that an executive can simply sweep aside the careful deliberations of jurors who do their best to decide what the facts are in extraordinarily painful cases, in order that the law can be applied fairly to them. And I am concerned for the anguish that so many members of the victims' families in these particular cases must now endure. I think they were and are owed more personal communication from Governor Ryan than they apparently received.

Issues of timing and process aside, was Governor Ryan's decision itself on sound legal grounds? For an answer to this question, most of us will have to rely on the judgments of people far more versed in the law's specificities than we are. Was the decision the right one to make, ethically? About this question, every American has both the right and the responsibility to think and to speak. How Christians in particular might begin to think about it is the subject of the rest of this column.

Apparently, it is more difficult to think "Christianly" about the death penalty than we would like to admit. For some Christians I know, the decisive reason for keeping the penalty intact is that it serves as a significant deterrent to capital crimes. Others argue for abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that enforcing the statute clogs the legal system, costing us more in the long run to put people to death than to keep them in prison for life. On a matter as serious as this one, arguments on the basis of sociology or economics seem almost obscene.

But so does another kind of argument, I think: the argument of lex talionis, the eye-for-an-eye mode of retaliation. Shed blood, and expect to have your own blood shed; it's just that simple. This approach certainly has more to commend it than the ones it superceded, that permitted the avenging of wrong by inflicting harm on an enemy many times beyond the harm originally inflicted. Lamech's infamous boast at Genesis 4: 24 put revenge at 77 times the original offense. Evidently, he regarded God's formula of only sevenfold vengeance (Genesis 4:15) as too wimpy.

It has been many years since I came across a Christian who believed that God's promise of a sevenfold retaliation on anyone who killed Cain warranted human beings' taking a similar kind of vengeance on other human beings. But I have always been surrounded by fellow Christians who have no trouble invoking the necessity of one act of retaliation per offense, subject to the criterion that the retaliation suit the offense. The implication for the present discussion is easy to draw: kill somebody, and expect to be killed in turn, preferably of course at the hands of duly constituted officers of the law.

To the lex talionis principle, it is tempting to apply the sixth commandment. However, the act of killing that the commandment prohibits bears little resemblance to the act of putting to death people who have taken the lives of others for no good reason. What does apply to the principle is what Jesus himself says about it at Matthew 5:38-48. Certainly, Jesus is not addressing here the question of executing someone convicted of murder. But he is addressing the application of an-eye-for-an-eye as the basis for taking action against wrongdoers, persecutors, and enemies. Simply put, he's telling us to take it out of circulation. What I find especially interesting in this whole passage is the last verse, wherein Jesus enjoins us to quit limiting our goodness toward one another, so that we can better imitate God's unlimited goodness to us.

You don't suppose, do you, that there still might be a place after all in our penal system for rehabilitation rather than revenge?

As they say, more later.