Why I'm Against the Death Penalty
Even in cases like Luigi Mangione's, where there seem to be no evidentiary issues, the state has no business killing people who can be locked away.
In today’s
, I participate in a debate about whether Luigi Mangione deserves to be put to death assuming he is found guilty of murdering United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.Here are some snippets from my piece, which is paired by one in support of capital punishment by the Manhattan Institute’s
:Few alleged murderers are less sympathetic than Luigi Mangione, the ultra-ripped Ivy League trust-funder. His manifesto vacillates between self-righteous indignation for healthcare executives—“These parasites simply had it coming”—and delusional self-aggrandizement—“I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
It being the way insurance companies supposedly fail to deliver better care while extracting ever-higher premiums.
If he’s found guilty as charged, who could possibly object? Except, of course, the 41 percent of morally vacuous youth who say that killing UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson was “acceptable,” or the spell-check–challenged idiots behind California’s “Luigi Mangioni [sic] Access to Healthcare Act.”
Well, me, for one….
…the only real question here is whether our government can keep us perfectly safe from Mangione by locking him away, rather than executing him. And the answer to that is yes.
Individuals have a legal right to use deadly force in self-defense and a few other circumstances, but we don’t have the right to bump someone off because we think they really deserve it. At the same time, the state has no business killing anyone unless it’s done to prevent imminent violence or harm. We grant the state a monopoly on violence so it can maintain order and keep us safe using the least amount of force possible. The moral authority of the government rests on its restraint, not its enactment of violence.
Please go to the
to read the full exchange.I will add a section that got cut for space, about the costs of the death penalty:
We know the death penalty is insanely costly. One study found that between 1978 and 2010, when California executed 13 prisoners, maintaining its Death Row cost taxpayers $4 billion more “than a system that has life in prison without the possibility of parole.” Loyola Marymount law professor Paula Mitchell told Reason a decade ago that “the legal costs [per Death Row case] skyrocket to an extra $134 million per year—well above the cost” to incarcerating an inmate without possibility of parole. You can argue that California is too soft on crime and spends too much coddling its criminals, but those costs include many rounds of appeals, which make sense given the finality of the punishment.
As I note in the piece, ‘one peer-reviewed scientific journal found that “a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences” was 4.1 percent. And modern-day executioners routinely botch their task, especially when using lethal injection.’
I don’t want a state with that sort of track record deciding life or death, especially when it can keep us safe with less force.
Again, here’s the link to my full piece—and Lehman’s pro-execution piece.
If you like what I’m posting here, please check out Reason, where I’ve worked since 1993. As the nation’s magazine of ‘free minds and free markets,’ it’s the leading source of politics, culture, and ideas from a libertarian perspective.
I think, in general, we use the word “right” too casually. With progressives it’s usually when describing “positive rights” — the “right” to force someone to do something or to refrain from doing something that doesn’t harm anyone else. You know this.
The phrase “legal right” presents special challenges. It implies a right (in Nature) to do something (or not) in the context of a state that purports to protect the rights of its citizens. Yet clearly no such right exists in nature.
So what “right” do we exercise when we seek justice, and when justice takes the form of vengeance? If someone murders my father do I obtain a right to protect others from a similar fate by incarcerating the person who killed him? That seems pretty antiseptic. Doesn’t really taste like justice to me.
If at least one of the social goods of assigning to the state our right to justice is to prevent or arrest blood feuds, we must give blood feuds their due: such inter-familial cycles of violence are quite common in nature. One might argue that the thirst for justice in the form of vengeance is part of our nature. It seems, at the very least, natural, yes? Seems there might even be some evolutionary advantage in assuring would-be murderers that if they fuck with you or your family the consequences will be dire.
So I guess I’m postulating a natural right to justice generally and to vengeance more specifically. We can’t merely return to the status quo ante: the perpetrator must pay a PRICE. Let’s not forget this. The primary reason I want someone who wrongs me to go to jail isn’t so that others are safe from that person. No, it’s the satisfaction I get from causing the wrong-doer to suffer.
Do I favor the death penalty? I do in theory, but not in practice. I do not trust the state enough — try as they might — to always get the right man. And that’s essential for the just application of the death penalty. In this case, however, we have the perfect storm for a moral case for the death penalty. The victim seems innocent of any charge that would reasonably warrant the death penalty, the murderer has confessed, and we have video of the whole thing. There is no doubt to guilt, and there is little doubt as to motivation (theater: murder is Mr. Mangione’s “art,” as it were).
So after a trial, if the jury returns a guilty verdict and if the family of the victim asks us for it, let’s kill him. If the family grants mercy, let us do that as well but keep him incarcerated as a prophylactic against his next spasm of self righteousness.
It isn’t “society” that has a right to justice here: it’s the people injured. His family.
You say "even where there seems to be no evidentiary issue" you are still against the death penalty but then the bad results of the death penalty you list (endless appeals with sky high legal costs far in excess of just life without parole) are all because we still care about the evidentiary issue even after conviction. The pro-death penalty person will say, well we can eliminate those costs by eliminating the endless appeals and executing the person immediately (i.e. eliminating concern with evidentiary issues and treating the conviction as final). So I think we have to go back to the evidentiary issue as the main reason to be against the death penalty. We know innocent people have been executed which is unacceptable - so just go to life without parole as the default. At least in that case there is the possibility of new evidence arising that may exonerate the person.