A new state commission has begun the task of determining the fate of the death penalty in New Jersey. It will be holding hearings and gathering information to assess its value — whether it acts as a deterrent, whether it offers the appropriate punishment, whether it can be administered fairly.
My hope is that the commission will do as most civilized nations have already done and end capital punishment.
Several thoughts:
There is a basic moral dilemma at the heart of the debate, one outlined by the French philosopher Albert Camus in “Reflection on the Guillotine” — capital punishment is state-sanctioned and premeditated murder. It “adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death.” Camus says the death penalty is “the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
And it is a moral tautology: It is a penalty that punishes the taking of life by taking a life — an equation that may seem logical to some but that hardens the heart of society and endorses the notion of retribution, making it more difficult to argue against vigilante justice. It is, after all, an eye for an eye.
Even if there were not moral issues at stake here — and I understand that there are many who do not follow the same moral and ethical principles that I follow — there are grave concerns about the fairness of its application and the accuracy of the judgments that impose it (given the finality of the death penalty, we have to make sure we are right and we must make sure we are not applying in a discriminatory fashion, neither of which seem possible).
It is time to follow the advice of Justice John Paul Stevens and stopping “tinkering with the machinery of death.”
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 