There are a lot of reasons to be pleased that Eric Frein, who killed a Pennsylvania State Trooper in 2014, was sentenced to death today — but I’m not pleased. It’s not because I have any empathy for Frein, or believe there was any doubt to his guilt. Nor is it that I lack empathy for his victim or his victim’s family.
In fact, my concern has nothing to do with Frein. It’s much broader. My concern is with our willingness to use the power of the state to take a life.
First, the background, from the Morning Call:
Frein killed Cpl. Bryon Dickson, a 38-year-old Marine veteran, and left Trooper Alex Douglass permanently disabled in the Sept. 12, 2014 attack at the Blooming Grove barracks. He eluded capture for 48 days, with state police spending more than $11 million on a manhunt that spanned hundreds of square miles of the rugged Pocono Mountains.
The case caught major regional attention and its resolution appears to have pleased state troopers in Pennsylvania, and Pike County Judge Gregory Chelak said he hoped “the story of Eric Frein ends today,.”
Don’t bet on it. As the Call reports, “Frein’s lawyers promised to tie up his case in appeals.” And, while Pennsylvania has been a death penalty state since the mid-1970s, there has not been an ‘execution since 1999 and only three since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty.” The state also placed the death penalty on hold two years ago, when Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf declared a moratorium.
Pennsylvania is one of four states with moratoriums on the books. Another 19 do not use capital punishment — some, like New Jersey, eliminated the death penalty via legislation, while others, like New York, Connecticut and Delaware, had the penalty eliminated by the courts.
Arguments in favor of capital punishment generally follow this line of logic: The worst crimes warrant the harshest punishment,
- to create a deterrent against future crimes;
- to provide closure for the victims’ families;
- to ensure a proportional response to the worst crimes.
These “rational” arguments fail most logical tests. There is no correlatio, for instance, between murder rates and the existence of the death penalty, though the states with the lowest rates often do not use capital punishment. Does this disprove deterrence? No, but it does raise serious doubts. The same questions dog the closure argument, with family members — even those supportive of a particular execution — signalling that closure had failed to materialize.
Implicit in all of this, though often left unstated, is the very human desire for revenge, for “an eye for an eye,” as the Bible says. It is a visceral, emotional response, something that exists, perhaps, in our DNA.
And we shouldn’t downplay this emotional response, though we need to be careful to separate the emotional and personal from the broader policy implications. Emotion can cloud judgment and, if we are to toy with the machinery of death, to borrow a phrase from Justice John Paul Stevens, we must approach the question with clear-headedness, even as we acknowledge the emotions behind our thirst for revenge.
Think back to Michael Dukakis and his response to a debate question in 1988.
His inability to engage with the emotional aspect of the question doomed his campaign. This failure has guided the Democratic response to death penalty questions in the intervening years: No Democratic nominee for president has come out against the death penalty since Dukakis. Bill Clinton even went so far as to make a show of pausing his campaign in 1992 to kill a death-row inmate.
The issue, however, was not so much the answer offered by Dukakis. It was the framing of the question — the assumption that all decisions must be made emotionally. Let me say here that, were something to happen to my family, I can’t promise that my opposition to the death penalty would hold. The emotion of the moment — the grief and anger — very well could overwhelm whatever core beliefs I hold. But that is why we should not legislate based on immediate emotion. Leading with our heart is understandable, but dangerous. It creates its own momentum and often causes us to ignore information that runs counter to our beliefs — hence the rash of exonerations of death row inmates. These are men who often were sentenced to death because of the headlong rush toward retribution created by our emotional responses to heinous crimes.
The sentencing of the innocent to death, the vast racial disparities in the death penalty’s use, its failure as a deterrent, the growing international consensus that it is wrong — all of these are good reasons for abolishing capital punishment. So is the extreme cost — the death penalty costs more per inmate than life in prison without parole because of the appeals process and the need for a separate, isolated death penalty wing, according to the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center.
Some would say these reasons are enough to abolish capital punishment. They aren’t. They carry within them a distant hope, an underlying logic, that assumes the death penalty can be fixed, that it is an acceptable, a moral form of punishment. If we can prevent the death of the innocent, can remove racial disparities, can moderate the cost, what is to stop us from putting the worst criminals to death?
These are useful arguments, but they are not enough. We have to keep the moral argument front and center. Capital punishment is state-sanctioned, premeditated murder, a cruel and unusual punishment that carries no broader benefit to society; and as such, it undercuts our efforts internationally to proclaim ourselves as a moral beacon; and its brutality sends a signal to those at home that state power is not to be trifled with.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, in his Advice for Living column in 1957, described capital punishment as both immoral and a failure in criminological terms:
I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime — rape and murder included. God’s concern is to improve individuals and bring them to the point of conversion. Even criminology has repudiated the motive of punishment in favor of the reformation of the criminal. Shall a good God harbor resentment? Since the purpose of jailing a criminal is that of reformation rather than retribution — improving him rather than paying him back for some crime that he has done — it is highly inconsistent to take the life of a criminal. How can he improve if his life is taken? Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
And the philosopher Albert Camus, a French atheist existentialist, damned the use of capital punishment as the worst form of public crime, focusing on its premeditated nature and the harm it does psychically to both the condemned and the society as a whole.
The use of the death penalty does not make us safer. It does not make us better. It makes us coarser. It sends a message to the world that retribution is the highest principle.
So, no, I cannot rejoice as another man has been sentenced to death.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 