Based on these statistics, which have been replicated across decades, it would appear that we need reach one of two conclusions: 1) impoverished people, uneducated people, and people of color are inherently more violent and criminal or 2) systemic injustices have resulted in the uneven application of capital punishment.
The systemic reasons for this unequal application of capital punishment are complex, involving an interplay of implicit bias and unequal access to legal representation. But regardless of cause, it seems sensible to me that we put an indefinite moratorium on the practice of capital punishment—even if only until we could ensure that it is administered justly.
And to that end, we would do well to focus on the justice issues upstream of capital punishment, namely equality in policing, economic equality, and reparative justice for the entrenched disparities between different people groups in America.
After all, “unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 20:10).
Some, including theologian and legal scholar Dr. H. Wayne House, disagree with this assessment. While House does not deny that capital punishment is unevenly applied, he argues that this reality “does not justify eliminating the death penalty as a morally proper punishment.”*
Quoting sociologist Ernest van den Haag, House adds, “Discrimination is irrelevant to this moral question…if the death penalty is morally just, however discriminatorily applied to only some of the guilty, it remains just in each case in which it is applied.”
Simply put, I could not disagree more. Whether capital punishment is applied evenly across race, class, or creed is imminently relevant to the question of its morality.
Relatedly, since 1972 when capital punishment was deemed constitutional and reinstated via the United States Supreme Court, the United States has executed 1,348 people. During that same time, 136 people on death row have been exonerated. That means that for roughly every 10 people this nation has executed, there is one person who sat on death row but was innocent. It also means that there is a non-zero chance that at least a handful of the more than 1,300 people who have been killed by the state died unjustly.
Perhaps the perfect case study in all of these concerns is the so-called Central Park Five, a group of teen boys of color who were wrongly convicted of murder in 1989 amid a media frenzy and who were later exonerated. At the heart of the case were issues of racial bias, social class and access to adequate legal representation, wrongful conviction, and discussion of execution.
At the time, then real estate mogul Donald Trump personally contributed to the controversy by taking out full-page ads in New York’s newspapers calling for political leaders to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE.”
Apparently not much has changed in our public discourse on this issue in the past four decades.
Nevertheless, while House acknowledges that it is fundamentally unjust to seek execution for innocent people and that judicial standards must be put in place to avoid such injustice, he nevertheless argues that “failure to properly apply capital punishment does not make [capital punishment] immoral.”
But then what is the moral purpose of capital punishment?
The Moral Reasoning for Capital Punishment
Advocates for capital punishment propose several moral reasons for executing those convicted of murder—particularly the premeditated taking of a life. (While some recent discussion has centered on expanding capital punishment to sex offenders, this article focuses on the morality of executing those who have taken a life.)
Some argue that capital punishment provides a unique deterrent to violent crimes. However, studies into whether it is an effective deterrent are, at best, inconclusive.
In fact, some jurisdictions where capital punishment is not imposed enjoy lower murder rates than jurisdictions where capital punishment is the law of the land. This reality would seem to demonstrate that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent, but the confounding variables involved are such that it seems most sensible to say that it’s inconclusive. In any event, I don’t believe deterrence to be a morally adequate—or effective—reason to execute people.
Others will argue that capital punishment is a means by which we protect society from the possibility of future violence from offenders. When we look at the world of the Bible (which we will get to below), this perspective is entirely reasonable. However, as Pope John Paul II argues in his encyclical “Evangelium Vitae,” if this is our moral framework, then the state “ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.”
“Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent,” John Paul II adds. In other words, why would we execute a convict when society is kept just as safe by sentencing that convict to life imprisonment?
* I am quoting Dr. H. Wayne House from “The Death Penalty Debate: Two Opposing Views of Capital Punishment (Issues of Christian Conscience),” which was coauthored with Dr. John Howard Yoder. While Yoder made significant contributions to the conversations of political theology and nonviolence throughout his life, he has also been credibly accused of sexual abuse—accusations that went largely ignored until sometime after his death. For this reason, I refrain from quoting his work in this article.
