The Death Penalty: Thoughts on Institutionalized Revenge

It is difficult to engage in the national debate about capital punishment with any degree of emotional detachment. The issue involves very primal human drives and anxieties, and highlights different beliefs among Americans about the purpose of our legal system.

One of the most emotionally charged issues surrounding the death penalty debate is the concept of revenge taken by the state on behalf of the victim. Another is the difficulty of establishing absolute certainty of a defendant's guilt within the existing legal system. Considered in the light of both of these factors, the death penalty is shown to be an outmoded and morally objectionable relic of our country's past, and ill-suited to the society we inhabit today.

Because the United States of America makes some claim to separation of church and state, such Biblical exhortations as "Thou shalt not kill" and "An eye for an eye" ought both to be disregarded as justifications for federal or state actions. What is left is a two-fold concept: revenge for the victim, from beyond the grave, and the supposed healing that this retaliation brings to the grieving survivors.

In the final lines of his essay "Death and Justice", former New York mayor Edward Koch writes that "When … neighbors shrink back from justly punishing the murderer, the victim dies twice" (243). This can be interpreted in two ways; as a literal statement of the dead victim's desire for revenge and shame if it is not carried out, or as a metaphor for the bereaved family's grief. The first of these is absurd- in our secular society, the dead may have a majority but they don't have much lobbying power. Laws are, on the whole, for the living. If the latter is meant, it is still a gross oversimplification and what at least some survivors of homicide victims consider to be an insulting and demeaning assumption about their own values.