Certainty & Death
Ed Mechmann of the Archdiocese of New York's Respect Life Office comments on the uncertainty involved in death penalty cases:
The argument from uncertainty is compelling, particularly with respect to current death-row inmates who have been there for a long time, such as Anthony Graves, who was released after 18 years on Texas' death row for a number of murders he didn't commit. I wonder, however, about this going forward.
I am inclined to believe that prosecutors will tend to be more restrained in their seeking capital sentences, reserving it for cases with strong supporting forensic evidence; essentially, it's likely that juries at trials for capital crimes will adopt higher evidentiary standards going forward. Should that indeed happen, it would be welcome, but I still believe that we must consider capital sentences from the perspective of their necessity to maintaining the public order and defending the common good, rather than a calculus of whether or not a prosecutor has sufficient evidence to send someone to the gurney.
H/T Pentimento.
That said, when I say that I believe society still needs recourse to capital punishment for extreme cases where the public order cannot be served by life sentences alone, I have in mind the example of the neo-Assyrian Mexican drug cartels, who have no qualms about publicly displaying the dismembered bodies of their victims or dumping a truckload of bodies in the street during rush hour.
UPDATE : "some guy on the street" shares an article on The Origins of "Reasonable Doubt" that answers some of Mr. Mechmann's concerns.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is sufficient to justify imprisonment, but I do not believe that it can deliver the level of certainty that is necessary to justify the use of lethal violence in an execution. It is not enough to eliminate the possibility of error.
The argument from uncertainty is compelling, particularly with respect to current death-row inmates who have been there for a long time, such as Anthony Graves, who was released after 18 years on Texas' death row for a number of murders he didn't commit. I wonder, however, about this going forward.
I am inclined to believe that prosecutors will tend to be more restrained in their seeking capital sentences, reserving it for cases with strong supporting forensic evidence; essentially, it's likely that juries at trials for capital crimes will adopt higher evidentiary standards going forward. Should that indeed happen, it would be welcome, but I still believe that we must consider capital sentences from the perspective of their necessity to maintaining the public order and defending the common good, rather than a calculus of whether or not a prosecutor has sufficient evidence to send someone to the gurney.
H/T Pentimento.
That said, when I say that I believe society still needs recourse to capital punishment for extreme cases where the public order cannot be served by life sentences alone, I have in mind the example of the neo-Assyrian Mexican drug cartels, who have no qualms about publicly displaying the dismembered bodies of their victims or dumping a truckload of bodies in the street during rush hour.
Labels: A World Aflame, Capital Punishment
posted by Fallen Sparrow at 8:32 PM
2 Comments:
A note of history: the origin of "beyond reasonable doubt" as a standard of certainty is closely tied with blood punishments, which were at one time more common and more finely graded even in the West, from floggings through mutilations up to quartering and ghastlier executions.
Specifically, as Christians became more populous and numbered more among the free and richer classes called to juristry under Pagan law, it was recognized that, on the one hand, the shedding of innocent blood was a mortal sin, and a false verdict of guilt seemed certainly to be a form of accessory to such sin, yet at the same time public safety demanded that true hard criminals must be chastised. The solution that the Christian theologians proposed had two parts; First, as the laws come from princes, whose power is from God, so if the process of determining guilt is in accord with the law, it is not the judge sitting who judges guilt, but God; Second, that if the judge or jury, in the light of evidence, can dismiss all doubts as being unreasonable, then indeed the process has justly found guilt, and the jurists can say so without becoming accessory to the shedding of innocent blood.
The upshot, to my mind, is that Mr. Mechmann's understanable hesitation is expressed in exactly the wrong way: it isn't that reasonable doubt is the wrong standard, in fact it is the Catholic standard needed for judgments concluding in capital punishment, precisely. His concern should rather be put that jurists' instructions or notions on reasonable doubt lead them to reason about doubt wrongly, or to misapply the standard.
There's a paper about this history by one James Q. Whitman, which you can try to get from the Yale Law School website, if it seems interesting.
Thank you for the background on this: I was not aware of the tradition behind the "beyond a reasonable doubt" evidentiary standard, and your suggestion that it is not the evidentiary standard but rather that jury instructions ought to treat doubt properly is a good one. This should be in all instances in criminal law and not simply in capital cases.
Perhaps this is in part why discussion of innocence strikes me as a distraction from a discussion of the true legitimacy of capital punishment, in that it leaves those open-and-shut cases (or ones that aren't "politically correct") in the shadows, and I find it interesting that Evangelium Vitae doesn't discuss guilt or innocence in the context, but rather addresses an imperative to bloodless punishment absent an overwhelming and ongoing threat to public order and the common good.
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