Eighty-one percent supported and 16 percent opposed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s execution for the murder of 168 people, 19 of whom were infants.
Moreover, 80 percent supported Saddam Hussein’s execution. Western European nations, save one, also showed majority support.
Polling has consistently found that 80 percent of Americans support the death penalty for some crimes, with only 15 percent opposing the death penalty for all crimes.
Eighty-five percent of those in Connecticut, our most liberal state, supported the execution of serial rapist-murderer Michael Ross.
Why?
Justice, the foundation of support for all criminal sanctions.
Theologian John Murray said, “Nothing shows the moral bankruptcy of a people or of a generation more than disregard for the sanctity of human life... . It is this same atrophy of moral fiber that appears in the plea for the abolition of the death penalty.”
Death penalty support is based upon the sanctity of life, just as incarceration is based upon a reverence for freedom.
Sanctions are sanctions only because we treasure that which is taken away.
All sanctions protect innocent lives, as with the death penalty, which is a better protector of innocent lives than a life sentence.
Living murderers harm and murder again, in prison, after escape, after early release and after we have failed to incarcerate them.
Executed murderers never harm again.
Based upon recidivism studies, just since 1973, we have allowed an additional 14,000 people to be murdered by those we know to have murdered before.
The death penalty has greater due process than other sanctions. Therefore, innocents are more likely to die as an innocent in prison, than they are likely to be executed.
There is no reliable claim of an innocent person being executed in the United States, at least since the 1930s.
There is a continuous fraud relating to those who are “exonerated” from death row. The current false number is 140.
Extensive, separate and well-publicized reviews find the real numbers are in the 25 to 40 range of the truly innocent being discovered and released from death row. That reflects a 99.6 percent accuracy rate in findings of guilt.
Some claim 67 percent of death sentences are overturned on appeal. Actually, it’s 38 percent.
We do know, under almost all circumstances, we would chose life over death, just as many potential murderers also fear death more than life. Whether crime rates are high or low, rising or falling, criminal sanctions deter some in all jurisdictions.
What we fear the most deters the most.
Yet justice must remain primary. C.S. Lewis wrote: “What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it?”
The recent trend with states abolishing the death penalty occurs in those states with a majority of anti-death penalty Democratic legislators.
I side with the overwhelming moral voice of the American people:
Justice finds that some murderers have sacrificed their right to live, just as other criminals have sacrificed their right to freedom.
By enforcing the death penalty, we save additional innocent lives that deserve to be saved.
As Pope Pius XII stated:
“When it is a question of the execution of a man condemned to death it is then reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of his fault, when already, by his fault, he has dispossessed himself of the right to live.”
Dudley Sharp, a former opponent of capital punishment, is a published author and victims’ rights activist who lives in Texas.
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