I hope you all enjoyed today’s talk!
Since this is the first post of the quarter, let me make a few preliminary remarks. First, I will be posting on this blog every Friday before 5pm regarding the day’s talk. Your blog responses should be posted as comments to my post (again, you need to write 6 responses this quarter, and they should be ~300 words). Second, in my post, I will usually offer some suggestions as to what you could address in your responses. Today’s talk was great in that Prof. Marshall really emphasized the ethical issues involved in the death penalty, especially from the point of view of a reformer like himself. Oftentimes, the ethical issues will be less obvious– so my suggestions will try to bring them out. Third, I encourage you to make your responses as much of a part of a discussion as possible! Try to respond to the thoughts of those who posted before you, agreeing where you see fit, disagreeing where you see fit.
Now to today’s talk. Prof. Marshall’s talk on the death penalty was filled with ethical problems and questions, and many of them were obvious– feel free to comment on any of them. But his three main points were as follows. He first talked about the ethics of devoting so much human resources to save the life of a single man (remember the surgeon who challenged him at the cocktail party). Second, he talked about the possibility of “Friendly Fire”; If the death penalty is an effective deterrent, then the abolition of the death penalty would allow for a lot of violence that would not have existed with the death penalty. Third, Prof. Marshall talked about the worry that, in advocating the abolition of the death penalty, one is oftentimes advocating an alternative (though perhaps lesser) evil– life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
To start the discussion off, I want to offer two thoughts in response. First, I wonder how legitimate the surgeon’s challenge to Prof. Marshall was. Are we really morally required to spend our resources in the most efficient way possible? If that were the case, then I guess Prof. Marshall would have been required to say no to the plea of the wrongfully convicted death row inmate to review the case– he would have been required to say something like, “Sorry, I have to spend my time dealing with other problems in this world, and I realize that your life may have been wrongfully taken away from you, but I am morally required not to help you.” I think there is a pretty strong intuition that something has gone wrong there. Perhaps what we’re required to do is not to spend our resources in the most efficient way possible, but rather not to ignore the moral injustices that come to our attention, given the sort of life that we’re leading.
Second, I want to offer one way of thinking about the death penalty– i.e., within the framework of a theory of punishment in general. I’ve heard at least four general functions of punishment that legitimize the state’s use of it– punishment as retribution, punishment as rehabilitation, punishment as prevention, and punishment as deterrent. Retribution is the idea that the society can “get back” at the criminal for the crime; rehabilitation is the idea that the society, through punishment, rehabilitates the criminal by “teaching” him that the crime was wrong; prevention is the idea that the society can remove the criminal from society in order to prevent that criminal from engaging in future crimes; and deterrent is the idea that punishment serves as a general reason for people not to commit crimes. You can read about more of these functions (and much more on the philosophy of punishment) here. But given this framework for understanding what punishment is supposed to do, how well does the death penalty serve the functions of punishment?
Those are just two thoughts that I have, but as I mentioned before, feel free to comment on anything that Prof. Marshall talked about, or, even more broadly, anything that is relevant to his talk!
And, as always, feel free to email me with any questions or concerns (aypak@stanford.edu).
Looking forward to reading your responses!
We can learn more about the nature of the death penalty by seeing how it fits into each of the four theories of punishment. Clearly, as rehabilitation the death penalty has no merit since it is rather difficult to rehabilitate one who is dead. As prevention, the death penalty seems to offer no advantage over life imprisonment – a man locked in a cell is equally incapable of committing further crimes as a dead man. That leaves only retribution and deterrence. The argument for deterrence roughly goes as follows: 1) A punishment is justified if it prevents future harm to innocent civilians. 2) Having the death penalty deters would-be murderers from murdering. 3) Hence, the death penalty is justified. In class, Prof. Marshall spent time refuting premise 2) – that is, he argued that it is unlikely that criminals consider the full consequences of their crimes when deciding whether to murder, and, hence the death penalty does not function as deterrence. I would instead like to cast some doubt on the first premise. It is not clear to me that a punishment is justified simply because it prevents future harms. Chopping the hands off of thieves might very well prevent theft, but this seems intuitively unfair. Consider also the following case: suppose that a man was wrongfully convicted of a crime, but that, because the entire public believed that he committed it, punishing him would effectively deter others from committing the crime. One who based her theory of punishment entirely on deterrent grounds would have to be OK with punishing this person. Hence, I think that punishment needs to always first be justified on retributive grounds; the reason that society is allowed to punish someone is precisely because that person has abrogated some right. Now, it does not follow the fact that something is allowed that it would be good for it to be done; so perhaps the reason that punishment is necessary is because of the deterrence considerations. But recognize that this does not mean that deterrence is the justification – rather it is a reason why doing so might bring about good consequences.
First off, the surgeon’s point is an interesting one, especially because I do think that the distribution of resources is a valid consideration. Growing up I supported the death penalty in theory, largely because I thought it would be less costly to impose than life imprisonment. Learning that that was not the case was a big factor in changing my mind on the issue. Returning to the surgeon’s point, I can understand his incredulity because Marshall and his team did invest a pretty astounding amount of time and resources into the one case, but I think it was important for them to do so because it ended up being such a landmark decision. So even though many others could have been helped during the period that they worked on the case, by setting a precedent and gaining public attention to the point of educating and raising awareness on the issue, they probably caused more indirect benefits.
Speaking to the theory of punishment, retribution can be a bit of a slippery slope. Marshall illustrated this many times in his talk through his anecdotes about victims’ families. In the broadest and most abstract sense, I believe that yes, someone who has committed a crime as terrible as taking another’s life should absolutely not be able to just carry on without facing some kind of repercussions for their actions. At the same time, it is imperative for society to recognize and be cognizant of both the external and internal factors influencing their attitude toward retribution. Marshall referred to the internal dimension as the tension between one’s “higher” self and one’s “base” self. As far as external influences go, the media plays a huge role in building up the communal and almost mob-like mindset with regard to wanting to punish a criminal, which has its own positives and negatives.
On an unrelated note, I had always suspected that race played a role in influencing death penalty imposition, but didn’t realize that it’s the race of the victim that matters more. But, when you think about the power of the media in society, it starts to make more sense.
After the talk, the surgeon’s response really stuck with me. As a pre-med, I can feel the surgeon’s concern with efficiency in saving lives and helping others. But fundamentally different from performing an operation on a single individual that only saves the patient in question, a court case not only has significant implications for the accused in the form of life or death, but more importantly it impacts the general public. Very rarely do people follow the progress of an operation, but a court case that lasted as long likely gained hundreds of thousands of followers. In that sense, the decision not only determines whether the defendant lives or dies, it also molds our society’s values and standards of justice. So maybe even though it is seemingly pointless to spend so much money, resources, and time on one single case, it will impact many others – just as many or even more so than if we allocated the resources to smaller cases.
On the subject of punishment as retribution, a previous comment brought up a noteworthy point – that chopping off the hands off a thief is unfair. I completely identify with that statement, but at the same point, it’s just as unfair to not chop of the hand off (so to speak) if that hand is source of suffering for a victim. Yet if those who committed a crime do not get the equal punishment as what they incurred, then what’s to stop others? This brings up the debate of whether life without parole could substitute for the death penalty. From the standpoint of conserving resources and time and not to mention a life, it seems like a perfect solution. And throughout our discussion on this subject, we focused on it’s impact on the victim’s family and the society has a whole. Yet we didn’t consider the right of the accused. Would he/she want to spend a life in jail without the fundamental freedom of Man? If life is defined as having rights to decide for oneself, then those who live life in prison without parole is stripped of the very definition of life. In some sense, that seems much harder of a punishment than death. This is totally not scientifically accurate, but I remember in one scene in Prison Break, Lincoln (who was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death) told his brother who wanted to break out of prison with him, “You gave me what’s worse than death – false hope.” I feel like if I were sentenced to a life in prison even if that means there’s no possibility I would get out, I would still have that slight hope that maybe, just maybe, that some day I might get out.
Professor Marshall said that through the prism of wrongful convictions he decided to become a death penalty lawyer. I would like to focus on the merits of life without parole from the perspective of the wrongfully convicted.
Michelle, you said: “I feel like if I were sentenced to a life in prison even if that means there’s no possibility I would get out, I would still have that slight hope that maybe, just maybe, that some day I might get out.” Just a thought, and a naïve one at that, but what if those who plead not guilty were automatically ineligible to be tried for the maximum sentence of execution? If given life without parole their innocence could one day surface and they would still be no threat to society.
Since 1973, 140 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. (Staff Report, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights, Oct. 1993, with updates from DPIC). From 1973-1999, there was an average of 3 exonerations per year. From 2000-2011, there has been an average of 5 exonerations per year. What does this increase in exonerations tell us?
It tells me that technological advances (namely DNA work) are helping the wrongfully accused, and those who are wrongfully accused in the contemporary era stand a good chance of receiving the justice they deserve — albeit only if they are granted life without parole. Courts are unlikely to entertain claims of innocence if the defendant is dead.
I feel a little sick to my stomach thinking about all the people who have been executed but were possibly innocent…
On the topic of how one justifies one’s use of time, there are two points I would like to bring up. First, the surgeon’s metric of measuring efficiency is not necessarily the most appropriate metric in this particular scenario. Most of us would agree that saving more lives is better and that is the metric offered by the surgeon. For a surgeon,in particular, given all else being equal, of course (s)he would save more lives. However, we all seem to agree that in this case where professor Marshall spent 4000 hours, while he could have spent the same hours on many more cases and helped many more people, it is still worth it due to its positive social and judicial system influences. My question then is that, is there a better way to measure “efficiency” in this case? Or rather, is efficiency in its conventional understanding incompatible in matters of social movements? Could we construct an ethically sound efficiency metric such that our society as a whole can gravitate towards actions which promote a more wholesome understanding of humanity, rather than seeing each life as one of the large number saved/helped?
On a related note, I would comment that the surgeon’s metric is close to treating humans as machines: not just the patients, but also the doctors. As is said, if more life is saved is better, then a surgeon would work non-stop in order to maximize the number of patients helped. Or, in order to maximize his/her work efficiency, he/she would sleep just enough, and have just enough non-work activity to keep him/her sane. But are people just what they do professionally? Or are people what they do professionally during their work-hours? Or are we merely machines on the societal level?
Second, how then do we justify our society’s endeavors on arts, music, entertainment as such? What is the appropriate metric to measure their value?
I’d like to begin by saying that despite my similar convictions on the death penalty to Professor Marshall’s, at no point did Professor Marshall’s insights on the topic leave me bored.
Anyway, I personally left the talk with a fascination with the concept of hypotheticals that arise in debating the death penalty. Prof. Marshall’s topic of “Triage”, the doctor’s statement that Prof. Marshall spent too many resources on one person’s life, brings into play the hypothetical situation that he could have saved more lives with his time. This reasoning deeply bothers me, as I wonder what the measure of a human life actually is. The idea that we as a society should perhaps ignore social injustice in favor of saving more lives, all hypothetical of course as one has no capacity to foretell the future or its possibilities, is quite frankly, ludicrous. I also believe that one could always deter saving a life or quite a few lives in favor of the capability of perhaps saving even more lives. Why would I spend my resources on saving 20 lives, when I could potentially save the lives of a million in Africa? I feel there is no limitation in one’s conception of the number of human lives that are to be saved, so any argument that one’s resources could potentially save many more lives remains to be mute.
Another note, Professor Marshall’s statement on the distinction between if the death row inmates deserve to die and if we, as society, deserve to kill, really stuck with me and so much that I repeated it two times over the weekend in debate about the death penalty. I suppose it brings about one of my more basic oppositions to the death penalty, in that I believe it quite hypocritical to commit the same crime in which the person is indicted for. I don’t believe it makes murder any more moral or right when committed under the government’s waving flag of law. Murder is wrong in the eyes of the law, and government is not exempted from it because they believe they are righting a wrong. From where I see it, nobody deserves to die by the hands of another, no matter the circumstances.
There seems to be two different kinds of objections to the death penalty. The first is from a practical viewpoint. At the very least people are fallible. They are prone to biases, passions, and irrational hate. The number of people exonerated while on death row is enough to make any thinking person cringe. We rightly fear the kinds of power that we give to the government, judges, or prosecutors. It seems logical to err on the side of caution, then; it is better to forgo the death penalty for people we imagine really do deserve it if it means we never sentence an innocent person to death. Since almost all evidence– especially eyewitness and circumstantial evidence– is capable of misleading people, it is easy to conclude that the death penalty is immoral in practice.
The far more interesting question it seems to me is if we should accept the death penalty absent the arbitrary barriers to fairness. Imagine a perfectly non-racist world (or if you have trouble with that, a population with no minorities; victims and suspects are the same race and background). Now let’s have an arbitrarily high degree of certainty that the suspect is guilty (something like 99.9999%). Let’s also say that he has been shown to be perfectly mentally competent. And to tug at our intuitions, he has done something arbitrarily heinous. To make the thought experiment more vivid, we can say he has single-handedly committed a completely unprovoked genocide. Is the death penalty enough in this case?
My point is this: do people deserve to be punished? Is it good that we punish them? Surely more punishment is required for an armed robber than a shoplifter. Absent the unfair variables laid out above, it is not clear why death is the barrier at which we say enough is enough. Is it impossible for me to do something so bad that the only question is how horribly the death penalty should be administered?
Well, that is my two cents. I just want to see what others think about death as a punishment in and of itself. Now to address some interesting points brought up by others. It is not clear that a man behind bars is incapable of committing further crimes. Surely there are murders, stabbings, and the like in prison. I don’t think that the doctor is treating the lawyer’s time as simply a societal resource, or him as a machine. He is saying that if the lawyer is going to spend a given amount of time practicing law (say 4000 hours), it would make sense to make that time as efficient as possible. Also Kate’s last sentence is very hard to defend. If the point is that human life is sacred and death should be minimized, it might make sense to, for instance, shoot a madman who was about to execute someone’s family.
Though it’s a very clichéd argument to use, it’s debatable whether the cost of executing a person versus sentencing a life in prison is enough to justify an argument one way or another. Many times, doing the ethically responsible thing may or may not be the cheapest option — and that decision shouldn’t hinge upon an activity’s accounting records. To make a very illustrative argument, it would be much cheaper and much less effort on behalf of the United States to not aid foreign countries, whether sending food or troops to help in war times, but the United States does it anyway because we, as a nation, have decided that it is (at least partially, in juncture with other benefits) in our ethical interest to do so.
I believe the US constantly sets standards for the actions it takes, and has evolved those standards throughout history. When written into the constitution that the punishment of a person must not be cruel and unusual considering the crime committed, using the death penalty was an acceptable form of punishment in the most extreme cases of criminal actions. However, society has now undergone many changes, and through our evolution of laws and opinions, the appropriateness of the death penalty may no longer hold. Unlike before, there is now a much larger outcry against using the death penalty from US citizens, and their cries should be heard and processed. On a personal level, people could fight back, forth, for and against the death penalty, but as a nation, there needs to be a unified decision either supporting or condemning the punishment. The best way to gauge that decision is to listen to the majority of citizens’ requests — if the citizenry feels that society has moved beyond the practice of executing people for crimes, then the practice should no longer hold in our democratic society.
What struck me the most about this talk was the issue of deterrence. One of the reasons for advocating the death penalty is that it deters people from committing a crime. However, it was interesting to hear Professor Marshall indicate that studies have been conducted and that claim is false. The death penalty does not deter crime. What was most surprising as well as troublesome was that fact that a majority of inmates on death row have mental illness, committed the crime under the influence, or committed the crime in such high passions that they had no thoughts towards their punishment. While these do not excuse the crime or infer they receive a lighter sentence, it does give rise to the fact that the people who are on death row are the ones who are not deterred by the death penalty. Is there a point to the death penalty than? If one of its objectives is to deter people from committing crimes and fails to do that to the large majority who are affected by the death penalty. It seems that there needs to be reconsideration on the effectiveness of the death penalty. The part of this statement that left me the most unease was the high population of inmates on death row with mental illnesses. Should someone be sentenced to death for a crime they committed when they were not in the right mind? I strongly believe they should not. I still believe they should be punished, whatever that might mean, but not be put to death.
What struck me the most about this talk was the issue of deterrence. One of the reasons for advocating the death penalty is that it deters people from committing a crime. However, it was interesting to hear Professor Marshall indicate that studies have been conducted and that claim is false. The death penalty does not deter crime. What was most surprising as well as troublesome was that fact that a majority of inmates on death row have mental illness, committed the crime under the influence, or committed the crime in such high passions that they had no thoughts towards their punishment. While these do not excuse the crime or infer they receive a lighter sentence, it does give rise to the fact that the people who are on death row are the ones who are not deterred by the death penalty. Is there a point to the death penalty than? If one of its objectives is to deter people from committing crimes and fails to do that to the large majority who are affected by the death penalty. It seems that there needs to be reconsideration on the effectiveness of the death penalty. The part of this statement that left me the most unease was the high population of inmates on death row with mental illnesses. Should someone be sentenced to death for a crime they committed when they were not in the right mind? I strongly believe they should not. I still believe they should be punished, whatever that might mean, but not be put to death.
I believe that certain crimes such as rape and murder are the greatest transgressions against humankind. Thus, the idea of punishment as retribution strikes me at the core. To me, the question is not whether the death penalty is right or wrong, but whether it is a more suitable punishment for the criminal than life imprisonment. Let me be clear: I believe such crimes such as rape and murder should be punishable by death. The death penalty would not bring back innocence or life of the victim, but to the victim and his or her family, death to the criminal actor may be the closest thing to justice. And no one has a right to say to those families that they should feel differently. Those who committed the crime had no qualms violating and or ending another person’s life, and concurrently in my world of justice, I would not allow such criminals the privilege of life.
That said, I recognize the many shortcomings of the death penalty and the justice system in general. In particular I am appalled by the disproportionate number of Black and Latinos on death row. This is a cancer that might not be cured, but like a doctor who put a patient through rehab, the justice system must do everything possible to make sure the situation does not worsen.
One point I will argue against is that the justice system should not support the death penalty because of the significantly higher costs compared to life in prison. So what? This argument is an instrumental one that does not tackle the death penalty as a moral issue. Again, morally, I support the death penalty as retributive punishment. Indeed, this instrumental argument suggests that if our society were wealthy and money not a problem, the death penalty would be a fine punishment.
I do not believe in abolishing the death penalty because it is (supposedly) morally wrong. I believe that external and instrumental factors, like the cost argument above, must be resolved so that the death penalty continues to do its job.
A lot of the previous comments have taken issue with the point brought up by the surgeon, saying that he did not accurately measure the good done by the hours spent saving that one man. I wanted to expand a little bit on those ideas by pointing out that this is the main complaint against utilitarian arguments like the one the surgeon used. We can’t measure the amount of good that we do with our time. Good is a concept that can’t be operationalized into anything measurable. I think that it is also false, even in a utilitarian sense, that we have a responsibility to save as many lives as we can during our lives. Even if you make the argument that we should be doing what is most efficiently beneficial for the lives of the greater community, that does not necessarily mean saving lives, there are many other types of goods that you can be doing. I think that this is what people were pointing out when they said that Marshall did more good than simply saving that one man’s life, there were many benefits to winning the case above and beyond that. Personally, I think it is extremely debatable how much responsibility we have to dedicate our lives to the community. If you are doing something you find personally fulfilling, and that action is somehow helping even one person, it is hard for me to feel like you have an obligation to be doing anything else, as your time should be your own to do what makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others.
It was really eye opening to me to consider that life without parole might also be considered unethical, but a necessary stepping stone to get the support needed to abolish the death penalty. I wonder what the logic is behind the argument for life without parole being unethical, and what the most extreme punishment that logic allows. Because it does seem somewhat manipulative to garner support using an argument that includes life without parole, and then turn around and try to abolish it. However, I think that is the nature of American politics. Setting and changing policy is about coalition building. All the members of the coalition may find common cause to support a certain policy, but does not mean that those within the coalition have to use that same reasoning when building another coalition on some other topic within that arena. The logic that if there is life without parole, the death penalty is not necessary is not any less true if some people within the coalition believe there shouldn’t be life without parole either. If that part of the coalition wants to form a new group against life without parole using different logic that does not appeal to certain members of the previous coalition, they just shouldn’t join. That is politics, you support each other while your interests are aligned, and then oppose when they aren’t.
I had a teacher back in high school whose sister had been kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered by a serial killer. My teacher and her family went years without knowing who had killed the girl before the killer was caught for doing the same thing to another girl. While my teacher is still angry and obviously brokenhearted over what happened to her sister, she did not want the killer to receive the death penalty. She felt strongly that human life is sacred and that two wrongs don’t make a right.
While this is only one person’s view, and I think anyone who has lost a loved one or has been affected in a similar situation has every right to be furious and demand justice, I’m not sure we have the right to take someone else’s life. If it was because of mental illness that they were compelled to commit the crime, then they can’t be completely to blame. And who are we to say that if that was us, we wouldn’t have done the same thing? In our right minds, of course not. But we are talking about those who are not in their right minds, and we can’t say for sure what we would do in that scenario.
My other issue with the death penalty is the finality of it. That sounds absurd, but consider the number of people falsely convicted who are later found to be innocent. I found 45 examples of people who were innocent of their crimes, and put on death row, only later to be found clean and freed. And that doesn’t include the number who were innocent and were executed. Granted, the advent of DNA testing has reduced this error, but I feel that the risk of killing a completely innocent person is not worth it.
I tend to take a utilitarian stance on most issues and this one is no exception. I feel that if it costs more for inmates to be put to death rather than to be put in prison for life, it is a benefit to the state and to the people to run a more sensible budget and abolish the practice. This being said, I would prefer that cases that were “black and white” (I know any lawyer would rebuke this statement) would be decided without the legal battles that are costing the government a fortune. A certain level of practicality which law seems to be lacking must be applied for a more efficient outcome. The importance of never being wrong in these cases seems to create problems that set unreasonable precedent in the legal world.
Now to the point of ethics: Many of the people who responded to this blog questioned the punishments that were inflicted on the convicted and the moral dessert associated such actions. Furthermore, there is debate about laws and harsh sentences being proper deterrents to prevent others from committing crimes. Here I think the whole idea of someone being “deserving” of punishment is conceived incorrectly. I generally take more of a deterministic view and believe that people are shaped into making decisions long before they are ever made. There is a concern that such a belief would remove the need for ethics in a society because of the absence of free will. However, I think the whole system of law and justice that our country has adopted implicitly shares this belief. The whole concept behind having laws is to change incentives in such a way as to create an overall harmonious society. I think we assume a certain level of causality even though the common man refuses to think that such factors are key determinants of making a decision.
I really enjoyed listening to Professor Marshall speak and was particularly interested in the anecdote about the surgeon. Even when considering how the amount of resources that the professor put into helping one individual could have been used to help many more people than just that one, I still think that what he did was ethically right. To me, no one person’s life is worth more than another person’s and I think that the professor identified a situation that he did not feel was ethical—the sentencing of an innocent man to death—and thus took steps to prevent that injustice. This reminds me of a thought exercise that I did for another class. Imagine that you are on a hijacked plane and that a hijacker puts a gun in your hand and tells you to kill the lady sitting in the seat next to you. He says that if you don’t pull the trigger then he will kill 10 people on the plane. So what do you do? Answers might be different according to whether one prescribes to action-based or consequential ethics that consider the greater good argument (but can you really know that the hijacker will do what he says?). My answer to this was that I would not shoot because 1) I would not consider that one lady’s life to be worth any less than the life of any other individual, even the collective lives of a group of individuals, and 2) it is against my ethics to harm and kill.
Like others have mentioned, I too, was under the impression that the death penalty was not as expensive compared to life in prison with no chance of parole. I used to support the death penalty, but on further reflection, I find it very worrisome that there are undoubtedly individuals who are placed on death row who did not commit the crime, leading me to question my previous support.
In high school, we would have debates all the time about different issues and one time we discussed the death penalty. I don’t remember much about the argument. I don’t even remember what side I sat on or what I even said. What I do remember was that when our teacher made us choose sides, none of us knew where to go. I also remember that in that brief little discussion of who was fighting for what, all I could think about was which side was right because that’s where I wanted to be on. But that wasn’t obvious. We didn’t have any facts. We were simply supposed to pick a side and research about it later. But what if the side I picked intuitively was wrong? I couldn’t take that chance; I somehow had this mentality of wanting to win the argument so I simply just wanted to be on the side with the best debaters, the winners.
Then I came to Stanford where issues were really issues. So the question again, should we have the death penalty? I don’t know but I do enjoy listening to lawyers and politicians discussing and debating this subject. As I take in the information they give me, my question revolves around the certainty of the facts. How sure are we that the prisoner did do the crime? As someone mentioned above, there are statistics that show that the facts aren’t certain, that there are mistakes and innocent people are given the death penalty. But I guess my other question is whether we, as a society, understand the consequences of having this system in place.
You do the crime, they say, and you pay the time. Okay, that’s fair. But do we get to take a life too? I want to linger on this question just a little bit more. I am taking the Mind, Body, Spirit class with Professor Fred Luskin this quarter and these past two weeks we have been learning about forgiveness. There are some atrocious crimes out there and terrible tragedies but where does forgiveness come into all this? Does forgiveness even have a place in court or in our law system? Couldn’t forgiveness at least spare a life and just leave a person in jail without parole? Wouldn’t that be enough? At least with a person sentenced to life imprisonment, they are by all means still technically alive. Their lives are spared in the base way possible.