The justification for the death penalty

Michelle Malkin has the details on a stupid move by New Jersey to end the death penalty there. As you know, I support expansion of the death penalty to include all crimes with actual victims. I submitted a comment countering the anti-death penalty propaganda, which I am editing for publication here:

The arguments against the death penalty fail on legal, logical and moral grounds.

1. Legal — The availability of the death penalty as an essential tool of governance was assumed by the framers of the US Constitution. It is well within the state’s legal police power to take the lives of those deemed too dangerous to the lives and property of innocents to live in a free society. The arguments that an innocent individual might be wrongfully convicted actually deal more with the implementation of any punishment, not just the death penalty. But there is simply no end to that legal argument short of ending punishment all together. If you do not trust your legal system to administer the death penalty, then why should you trust it to put someone in prison? Someone wrongfully in prison for 20 years has lost 20 years off their lives just as definitively as someone wrongfully executed. If the argument is taken to its logical conclusion, you wouldn’t punish anybody for crimes, which defeat the entire raison d’etre of government under the social contract — to protect its citizens from the predations of others, foreign and domestic. The focus of people arguing that an innocent individual could be executed should be making the implementation of the punishment more reliable, not taking away the punishment.

2. Logical — Two issues here. First, the safest and cheapest way to remove a criminal from society is not to incarcerate them, but to execute them. This was you do not have to pay for their housing, and there is no chance that some liberal judge concerned with jail overcrowding, a naive parole board (such as Arkansas) or a bleeding-heart governor (like Michael Dukakis) would release these thugs on an unsuspecting public.

Second, while the death penalty would be more of a deterrent if it was implemented in a more timely manner, it is indeed a deterrent and it indeed saves lives, as many as 18 for each execution, as a study done by Brookings in conjunction with AEI showed.

3. Moral — The Catholic Church, in particular, was OK with the death penalty for 2000 years or so until the Vatican Curiae turned far leftist. There is simply no valid biblical argument against the death penalty. Jesus may have said that we should turn the other cheek, blah, blah, blah. But he also acknowledged the separation of church and state with his statement of “Render unto Caesar.” It is in this contest that turning the other cheek must be interpreted, more as a guide to individual conduct than to state conduct. The state has a legal and moral obligation to protect its people, and such forgiveness would run counter to that goal.

Leaving aside the Old Testament for the sake of argument, Jesus himself was given many, many opportunities to speak specifically against capital punishment. For instance, I would think that, if He intended to speak against people being executed by the state, He would have done so when He was being executed by the state. He did not. Far from it. When one of the criminals condemned with Jesus demanded that Jesus save them all, the other criminal rebuked him saying that their punishment was “justified,” but Jesus’ was not. Jesus did not disagree with him. He never spoke against the death penalty during his time on earth, though such penalties were commonplace in ancient Rome.

Only God can judge a man’s soul, but the state is well within its legal and moral power — indeed it has a legal and moral duty — to judge who is a danger to the public and to remove them from this world for the protection of its citizens.