Oddly enough, what made me abandon my longstanding, albeit reluctant, support for the death penalty was — of all things — the US-led1999 terror bombing of Yugoslavia. This came after a number of episodes, the Waco slaughter among them, in which various government agencies killed innocent people on a whim and without their agents displaying a tremor of remorse.

The spectacle of a 78-day bombing campaign against a country that had done NOTHING to justify that assault finally prompted me to understand that the regime ruling us simply cannot be trusted with the power of discretionary killing.

I firmly believe in the right to lethal self-defense. But I cannot support the killing of other human beings for any other reason.

I have found the following in an article from Murray Rothbard discussing C.S. Lewis’s critique of the modern belief that “rehabilitation” is a humane and civilised alternative to “punishment”. The full article is online here.

Noting that the “reformers” call their proposed actions “healing” or “therapy” rather than “punishment,” Lewis adds:

“For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure…. It will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. Even in ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are “treatment,” not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.”

Perhaps paleos need to remember that the liberal left’s opposition to capital punishment (at least for non-foetuses) has little to do with any natural rights natural justice position. They were perhaps more opposed to the idea of punishment than it’s “capital-ness”. If some machine to obliterate the personality and reprogram it were available, the liberal left’s ‘anti-CPers’ would be all in favour of it. And presumably want it made both universal and compulsory! Paleos should not be afraid to oppose C.P. just because liberals also oppose it, if perhaps for different reasons.

” 2266 The State’s effort to contain the spread of behaviors injurious to human rights and the fundamental rules of civil coexistence corresponds to the requirement of watching over the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime. The primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. When his punishment is voluntarily accepted by the offender, it takes on the value of expiation. Moreover, punishment, in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.[67]

2267 The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.

“If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.”

“Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today … are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’ [68] ”

As to my previous point about liberal utilitarians, it is fascinating to note that Alan Dershowitz, who has recently been making the case for torture, has previously in career opposed firearm ownership, defended pornography and is a supporter of animal rights. My guess is that modern liberals will come to support C.P. once the ‘punishment’ word is removed. If CP is ever reclassified as a new fangled form of socially aware euthanasia, watch out!

In the past conservative opponents of this liberal utilitarianism argued that capital punishment was necessary, regardless of the alleged non-deterrent effects, on grounds of justice. Now that the empirical evidence is increasingly supporting capital punishment, it’s fascinating that conservatives, increasingly alienated from the social engineering machine the welfare state has become are turning against C.P. Can a liberal defection to the pro-CP camp be long off?

The other main issue I have is the haphazard application of the death penalty - how not all capital crimes are worth equal punishment. I do agree that the dealth penalty as currently exercised is past its time.

Huckabee reminds me of a deflated less conservative Jerry Falwell.

Still, I don’t find the potential for error to be the most persuasive case against capital punishment, since that potential exists with any kind of punishment, and I suspect there are fewer errors in capital cases. It’s true that a mistake in a capital case is irreversible — but then again, if you wrongly send someone to jail for a few years, that mistake is irreversible, too. It’s not as if the wrongly convicted prisoner who serves part or all of a prison term can get any of that time back. So the potential for error is a consideration, sure, but I don’t find it to be enough. (How many cases of wrongful execution can anyone point to the U.S., anyway? Virtually none in recent decades, from what I’ve seen.)