Capital Punishment: Killing People Doesn't Solve Social Problems

The execution of 27-year-old Jeremy Vargas Sagastegui is scheduled for Tuesday.

There are many reasons to oppose this execution.

Sagastegui was not subject to adequate psychiatric review. Interviews with his family reveal a compelling history of severe childhood abuse and mental disturbance. Because Sagastegui was allowed to represent himself in court and wants our state to assist his suicide, those mitigating circumstances were never investigated or presented to the court.

Capital punishment is a brutal and brutalizing practice. It attempts to avenge one murder by committing a second. The second murder is more reprehensible because it is officially sanctioned and done with great ceremony in the name of us all. It teaches the permissibility of killing people to solve social problems - the worst example to set for any society. `A usurped power'

No civilized state or nation ought to set itself up in the business of killing. Imposition of the death penalty is a "usurped power of government." Since no man has the right to take his own life, he cannot delegate the power to take his life to the government.

The taking of life in any form of murder is a terrible thing, but vengeance carried out in like manner serves only to satisfy and nurture our basest and most hateful instinct. Therefore, it further dehumanizes a society that has no gentleness to spare.

Capital punishment deprives the state of a citizen and his industry, without recompensing the community for his offense. Imprisonment certainly prevents a repetition of the offense and affords an opportunity for reformation of the criminal.

No question of public policy, except peace or war, is more important than whether, and under what circumstances, the government should be authorized by its citizens to kill people.

In a democracy, where the people are sovereign, when the government kills, it kills for us.

Both Great Britain and Canada have abolished the death penalty in recent years. The only countries that continue the practice of legal execution are Iran, South Africa, a few oppressive regimes in Latin America and some emerging nations of the Third World. The death penalty contradicts our values and perpetuates an atmosphere of violence.

Legally taking a life is useless and demoralizing to the general public. It is also demoralizing to the public officials who must callously put a person to death. Society is amply protected by a sentence of life imprisonment, which accomplishes the same objective of community safety nonviolently.

We must call upon the state to consider the needs of both the victims and the offenders, to leave room for reconciliation and forgiveness, and to limit the use of force. It is better to expend time, energies and resources in improving the criminal-justice system and eliminating the social conditions that breed crime than to foster a false confidence in the effectiveness or fairness of the death penalty.

Capital punishment is unfair because it is applied in a discriminatory way.

Death row continues to hold a disproportionate number of the poor, the black, the mentally disabled and the emotionally disturbed. Justice William O. Douglas once said, ". . . One searches in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata of our society." Evidence supports the conclusion that those without the "capital" are "capitally" punished. Would anyone call such treatment just?

The late Justice Thurgood Marshall said, "The American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment of the morality of the death penalty. If they were better informed, they would consider it shocking, unjust and unacceptable."

The essence of the Bible's teaching is not barbarity and vengeance, but forgiveness and mercy.

Church leaders agree

Christian and Jewish leaders have long proclaimed this truth. American Roman Catholic bishops and American Protestant and Jewish leaders are vigorously opposed to capital punishment. Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff in history to take such a stand. Coretta Scott King, the Kennedy family and others who would seem to have more reason to favor the death penalty are among those who firmly oppose it.

No sensitive person would recommend coddling criminals or dealing naively with assassins or rapists. It is morally unsatisfactory for criminals to go unpunished.

But sick people must be treated with compassion. They may never recover enough to be a safe risk in our society, but they certainly should not be killed. The abolition of the death penalty would send a message that we can break the cycle of violence and find more humane ways to deal with iniquity and crime.

Dale Turner is an honorary member of the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.