The Ultimate Penalty . . . and a just one: The basics of capital punishment.(Brief Article)

The case of Timothy McVeigh reminds us that the endless dispute about the death penalty is mainly religious in origin, even if many of the arguments employed are secular. The religious belief is that only God can legitimately end a human life; no crime can justify the death penalty for anyone, regardless of how great and certain his guilt is, or how powerful a deterrent his execution would be. Theologians disagree on the death penalty-it is warranted by Biblical passages and was traditionally favored by churches-but it is currently opposed by a majority of religious leaders.

The secular objections to the death penalty hold that its rational purposes, such as deterrence, should be achieved by alternative means, since we can never be entirely certain that all those convicted of capital crimes are actually guilty. The possibility-in the long run, the likelihood-that some convicts are not guilty is currently the most persuasive objection to capital punishment.

Why execute anyone? Why not avoid the risk of miscarriages of justice by abolishing capital punishment altogether? Simply because there are no fully satisfactory alternatives. Life imprisonment is not necessarily lifelong; life imprisonment without parole still allows governors to pardon prisoners. The finality of death is both the weakness and the strength of capital punishment. We are not ready to do without it, yet hesitate to use it: There are many convicts on death row, but only a few are actually executed. Between 1973 and 1995, 5,760 death sentences were imposed; as of 1995, only 313 had been executed, and only some 400 have been executed since. Gary Graham, executed in June 2000, spent 19 years on death row exhausting his appeals, which were reviewed by more than 30 different judges. His case is far from exceptional.

Abolitionists often argue as though no one would die were it not for capital punishment. Yet we are not spared death in any case; a death sentence may shorten the life span, but-unlike imprisonment-it does not introduce an avoidable event, but merely hastens an unavoidable one.

Even if-without executions-society would be fully and permanently protected from murder, many people would feel that the survival of murderers is morally unjust, that the death penalty for murder is deserved, that it is a categorical imperative as Immanuel Kant thought. There is no way of proving or disproving such a moral idea, but there is little question that it is widely shared.

The issue of deterrence is raised by the abolitionists, who often point out that the number of homicides does not decrease as the frequency of executions increases; from this they conclude that executions do not deter crime. But deterrence depends on the credibility of the threat of execution, and this credibility does not depend on the number of executions. To be sure, a threat never carried out will become incredible; to deter, it must be carried out often enough to remain credible. This does not mean it has to be carried out in all cases; but the ...