The Chicago Tribune’s message about the death penalty can be summarized in one sentence, appearing toward the end of the Dec. 29 editorial: “The death penalty, properly administered, should be reserved only for society’s most heinous, most well-defended and most unambiguously selected criminals.”
The Tribune proposes a series of fixes to ensure that no innocents, and that only those murderers reaching a government-defined level of heinousness, are executed.
Let’s project ourselves into the ideal death penalty world the Tribune imagines, a world in which white murderers are executed in proportion to blacks and Hispanics, and rich and famous murderers are executed rather than released and made into made-for-TV movies. What have we accomplished?
No investigation has ever shown that the death penalty deters crime. Murderers murder out of passion: for love or hatred of another, for money, for drugs. These murderers never dwell on the death penalty.
Death-Row inmates have committed horrifying acts, and executing them may seem like a tidy end to a messy problem. But the ugly truth of the death penalty is the message that our government sends us and the rest of the world: The eye-for-an-eye pursuit of revenge, taken to the ultimate, irreversible act of killing, is acceptable.
