Last week, the death penalty came up often during debates at the Justice For All display.
Many of the pro-choice protesters of the exhibit challenged that anyone who opposed abortion and was in favor of the death penalty is a hypocrite. According to them, life cannot be held sacred on the one hand and disposed of on the other.
What they do not understand is the critical difference between the two circumstances.
All human beings possess the right to live, but the exercise of a person's rights must be balanced against the good of society.
In the tradition of the enlightenment, and especially of the United States, a few fundamental principles govern decisions about human life.
The two that apply here are considering everyone innocent until proven guilty and depriving a person of rights only by due process of law.
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No rational person can disagree that an unborn fetus is innocent of any crime. The fetus itself has had no choice in the circumstances of its existence. Lacking the ability to reason, it cannot possess mens rea, the state of mind necessary to commit a crime.
Therefore, it cannot be held responsible or blamed for its presence in the womb; it is innocent.
On the other hand, people on death row who have been duly tried and convicted of crimes are not innocent.
Through the law process, a jury of their fellow citizens has evaluated the facts, and the conclusion has been reached that these persons have committed criminal acts so heinous as to warrant their complete removal from society. These are people who must, for the safety of others, be kept separate from society.
The kinds of crimes that land someone on death row in this day and age are not pleasant to read about. Our criminal justice system is very lenient in its application of sentences to criminals; most criminals sentenced to death go through years or even decades of legal processes designed to minimize the possibility of a mistake.
Using death as a form of punishment can be argued against from many angles.
The reason it is used here in the United States is not because of a lack of respect for human life, but because that respect must be fairly applied. Criminals deserve fair treatment, but so did their victims.
Since no single person can or should have the power to murder another, our respect for the criminal's life must be balanced against our need to preserve the lives of innocents.
Someone who has murdered before and is very likely to do so again must be removed from society.
The will of society may seem a hard thing to judge. Opponents of the death penalty would say that their voices are not being heard in a society that employs the death penalty.
Here again is the need to balance the idea of justice with the practical needs of society. Everyone cannot sit in every courtroom and be on every jury.
Instead, our system relies on laws to determine what is fair treatment for crimes. Everyone is held to the same standards of acceptable behavior.
Then, because every case is different, representatives of society are randomly chosen to oversee the judicial process and ensure that the laws are applied fairly to the accused. A judge acts as a final human safeguard, assigning a sentence that conforms to the spirit of the law while not unduly punishing the guilty party.
This is what is referred to as due process - the complex system of judgment that exists to ensure that only the guilty are deprived of their human rights, and only for the most serious of reasons.
Abortion is not handled through any such process; the decision of whether or to support or end a human life is left entirely in the hands of one person.
by Craig A. Butler
Daily Lobo Columnist
