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PAGE TITLE: http://edition.cnn.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: With death penalty, let punishment
truly fit the crime
DATE: Thursday August 22, 2013
AUTHOR: Robert Blecker
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Robert Blecker teaches criminal law
and constitutional history at New York Law School.
Tufts,
B.A. 1969
Harvard,
J.D. 1974 cum laude Harvard
Fellow
in Law and Humanities, 1976-77.
Served
as Special Assistant Attorney General, New York State Office of Special
Anti-Corruption Prosecutor. A leading U.S. authority on death penalty and
frequent commentator for national media, including CNN, Court TV, and PBS.
With
a gleam in his eye, Robert Blecker, a nationally known retributivist advocate
of the death penalty, has managed to alienate both sides of the debate on
the politically divisive and morally complex issue of capital punishment.
But his position as designated outcast is nothing new, nor is his strongly held
conviction that the most vicious and callous offenders deserve to die and that
society is morally obliged to execute those “worst of the worst” criminals. A
radical at heart, like many who grew up in the 1960s, Professor Blecker railed
against prevailing academic assumptions about the evils of capital punishment
during his undergraduate years at Tufts, where he refused to major and
nevertheless in 1969 earned a B.A. with honors in three fields, while
vehemently protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. At Harvard
Law School, where he won the Oberman Prize for the best graduating thesis,
Professor Blecker was one of only two students to publicly defend the death
penalty. He went on to prosecute corrupt lawyers, cops, and judges and saw up
close how the rich and powerful were given breaks denied to poor and powerless
offenders. Later a Harvard University Fellow in Law and
Humanities and also a playwright, Professor Blecker’s production “Vote
NO!”, an anti-federalist case against adopting the Constitution, premiered in
1987 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and traveled to 16 states,
convincing even staunchly patriotic audiences to vote against the Constitution.
Still rebellious, Professor Blecker espouses his carefully considered, yet
almost universally unpalatable position in the academic community. Based on 13
years of interviewing convicted killers, and hundreds of hours inside
maximum security prisons and on death rows, he makes a powerful case
for the death penalty as retribution, but only for the “worst of the worst”
offenders. The sole keynote speaker supporting the death penalty
at major conferences and at the Association of the Bar of
the City of New York, he was also the lone American advocate at
an international conference in Geneva on the death penalty sponsored by Duke
University Law School. Professor Blecker encourages emotional debate in his
teaching and has cotaught his death penalty course with leading
abolitionists—most recently Kevin Doyle, Director of New York’s Capital
Defender’s Office—in order to give students both viewpoints. He also
teaches Criminal Law, Constitutional History, and Criminals and Our Urge to
Punish Them. Frequently appearing in The New York Times, on PBS,
CourtTV, CNN, BBC World News, and other major media outlets, and with
privileged access to death rows across the country, Professor Blecker is making
a documentary chronicling life on death rows and contrasting them with maximum
security general population: Are they "living hell" as commonly
portrayed? He, himself will be the subject of a feature documentary to be
released to theatres Spring '08, which chronicles his odd relationship with
Daryl Holton, recently executed by Tennessee.
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Robert Blecker
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STORY
HIGHLIGHTS
- Robert Blecker says executing savage criminals satisfies our deep instinct for justice
- Blecker: Problem with lethal injection is it conflates execution for a crime with medicine
- He says states underpunish sadistic murderers, yet overpunish lesser criminals
- Blecker: The firing squad is the most honest, effective way to carry out death penalty
Editor's
note: Robert
Blecker is a professor at New York Law School where he teaches criminal law
and constitutional law. His crime and punishment memoir, "The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst
of the Worst," will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in November.
(CNN) -- No matter how vicious the crime, no matter how
vile the criminal, some death penalty opponents feel certain that nobody can
ever deserve to die -- even if that person burned children alive, massacred a
dozen strangers in a movie theater, or bombed the Boston Marathon. Other
opponents admit the worst of the worst of the worst do deserve to die. They
just distrust the government ever to get it right.
Now that pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply
the lethal drugs that U.S. corrections departments have used for years to
execute criminals -- whether from their own genuine moral objections or to
escape a threatened economic boycott -- states have begun to experiment. Death
penalty opponents, who call themselves abolitionists, then protest the use of
these untried drugs that just might cause a condemned killer to feel pain as he
dies.
Let the punishment fit the crime. We've mouthed
that credo for centuries, but do we really mean it? We retributivists who
believe in justice would reward those who bring us pleasure, but punish
severely those who sadistically or wantonly cause us pain. A basic retributive
measure -- like for like or giving a person a taste of his own medicine --
satisfies our deepest instincts for justice.
When the condemned killer intentionally tortured
helpless victims, how better to preserve some direct connection short of
torture than by that murderer's quick but painful death? By ensuring death
through anesthesia, however, we have nearly severed pain from punishment.
An unpleasant life in prison, a quick but painful
death cannot erase the harm. But it can help restore a moral balance.
I, too, oppose lethal injection, but not because
these untried new drugs might arbitrarily cause pain, but because they
certainly cause confusion.
Lethal injection conflates punishment with
medicine. The condemned dies in a gurney, wrapped in white sheets with an IV in
his veins, surrounded by his closest kin, monitored by sophisticated medical
devices. Haphazardly conceived and hastily designed, lethal injection appears,
feels, and seems medical, although its sole purpose is to kill.
Witnessing an execution in Florida, I shuddered. It
felt too much like a hospital or hospice. We almost never look to medicine to
tell us whom to execute. Medicine should no more tell us how. How we kill those
we rightly detest should in no way resemble how we end the suffering of those
we love.
Publicly opposing this method of execution, I have
found odd common ground with Deborah Denno, a leading abolitionist scholar who
relentlessly attacks lethal injection protocols. Although Denno vigorously
opposes all capital punishment, we both agree that the firing squad, among all
traditional methods, probably serves us best. It does not sugarcoat, it does
not pretend, it does not shamefully obscure what we do. We kill them,
intentionally, because they deserve it.
Some people may support the firing squad because it
allows us to put blanks in one of the guns: An individual sharpshooter will
never know whether he actually killed the condemned. This strikes me as just
another symptom of our avoidance of responsibility for punishment. The fact is,
in this society, nobody takes responsibility for punishing criminals.
Corrections officers point to judges, while judges point to legislators, and
legislators to corrections. Anger and responsibility seem to lie everywhere
elsewhere -- that is, nowhere. And where we cannot fully escape responsibility
-- as with a firing squad -- we diffuse it.
My thousands of hours observing daily life inside
maximum security prisons and on death rows in several states these past 25
years have shown me the perverse irony that flows from this: Inside prisons, often
the worst criminals live the most comfortable lives with the best hustles, job
opportunities and sources of contraband, while the relatively petty criminals
live miserably, constantly preyed upon.
Refusing to even contemplate distinguishing those
few most sadistic murderers who deserve to die painfully, states seem quite
willing haphazardly and arbitrarily to expose prisoners in general, regardless
of their crimes, to a more or less painful life, or even death at the hands of
other criminals.
Ironically, even as we recoil from punishing those
who most deserve it, we readily over-punish those who don't. A "war on
drugs" swells our prisons. We punish addiction and call it crime; we
indiscriminately and immorally subject a burglar or car thief to the same daily
life in prison we also reserve for rapist murderers.
The time has come to make punishment more nearly
fit the crime. To face what we do, and acknowledge, with regret but without
shame, that the past counts.
So part of me hopes the abolitionists succeed with
their latest campaign against death by lethal injection. We should banish this
method. Let the abolitionists threaten to boycott gun manufacturers. See where
that gets them. Meanwhile, the rest of us will strive to keep our covenants
with victims, restore a moral balance, and shoot to kill those who deserve to
die.
Rest assured, when we can only achieve justice by
killing a vicious killer, We, the People will find a constitutional way to do
it.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are
solely those of Robert Blecker.
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