Geese and Ganders

I am not a fan of the death penalty.  Certainly not how it manifests in the US, anyway.  My concerns aren't really philosophical (although I will admit that the question of the state ending someone's life outside of armed conflict is a little troubling), I'm more concerned with the sheer bureaucratic mess of it all, the cost, the process, and above all how one rule applies to some but doesn't apply to literally thousands of others.  

Let's have a look at some facts and figures.  

For a developed, Western country with a stable (*ahem*) governmental structure, the USA had a relatively high murder rate of 5.35 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 (source). This places it well above similarly-developed and wealthy democracies like Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada, and nearly all of Europe, Scandinavia and Asia, depending on where you draw the borders.  

With its high population of 330 plus million people (around 75% of the combined population of the EU (source, source), the US is also going to suffer from sheer bulk of numbers.  Since 1990 there has been an average of 17,711 murders and non-negligent manslaughters every year (source).  That figure has dipped in recent times which is admirable given increases in population, but it's still well north of 10,000 cases a year.

So it’s clear that there are a lot of homicides in the US both in bulk and per capita, but does that mean that the number of executions reflect those high numbers?  Not really, no - there have been significantly fewer than 100 executions every year since 2000, and that figure has been going steadily downwards since then:   

(Source)

So we can see that less than 1% of murders actually result in a death sentence.  Even allowing for particularly egregious circumstances, this makes a mockery of the process in my view, as from a sentencing perspective a murder doesn't equal a murder.  This means that there's a strong case for equating the death penalty with cruel and unusual punishment by consequence; if you are sentenced to death you're literally suffering a worse fate than 99% of other people that committed the same crime after all.    

We also know that it's very expensive to execute a prisoner on account of the judicial expense of it all, which usually runs to millions of dollars per prisoner.  By constitutional law there is a far greater expense to turn over every possible stone in ensuring that a prisoner is in fact guilty or fit to be tried before he or she is executed. This costs an absolute fortune, to the point many states have opted against the death penalty not on philosophical grounds but due to the sheer cost of it (source).  Do you really want to spend millions of dollars on a murderer when you could throw them in the clink and build a school instead?  I know what I'd rather do.     

...... So long story short, I think the death penalty's a bit of a bad joke as it stands in the USA.  It's unwieldy, it's expensive, it's inconsistently applied and there are strong arguments to suggest that it does more harm than good.  And that's BEFORE you start asking philosophical questions about the nature of capital punishment, of which there are many.  

So imagine my surprise when I find myself reacting very negatively to this.  If I was to be an advocate of the death penalty, then surely strangling a pregnant mother, cutting out her unborn baby with a knife and then kidnapping it would be the epitome of something deserving capital punishment, wouldn't it?  It would in fact be a pretty open-and-shut case, on a par with all the gangland killings, drugged rampages and all the other horrors that go on in the more violent parts of the US.  It's clearly unusual for a woman to be on death row - we know statistically that men commit violent crimes far more than women do after all which is so obvious I'm not even going to bother sourcing it - but that should not mean that there's automatically been some sort of miscarriage of justice when a statistical outlier crops up from time-to-time.  

It seems that appeals are being made on account of brain damage, mental incompetence and turbulent pasts.  All of which have been argued and struck down before, and not seen as being good enough reasons to down-grade her sentence since she was convicted in 2004.  But suddenly "literally hours" before her execution, a judge rules that the case needs more attention?  This is where I call bullshit.    

Let me ask you a few questions.  Do you think it's likely that if the killer of that pregnant woman was a man, that we would be having this conversation?  Do you think it's likely that if the male perpetrator of such a heinous crime was "brain damaged", "mentally incompetent" and "suffered from a turbulent past" that we would give a damn, much less be discussing it in the international press?  And how many murderers with histories of gang violence, drug abuse and all the other myriad horrific causes and sources of homicides out there could, have and do mount similar arguments in their defences?  I would say the vast majority - "society's to blame" after all.  And maybe, just maybe, it really is, but there's a line between having that discussion and absolving everyone of personal responsibility.    

This is where I despair of modern politics, gender/identity politics and the mainstream media.  Quite how a murderer can be absolved of this grisly, shocking crime on the basis of her sex is really beyond me.  I've made my stance on the death penalty clear, but sorry - you're either a murderer or you're not.  Being a woman doesn't make a difference.   

UPDATE: 13/01/2021

So it seems that the stay of execution was short-lived; Lisa Montgomery was killed by lethal injection on Wednesday 13.01.2021 after the stay of execution was lifted by the Supreme Court only 36 hours or so afterwards.  More details can be found here.  I take no pleasure in the fact that the sentence was carried out given all that I've explained, but I guess there is some justice to be found in the fact that she received the same degree of "justice" as any number of the others that have been executed lately.  This is despite the fanfare surrounding the case, which I still maintain is purely down to her sex.  

..... Yeuch, by the way.  What a horrible story, from start to finish.  Who'd want to be involved in any of that?  Spare a thought for everyone who had a stake in the decision towards the end, knowing that their actions would result directly in whether someone lived or died, which went right up to the Supreme Court.  Like the saying goes: 

"Laws are like sausages.  It's best not to see them being made"