It is possible to view Nebraska’s recent vote to abolish the death penalty — a vote that brought together liberals, budget balancers, and social conservatives — as a heartening sign that partisan divisions can be overcome, that moral progress can arrive even in places that vote Republican, and that the brutal façade of structural racism may one day crack and topple. This view has much to recommend it: It appeals to our desire to overcome tiresome divisions, confirms the superiority of the present over the past, and does honor to the principled people who have argued, often very eloquently, that we must unknot the hangman’s noose.
It also suffers from certain defects. Its story of moral progress asks us to overlook the countless cruelties of our criminal-justice system as we congratulate ourselves on the elimination of a relatively rare punishment (Nebraska’s last execution was in 1997). It suggests that the only purpose of criminal justice is deterrence — a view long championed by Beccaria, Bentham, and other apostles of cruel efficiency. It asks us to ignore that life imprisonment, the only alternative to capital punishment, is hardly more humane.
Indeed, comparing our differing reactions to capital punishment and life imprisonment is one of the more direct ways to see what lies behind most death-penalty opposition. As Pope Francis has observed, “Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.” His suggestion that we abolish both is rather questionable (taken seriously, it requires parole for Pol Pot, halfway houses for Hitler), but his basic insight is sound. Is it really more barbaric to grant a terrible murderer a dignified death than to force him to live a life of confinement, perhaps to undergo humiliating force-feeding, and then to die in the hands of the state even if not by the state’s hand?
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