A Life For A Life

Governor Furcolo's appointment last week of a seven-man commission authorized by the 1957 Legislature to study the question of capital punishment may eventually spell the beginning of the end for that penalty in the Bay State. If abolition is realized, it will be a much-delayed step towards modernizing our penal codes.

The punishment of death must itself bear the heavy burden of proof. Not only its utility, but also its absolute necessity must be demonstrated if execution for homocide is to be retained. None of the justifications of punishment appear to offer such demonstration.

Common opinion stipulates three major functions of criminal punishment: deterrence, retribution, and reformation. Those who favor retention of the death penalty rely most heavily on the first of these, and it is primarily on this ground that they must be refuted.

In the areas where capital punishment has been abolished, statistics fail to show any increase in the homocide rate. In some of the American States where abolition has existed for some time (Michigan repealed in 1857), the rate has actually decreased slightly. In any case, the frequency of homocide in these areas seems to indicate that the rate is affected entirely by factors other than the death penalty.

Those who favor the penalty, however, continue to argue that the threat of death stays the hand of a potential murderer. Yet, psychological evidence has shown that the great majority of homicides are not premeditated, but are prompted by anger, insanity, defense, accident, etc. In such instances, the possibility of the death sentence provides no deterrent element.

Moreover, the premeditating murderer, upon calculation, knows that his chances of actually being executed are very slight. During the first fifty years of this century, in England and Wales, almost 7,500 murders were known to the police. Yet, because of factors like suicide, non-apprehension, acquittal, insanity, reprieves, etc. only 632 criminals were executed, about one out of twelve. In the U. S. the ratio of homocides to executions is even greater.

Some retentionists claim that the death penalty builds up some sort of "moral abhorrence" in the community for the crime of homicide, the supreme punishment stigmatizing it as the greatest offense. But execution is hardly a moral argument; ethical standards are the products of education and environment, not force.

There appears, then, to be little strength to the argument that the threat of the death penalty deters homicide. Certainly there are even less grounds for upholding the absolute necessity for such a measure.

A more emotional and more antique argument rests upon an expansion of the "eye for an eye" dogma. A crime, they say, warrants a punishment equal to its viciousness. But modern penal theory and greater concern for the individual life strongly dilute these arguments. Britain's Sir John Anderson states, "There is no longer in our regard of the criminal law any recognition of such primitive conceptions as atonement or retribution." A dogmatic, retaliatory instinct cannot justify the ultimate penalty.

Finally, the argument from reformation cannot at all be used by the forces opposing abolition. Death has little reformative influence. Conversely, a reformative theory favors repeal of the penalty, and heavier reliance on corrective institutions.

Recent psychological evidence, furthermore, hints that the threat of execution actually increases the possibility for homicide by appealing to the potential murderer's sense of the spectacular. The criminal mind may be drawn to the celebrity accompanying a murder trial, conducted by a jury with a guillotine in its pocket.

Taking a man's life bears the burden of unquestionable proof. The opponents of abolition fail, therefore, to present such evidence. In a liberal and humanitarian society, the final punishment cannot be justified in the absence of such proof. When the question comes before the people eventually in the form of a referendum, it is to be hoped that they too will realize these considerations.