The death penalty

In a move that surprised practically everyone, including most Nebraska residents, the Unicameral last week abolished the death penalty in Nebraska. As expected, the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, playing politics as usual, vetoed the bill and it went back to the Unicameral for an override vote. It would take 30 votes to override and that's exactly how many they got. The override passed, 30-19.

The reason this was so surprising is that Nebraska is one of the most Republican dominated states in the country. Practically every state and federal office is held by a Republican as are most county and local offices and Republicans across the country have been pro-death penalty for years. So how did this happen?

The main reason is the death penalty has never been effective in deterring crime. There are two kinds of deterrent factors at work; general deterrence and specific deterrence. General deterrence occurs when one person decides not to commit a crime because of what happened to another person. So, in practice, if potential murderers see other murderers get executed, it will convince them not to murder. General deterrence as a prevention for murder has never worked because people of that persuasion are either convinced they're not going to get caught or don't care if they get caught. On top of that, the death penalty is used so seldom that its potential value in preventing future murders is lost in time.

The Republican co-sponsor of the bill, Colby Coash, pointed out that Nebraska hasn't executed an inmate since 1997 and was quoted as saying that "If any other program was as inefficient and as costly as this has been, we would have gotten rid of it a long time ago."

The second kind of deterrence is specific deterrence. That means that the punishment for committing a crime is so heinous that those who do it won't do it again. Theoretically, the effectiveness rate for capital punishment is 100% because if those people are executed, it's certain that they won't commit additional murders. But there's a down side to this too because our American system of justice is far from being perfect. It's not unusual for innocent people to be convicted of committing crimes and this holds for murder as well. In fact, since 1973, 153 death row inmates have been exonerated of their crimes and, amazingly, the average number of years between being sentenced and being exonerated is 11.3 years. That means they spent over a decade in prison for a murder they didn't commit before the mistake was discovered and they were released. The number of exonerations where DNA was responsible was 20.

We've long had a belief in our system of justice that it's better for a hundred guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be incarcerated. But the facts fly in the face of that belief. If the system locks someone up who's later proven to be innocent, at least they can apologize, pat him or her on the back and release them but that's not possible with capital punishment. Once a person is executed the deed is done and nothing can take it back.

Another thing to consider are the countries who still execute their citizens compared to the countries that don't. You might be surprised to know the ten countries that carried out the most executions in 2013. They are:

China

Iran

Iraq

Japan

North Korea

Saudi Arabia

Somalia

Sudan

USA

Yemen

Except for the USA, these are not very progressive countries. These are not leaders in world affairs. Not many countries want to be like them. Noticeably absent are all of our allies around the world; Great Britain, France, Germany the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Australia, etc.

Most of these countries have banned capital punishment altogether and the few that still employ it use it sparingly. Europe was execution-free in 2013 and Belarus, the only country in the region to still impose capital punishment, sentenced four people to death.

As a former police officer and a Criminal Justice professor for over 30 years, I have always been against the death penalty. It's barbaric, it's applied discriminatorily, and it doesn't work to deter other people from committing murder. Life in prison without the possibility of parole is much more effective at deterring crime and if we find out, as we often do, that the justice system made a mistake, we can at least let them go.

The only defensible argument for the death penalty is vengeance and a modern, sophisticated country like ours should have gotten past that long ago!