Pacifism, Capital Punishment, and Saddam

This past summer, I spent a week shingling a friend’s house in central Wisconsin. It could have been the heat (roofing isn’t the best idea during a heat wave), or it may have just been the 12 hours a day spent on the roof, but somewhere along the lines we decided it would be a good way to pass the time by talking about politics.

Big mistake.

We started off OK: Between the four of us we determined that we agreed on pretty much every issue. Then we got to the death penalty. Six hours and one un-shingled roof later we went inside to cool off from the heat, and the politics.

The death penalty is one of those issues that you just don’t bring up at the dinner table or with close friends, unless you’re 100% positive that they agree with you. Unless you’re a syndicated columnist, because we all just like to argue.

However, this became a big deal this week as it was announced that Saddam Hussein will be executed for his many crimes against humanity (pending appeal). This is a very interesting thing to think about. If I were a betting man, I’m thinking that the percent of Americans against the death penalty is quite different then the amount of Americans against Hussein being executed. As in, a lot less.

The logic of this makes sense; Saddam killed many more people and committed much worse crimes than anyone we have on death row. However, the leading groups opposing the death penalty don’t agree.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) website, “The death penalty is the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights.” Taking a page from them is Amnesty International stating, “The death penalty is the ultimate denial of civil liberties.” It’s almost like the DNC sends out talking points memos to different organizations instructing them on what to say (i.e. repeating “choice” as many times as you can when talking about abortion, calling our enemies “insurgents” rather than terrorists, etc.).

I don’t expect you to take the opinions of these two organizations too seriously; Amnesty was the group that called the United States a major violator of human rights because of its support of the death penalty, as well as having its secretary general Irene Khan call the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay the “gulag of our times.” Now I’m no history expert (I don’t graduate till 2009), but I recall reading somewhere that the Soviet Union murdered millions in their concentration camps. At last check the United States was hovering around zero.

Anyways though, are these groups right to condemn capital punishment in America? Yes…if they’re pacifists.

If you truly believe that the death penalty is wrong, in this country; then you are forced to take a pacifist position.

A pacifist believes, among other things, that to go to war is absolutely wrong and should never be done because it results in violence and the killing of people. Even guilty people. Is this not the same idea that fuels people against the death penalty? To be against the death-penalty but in support of any war in all of history is inconsistent. Every person facing the death penalty has committed a gruesome murder and/or rape. Very few enemies on the field of battle have done this sort of crime, so to believe we are justified in killing an enemy soldier but not a criminal is inconsistent.

Anti-death penalty advocates will say, of course not. They are against capital punishment because “innocent people are killed” or “Jesus wouldn’t sentence people to death”. But this logic just doesn’t make sense. Innocent people are killed in each and every single action war in the history of the world. Are they against World War II? How about the American Revolution? A lot of people that are against the death penalty are Christians; are they against the wars of the Old Testament that God oversaw and commanded?

When our society puts someone to death, they use every available resource to absolutely prove that that person is guilty; that they’ve committed murder. The prosecutors dig up all the evidence they can find in order to convict them, it is presented to an impartial jury, and the person on trial is given a proper defense. On the other hand, none of this happens when we go to war. In World War II, we sought out and killed German and Japanese soldiers. We also killed innocent civilians from these countries, and we knew we were doing it. And virtually everyone in this country is grateful of that today. There is no trial, there is no jury. We were at war against a great enemy, and we did what we had to in order to defeat them.

We are at war with another enemy in our country today, and that enemy is murderers and other criminals. In this war, however, we grant our enemies defense lawyers and we do our very best to show that they are absolutely guilty. And if there is even a shadow of a doubt, we do not execute them.

Nobody can deny that there is far more doubt about whether everyone we are killing in war is guilty then there is about when we execute someone on death row. We obviously don’t have the capabilities to try every person we kill during war, yet we do when it is a murder in our own country. So when will this country begin to give the benefit of the doubt to our policemen and prosecutors like we do to our soldiers?

Jarrett Skorup is a student at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is a student fellow for The Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College. You can contact him here.