Editorial
Thou Shalt Not Kill
If you believe the juries, it’s hard to get weepy about Philip Ray Workman and Robert Glen Coe. Workman held up a Wendy’s restaurant in 1981 for drug money, but wound up killing a cop instead. As for Coe, he raped and sodomized an 8-year-old girl named Cary Ann Medlin in 1979 in rural West Tennessee. After she told him “Jesus loves you,” he stabbed her to death with a pocketknife.
Time has run out for both men. This week, the endless game that death row inmates play of filing appeal after appeal to delay their executions came to an end. For the first time since 1960, the state will recommence its love affair with capital punishment. First up is Coe, who is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection on Oct. 19. Workman will be executed some time later.
The announcement that we will soon be killing prisoners again was made by the state Attorney General, Paul Summers, who described the entire affair as “sobering and somber.” He might as well have added “wrong, immoral, barbaric, and a hallmark of an uncivil society.”
Capital punishment is unfair. Those convicted of capital punishment are disproportionately poor, and as a result, receive poor representation. Both Coe and Workman, for instance, did not have the resources to buy good counsel at their trials; it is inarguable that this played a role in their receiving the death penalty. (See “Killing Time,” Nashville Scene, Sept. 23, 1999, at http://archives.nashvillescene.com.)
Of course, the same element of unfairness applies, say, to D.U.I. laws. If you can afford a good lawyer, you have a better chance of avoiding conviction, even if you were undoubtedly drunk and behind the wheel. The fact is that the element of unfairness applies in small degrees to all criminal cases—the richer you are, the more likely you will get good counsel, and receive a lesser sentence. Unfairness is, in fact, something that cannot be escaped. Basically, we have to live with it. But when it comes to capital punishment, the element of unfairness has to be considered because the stakes are so huge. After all, we’re talking about taking a human life. And the best way to deal with it is to choose not to execute people.
Capital punishment has not been shown to reduce crime. About all capital punishment does is provide society with a dose of revenge. But revenge is something we shouldn’t appeal to. Revenge is a primitive emotion, a short-lived prescription. Revenge is not a reason to take a life.
Capital punishment has made its way back into our society after a long hiatus. It appeals to the howling mob. It finds emotional traction in the victims’ rights movement. It has gotten the political classes so wound up that almost every elected official in this country voices support for it.
Opposing the death penalty, however, is easy. It is as simple as starting with this notion: Killing people is wrong.
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