At a time when Americans are increasingly opposed to the death penalty and states are increasingly ending the practice, some others are returning to firing squads as an execution method. The recent law change by South Carolina was in response to the difficulty the state has had in finding lethal injection drugs. It’s an issue that, in itself, should awaken these lawmakers to the fact that capital punishment is on its way out in America — and needs to go.
Even as liberals and conservatives seem to be more polarized than ever on most issues, they’ve actually been moving closer together regarding capital punishment, according to polls. This appears largely the result of conservatives concluding that government-sponsored executions fly in the face of such stalwart conservative principles as limited government power, “pro-life” activism and fiscal responsibility (since the necessary legal process to get to an execution is ultimately more expensive than permanent imprisonment).
People of all political persuasions can’t ignore the hard facts: Capital punishment has never been shown to serve as a deterrent to violent crime. The ultimate penalty is unfairly applied, with minority defendants more likely to be condemned than white defendants in the same circumstances. And the fact that DNA evidence has proven the innocence of scores of death row inmates makes it likely that innocent people have been executed in the past — and that such unacceptable injustice is likely to happen again.
This may be why polls have shown that support for capital punishment among Americans as a whole has dropped below 50% when the other option is life imprisonment without chance of parole. In some Republican-leaning states like Ohio, bipartisan efforts are underway to drop the death penalty from the books entirely, with Republicans backing those efforts as legitimate expressions of conservatism.
Yet South Carolina now is joining Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah as the only states to offer the firing squad as a method of death. Like other death penalty states, South Carolina has had trouble procuring the drugs necessary for lethal injection because the pharmaceutical companies that make them are increasingly hesitant to have their products used to kill humans. South Carolina’s legislature and governor responded with the new law forcing death row inmates to choose between the electric chair and a firing squad.
The argument could be made that employing such a bloody execution method, as opposed to the comparatively sterile method of lethal injection, might at least drive home to execution witnesses just how barbaric the entire enterprise of state-sponsored killing truly is.
But whatever the method, the fact remains that most of the advanced world has long since rejected capital punishment as a concept, and the U.S. should as well. It doesn’t deter crime, it cannot be administered fairly, and it brings society down to the level of the killers it executes.