BackThe Death Penalty: A Double
Standard For Murder
By
Theresa Torricellas
E-Mail
An fundamental flaw of the
death penalty is that it sets a lower standard of moral conduct for the
government than the
government imposes via criminal law standards on its individual citizens. The
actual act of imposing the death penalty is an act of intentional homicide: the
unnatural, but deliberate taking of human life, which is neither justified or
excused under ordinary criminal law concepts of accident, negligence, necessity
or duress, or in defense of self, others, or one's country. Neither does the
conduct come under the concept of manslaughter or "heat of passion."
The government can't claim it is a
juvenile who has not yet developed the capacity to distinguish between right and
wrong though it arguably might plead "insanity" or
''idiocy" as a possible defense to its crimes of murder when imposing and
carrying out the death penalty. Imposition of the death penalty amounts to cold blooded,
callous, premeditated murder.
I fail to comprehend the validity
of cold-blooded, unnecessary murder, under the auspice of governmental sanction
and authority. If the government were a "person," the conduct carried
out before and during an execution would never be tolerated. This conduct would
be sanctioned as
criminal conduct, commonly known as premeditated, unjustified, unexcused and
unmitigated murder.
Shall our government be allowed to stoop to murder? Shall those in government, or we as citizens who the government purports to represent, be willing to tolerate, support and turn a blind eye to the fact the government is actually committing "murder" when imposing the death penalty? This type of murder would never be tolerated by the government if it were an independent act carried out by an individual citizen.
Of all the various alleged
"reasons" and purported justifications and rationalizations relied on
in support of government imposition of the death penalty, not one of them, nor
even all of them combined would be sufficient to legally excuse an individual
citizen from culpability and sanction for "murder" if s/he commit the
very same conduct committed by government when imposing the death penalty. Is it
"reasonable" to say that we should hold our individual citizens to one
standard of conduct, while simultaneously lowering the standard of conduct for
the government, so that "We, the people" may legally commit murder,
despite the fact it be an extremely serious criminal offense when committed by
individual citizens?
The only intelligent solution to
this contradiction in the scheme of things is to raise the standards of conduct
applied by the government in imposing criminal sanctions, so that it not be
permitted to commit murder under the guise of legally imposed punishment.
At best, the death penalty is a
ruse and guise for "murder" committed under the cloak of legality, as
an outlet for anti-social, primitive or base retaliatory urges of those
who would commit murder, or have it committed, but who do not wish to carry the
personal and legal responsibility, nor the public stigma for having personally
committed it. The foul stink of this crude, heinous and immoral conduct attaches
itself to the fabric of our community conscience, marking us as the primitive,
barbaric society that we truly are, despite pretexts to the contrary!
The low moral standard of allowing the imposition of the death penalty as a common criminal sanction serves as a blight on the government, those serving in it, and those it serves. When will "We, the people" start to hold the government accountable at the level of moral standards, conduct and expectations, that "We, the people" hold for ourselves, the individual members of society, and imposed on every member through the government, by the application of criminal law? When this can be accomplished, our government will be more closely aligned with the higher moral conscience and principles that ought to guide it.