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3 The Death Penalty Introduction Discussions about the death penalty seem fewer and less volatile than in years past. Reasons for this include, but are not limited to, shifting attitudes about the death penalty and more pressing needs demanding attention, such as a continuing focus on abortion in some areas of the world and on war in others. However, the death penalty remains a critical moral issue, in part because it involves the state’s ability to kill its own people as well as visiting citizens from other countries, provided that the latter have transgressed some law that permits capital punishment. There are relatively few countries and states that practice capital punishment, but their scarcity is irrelevant.1 What matters is the fact that the state, which already wields enormous power over regular folks, can impose the ultimate punishment of death on certain individuals if the state so desires. The fact that the state is entitled to kill individuals should be a matter of moral concern for any reasonable person. Unlike the other chapters and topics on death—with the notable exception of war—this chapter deals with the state’s actions more than it does with what individuals do. Of course, the state is comprised of individuals, but when someone is to be put to death, it is the state that claims authority to do it. Abortion, euthanasia, and other deaths are generally considered to be personal or individual actions with which the state should not interfere or should engage only to help people rather than to intervene intentionally to kill them. 1. Depending on whether you count Taiwan, there are either 195 or 196 countries in the world today, and 140 of them have abolished the death penalty. For the death penalty statistic see “The Death Penalty Worldwide,” Infoplease, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777460.html. 101 Steffen Ethical discussions about state-sponsored execution usually focus on capital punishment. A person who has committed some grave offense is subjected to arrest, trial, and conviction and then sentenced to death, with the actual execution being the end result of a legal process. In a formal sense, then, the death penalty refers to a legalized state-sponsored killing inflicted deliberately and intentionally on human beings as a punishment for some offense. But the execution power claimed by political communities is broader than a reference to “capital punishment” for crime might indicate, for political communities of one sort or another have claimed an execution power from time immemorial to cover all kinds of offenses that by our ordinary moral lights do not merit death. The Hebrew Bible allows that a child who curses a parent may be taken out of the city and stoned, so the capital offense need not be criminal. Hitler authorized the killing of thousands—millions—of persons on what were believed to be “racial” grounds, so there was no “offense” or crime involved except the contingency of individuals belonging to an ethnic-religious group irrationally out of favor with the ruling authority. The execution power, distinct from capital punishment, can creep into such situations. Capital punishment is actually a more restricted way of talking about the execution power, although it is an instance of it. When we refer to the death penalty or capital punishment, we are focusing attention on a legal process that results in the imposition of a death sentence for crime—the worst crimes, such as murder—under the rule of law. This is important to note because communities have at times assumed the execution power and killed individuals who were believed to pose some threat to their community—think of the thousands of lynchings that occurred in the United States as white vigilantes killed black citizens often for no reason other than to terrorize the black community. This was not capital punishment, but it most certainly was the execution power being exercised against those believed to be threatening to the social order and community values. Capital punishment is held to be a justified killing inflicted for crimes of such gravity that the offender has forfeited a fundamental right to life. States where executions are permitted hold that law can demand the offender’s life on behalf of society as recompense or retribution for the offense. When death sentences are carried out, a society acts through its legal system and by means of an authorized machinery of execution to confront an individual and deliver death by a legalized procedure that is also an act...

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