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IS THE DEATH PENALTY A DETERRENT?

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LONDON, Jan 16 2011 (IPS) - When I was about fourteen, my mother took me to the black funeral home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to see the body of Robert Lee Sauls, who had been executed in the electric chair for killing a white man who came upon him as he was sleeping in a car parked off the road in the man’s field. I don’t remember what, if anything, my mother said about the affair, whether she took me with her as a life lesson, or whether I was simply taken along as she paid her respects and prayed for the man’s soul.

But I knew Sauls had been executed for his crime. That knowledge was the furthest thing from my teenage mind in 1961 when I missed my bus home one evening and, desperate to change my dead-ended life, made a rash decision to hold up the bank in the shopping center where I worked as a janitor. The robbery was botched before it really began, and as events spun out of control in its aftermath, in a panic I killed teller Julia Ferguson. It never entered my mind when I walked into the bank that I would hurt anyone, much less that I would take a life.

I spent twelve years condemned to die by all-white male juries in three successive trials before the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision briefly abolished the death penalty. I was resentenced to life imprisonment in 1973. I won a new trial in 2000 and on January 15, 2005, was convicted of manslaughter, which carried a maximum sentence of twenty-one years. Since I had already served forty-four years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, I was freed on the spot. Louisiana is very tough on criminals.

Not only are they executed, but Louisiana locks up more of them per capita than any other state in the U.S., and makes them serve the longest prison terms in the world. If severe punishment mattered, Louisiana would be the safest state in the U.S.; instead, it consistently ranks as the most murderous. Nonetheless, politicians love the death penalty because it allows them to address the issue of crime and violence with quick and easy rhetoric, leading a fearful and gullible public to falsely believe that executing someone will “send a message” to criminals that their acts will not be tolerated, and that the criminals will then stop committing crimes. This makes the public feel good, but it does not deter crime. Deterrence is the end result of a reasoning process. If we are thinking rationally, we avoid behaviors or situations that will cause us pain and suffering.

The problem is that most violent crimes are not committed by rational-thinking people. They are committed by people who are walking time bombs because of frustration, rage, despair, desperation, and an inability to solve their life problems. Even people who are normally rational can lose control of fierce emotions and kill: there is the jealous man who kills his spouse, the disgruntled employee who returns to the workplace to kill his boss or his colleagues, the battered wife who just canÂ’t take it anymore and kills her sleeping husband, or the fearful hold-up artist who reacts with deadly force to his victim unexpectedly reaching for a weapon to defend himself. Understanding that most violence is driven by emotion does not in any way excuse it or absolve the culprit of responsibility, but it does explain why the death penalty does not deter it.

The best example I know of that points up the ineffectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is the case of C. Murray Henderson, who, highly educated, was the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary before he left to become Commissioner of Corrections for Tennessee, where his job was to oversee the state’s entire prison system. If anyone could have been deterred by the prospect of the death penalty, it should have been the 78-year-old Henderson, who spent all of his professional life in the business of punishing criminals and who had intimate knowledge of life in prison and on death row. Yet his emotions overpowered his rational mind one morning in 1997, and he shot his wife Anne five times as she sat in the back parlor of their plantation home in St. Francisville, Louisiana. She survived. Henderson went to prison, where he died several years later. Deterrence is a myth with universal appeal, but nowhere is the fallacy of it better illustrated than in the kill-or-be-killed world of gangs and drug-trafficking, where violence and the death penalty are extra-judiciously imposed for transgressions. The executioner is not a prison medical technician who slips the lethal needle in the offender’s arm but a drive-by shooter or hit-man. Yet, the prospect of getting slaughtered does nothing to deter those aspiring gangsters waiting to step into the shoes of the fallen. Of all the murderers I met during my forty-four years in prison, not one had thought about the death penalty before or while committing the crime that sent him to prison or to death row. Such forethought takes place in the minds of coolly reflective individuals, for whom the notion of punishing one person to scare others makes perfect sense. But it doesnÂ’t apply to most violent behavior, which is committed by individuals caught in a maelstrom of emotions, insensible to the consequences of their actions.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*)

Wilbert Rideau is author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, a memoir. While in prison, he became a journalist and won some of AmericaÂ’s most prestigious journalism awards, including a George Polk Award and the American Bar AssociationÂ’s Silver Gavel.

 
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