“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man,” Clint Eastwood’s character said in the 1992 Western Unforgiven. “You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” The statement, made with cold indifference by a hardened killer, underscores the stakes in putting someone to death.
Those stakes are not only born by individuals who take another’s life, either in murder or in self-defense. We as a community face its enormity whenever our government, state or national, executes a convicted person.
Alabama will soon experience that matter twice for the same man. In 2022, the state failed to carry out the death penalty for Kenneth Smith, a convicted murderer. The failure came from trouble with inserting an IV used to administer the most common form of execution in America today: lethal injection. The state tried again Thursday, using a new method of execution known as nitrogen hypoxia. This form of the death penalty involves covering the convicted person’s face with a mask and administering nitrogen gas through it, causing death by oxygen deprivation.
It is right for us not to ignore the moral questions that surround the death penalty. Death does stand apart from other punishments. It stands apart in its finality. A person might receive a pardon or later exoneration from a prison sentence or a fine. But we cannot revive the deceased.
Moreover, execution exists in a league of its own regarding enormity. As said in Unforgiven, killing extinguishes all of a person’s earthly existence. Prison may take away many liberties, and financial penalties can drain bank accounts. But death extinguishes all freedom, all property possession, all terrestrial pursuit of happiness.
We must face these truths as a society. Those truths should make us ask hard questions about the extent and the methods of execution. But those truths should not dissuade us from affirming the death penalty’s status as a constitutional, righteous, and moral form of punishment.
First, the Constitution clearly assumes that the government can use execution in response to certain crimes. The Fifth Amendment describes a grand jury requirement “for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime.” Far from banning the death penalty, it merely makes certain demands for how crimes carrying such a penalty should be handled judicially. The Fifth and 14th Amendments possess clauses saying that no government can deprive a person of “life …without due process of law.” That language assumes that a process does exist under which the government may deprive a person of life. The Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” must be read in the same way. It limits when and how but not whether or not.
Second, our religious background as a country supports a limited, judicious use of execution. After the flood in Genesis, God tells Noah, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Moreover, St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, declares that the magistrate possesses the power of the sword, a clear indication of God-given authority to administer death in the cause of justice.
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Third and finally, morality encourages some form of the death penalty. Governments should not kill for minor infractions. We must have some concept of proportionality. Yet, for the most heinous crimes, legal execution affirms two truths. One, it defends the community, including particular individuals within it, from attack. Second, it declares that the destruction of innocent life can and, at times, should result in reciprocal retribution. For the religious, the Genesis account helps here, too. It notes that men can kill he who sheds blood because of the image of God in all human beings. The murder of another person is an attack on not just persons but on the God in whose image they are fashioned.
In cases such as Smith’s in Alabama, governments and the people must pay careful attention to how to administer the death penalty, doing so without unnecessary pain and suffering. But they should not let the difficulties of the punishment deny its inherent legitimacy nor eliminate its limited application.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.