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Life or death is God’s department, not courts’

Posted: Dec. 18, 2004

Gregory Stanford
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A California jury was forced to play God and to decide whether Scott Peterson should live or die.

Courts around the world have stopped encroaching into the realm of the divine in such a manner. Capital punishment is following the path of slavery, a once common practice that nations forsook as its barbarity sunk in.

Even in the United States, death sentences have dwindled in recent years, as the realization has spread that humans lack an attribute key to deciding whether a person is unworthy of life: infallibility.

The ranks of inmates released from death row around America on account of belatedly proven innocence grew by five this year, among them, by way of example, Ryan Matthews, whom a Louisiana jury had found guilty - beyond a reasonable doubt, mind you - of a murder that took place in 1997, two weeks after he turned 17. DNA evidence has exonerated him of the crime.

To tell the truth, I didn’t follow the Peterson case, due to an aversion to junk news. Of course, the killings were tragic, but not any more than many Milwaukee murders that don’t get a flicker of national play. As it turns out, though, the Peterson case does illustrate a weighty issue: the death penalty, whose fatal flaw is that it pretends that humans are all-wise and all-knowing - in other words, are godly.

Ironically, in taking a life as punishment, humans sink to the depths of common killers rather than soar to the heights of angels.

The theoretical certainty that any death penalty system will include the innocent among its toll is reason enough to oppose the ultimate punishment. But the central reason is that humans must avoid taking lives. Without getting too religious about the matter, that’s God’s department. Remember “Thou shall not kill”?

The death penalty doesn’t bring Wisconsin low, thank goodness. This state wisely scuttled that punishment in the 19th century. Still, all these years later, the introduction of a bill to revise the penalty seems a biennial ritual in Madison.

Advocates label it a crime-fighter - which is false advertising. Ample research shows that the death penalty deters no better than does imprisonment. The Wisconsin statute book, by the way, features a life sentence without parole for first-degree murder.

For all I know, Peterson’s guilty as charged and as convicted, and innocence doesn’t figure in. But a death penalty system that gets it right even 99% of the time isn’t good enough. Snuffing out the lives of the innocent 1% is too steep a price to pay.

The liberation of some death row inmates by new, DNA technology leads to these sobering conclusions:

• That technology would have cleared a share of inmates put to death before it was invented.

• If a percentage of inmates for whom DNA technology happens to be relevant is innocent, then a percentage of inmates for whom DNA technology is not relevant is also innocent. Trouble is, of course, there’s no easy way to sort out this latter batch of innocents.

In a Dec. 9 article, the Chicago Tribune put a human face on the theoretical certainty that capital punishment is claiming innocent lives - the face of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom Texas executed earlier this year for supposedly setting a fire that killed his three daughters. Citing an array of experts, the Trib said he was convicted on the basis of “arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances.” The experts added that the fire may have even been accidental. Willingham, by the way, professed his innocence to the end.

In maintaining a system that puts a Scott Peterson to death, a state is also putting a Cameron Willingham at risk.

The Redwood City jury found Peterson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But how far beyond? If you’re putting a human being to death, 100% certainty would be nice. Unfortunately, the space between reasonable doubt and certainty is big enough to have trapped many innocent people.

Shortly before deciding on death, jurors viewed photos of the decomposing bodies of Laci Peterson and her unborn son.

Scott Peterson’s lack of emotions spoke a thousand words to one juror.

What’s striking is how subjective the choice of death was. Indeed, death penalty data reflects such subjectivity, showing, for instance, that killers of whites are far more likely to be put to death than killers of blacks. (Laci Peterson happened to be of Anglo and Hispanic descent.)

This subjectiveness helps explain the inconsistency in who gets death.

If you’re going to play God, you should have divine traits, such as infallibility and unerring consistency.

From the Dec. 19, 2004, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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