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Remember the wild teenage weekends spent camping and sharing bottles of coffee brandy stolen from Grandma’s liquor cabinet? How about cutting class in high school to head to the quarry for an impromptu cliff-jumping session? Or what about the time you and some friends hid behind the hedge on Main Street and pegged passing traffic with rocks? OK, so these are my memories I’m projecting as the universal stereotype of adolescence, but they all fall under the same heading: youthful indiscretions. No doubt, you can add your own hilarious hijinks to the list. So, too, can the Supreme Court of the United States; two weeks ago, the Court voted 5-to-4 to add murder to the list of youthful indiscretions by nullifying the death penalty for underage killers.
The Court ruled that executing minor murderers violates the Eight Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” My question is this: When is executing any human being not “cruel and unusual?” The decision has the Supreme Court split, with Justice Antonin Scalia lambasting his fellow justices for implying that “American law should conform to the laws of the rest of the world.” What should be an issue of the basest of human rights – the right to life – has been cemented as a political volleyball. This isn’t an issue of religious beliefs or politics. Instead, it is a reflection of the absurdity with which we govern ourselves as a society. We accept that humans are fallible beings who frequently make mistakes and improper decisions, even when confronted with evidence that directly refutes our position. We are a biased and highly subjective species. With this in mind, why do we think that we have the authority to make the ultimate decision with regards to a person’s life?
Condemning a person to death is an irreversible decision. I’ve yet to run into someone who’s been resurrected, and I’m quite sure medical science won’t harness the technology of reanimation in the near future. To have such a sentence handed down by one human to another is simply illogical. If even one innocent man has been the victim of unjust capital punishment, then the death penalty has failed us all. The argument that the death penalty is the ultimate deterrent against murder is certainly solid, until one realizes that this argument is a straw man raised to move attention away from the pertinent issue – that of our fallibility as humans. Imperfect and subjective humans should never be tasked with deciding whether another human has the right to live or die. I’m not sure if some omnipotent god-figure granted each of us life, but I do know that I was never given the right to take another human’s life. Even if we exist in an infinite random universe that operates with the imprecision of a craps table, there exists no rule book that states that I have the ability to remove others from the game as I see fit.
Debating the nuances of the death penalty is akin to debating whether or not it is better to have the right leg amputated over the left. Either way, the handicap is the same. In this same way, we shift the debate from the entire issue of capital punishment to its meaningless details. Rationalizing state-sanctioned murder in exchange for another murder is folly, and it highlights the tragic irony with which we exist as social beings. Until we can be sure – without exception – that convicted killers really are killers, support of capital punishment is support of a mechanism of death that may be applied in error. Incarcerate the convicted killers and let your god sort out their fate at a later date. Supreme Court justices are made of the same imperfect flesh and bone as you and I. Let’s hope they keep that in mind they next time they rule on capital punishment.
Aaron Barnes is senior English major.
