Capital Punishment Essay: Death Penalty Can be Fair, and Fun!

The Death Penalty Can be Fair    Every American should want fairness in all areas of public policy - this is especially true with regard to the death penalty, since the stakes are high. But the opponents of the death penalty make a most peculiar argument about fairness. They argue that if the death penalty is not administered fairly, and especially administered with racial fairness, it must be abolished.    Nobody would even think of trying to apply this principle in a consistent way. If we find that black neighborhoods get less police protection than white neighborhoods, would we withdraw cops from both black and white neighborhoods? If banks are discriminating against black home buyers in mortgage lending, would we demand they stop all mortgage lending? If we find the IRS discriminating against middle-class and poor taxpayers, would we want to abolish the IRS? All right, that does have an attraction, but nobody is seriously suggesting it.    What do the opponents of the death penalty say should replace it? Life imprisonment, perhaps? But there is no reason to believe this penalty is more fairly imposed than the death penalty. So are we going to knock the maximum down to 10 years? If so, we face the same problem.    In addition to the philosophical incoherence of the argument, the empirical reality of racial disparity in capital punishment is a lot more complicated than simplistic notions about racism run riot in the criminal justice system would lead you to believe. It's important here to understand that the opponents of the death penalty make two different arguments about racial fairness, and they are flatly contradictory.    The first thing that we see when we start looking at statistics is... ...pital defendants are a highly self-selected and hardly unbiased group.    So what we have, in the way of hard statistical evidence, fails to support the politically correct fantasy of massive discrimination. Is the death penalty administered with perfect fairness? No. Is it administered as fairly as other public policies, and especially as fairly as other criminal sanctions? Yes.    Public officials should work to make the system even fairer. In particular, better provision could be made for an effective defense in capital cases. And I think that a revival of executive clemency (which has fallen into disuse) in cases where a jury is perceived to have been too harsh would be a good thing. But the notion that unfairness, and particularly racial unfairness, requires the end of the death penalty makes neither philosophical nor empirical sense.