Once again, the debate over capital punishment is raging, driven by the staggering incompetence of Tennessee’s would-be prison executioners, who have repeatedly failed to kill Christa Pike for a murder she committed 30 years ago, and by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s shocking announcement that the military plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood mass shooter Major Nidal Hasan.
Largely missing, as usual, is the question that ought to be paramount in the mind of any citizen considering the wisdom of a government practice or policy: what is the death penalty for?
Clearly, killing killers is not about keeping society safe from convicted murderers. Serial killer Ted Bundy escaped from jail twice in 1977. The 2015 Dannemora break by Richard Matt and David Sweat in upstate New York, Danelo Cavalcante’s escape in Pennsylvania in 2023 and parts of the Texas Seven escape in 2000 all made news precisely because 99.999% of murderers remain behind bars. A 2024 study found that about 91% of overall escapees were back in custody within a year, most within a week.
Proponents repeatedly argue that the ultimate punishment serves as a deterrent. But if you visit a prison and talk to murderers—as I have—you will quickly learn that the vast majority of heinous crimes are committed by young men in their teens and 20s, typically under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, and often driven by the need for money to buy more drugs. By the time these offenders are in their 40s or 50s, they are entirely different people who would never do anything like that again if they were released.
Murder, by the way, has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the criminal justice system.
For a deterrent to work, a person considering a violent act has to be in a reasonably calm and rational state of mind. When Christa Pike and her two accomplices committed murder in the 1990s, she had convinced herself that the victim was plotting to steal her boyfriend. She was a drug addict at the time. It is fair to surmise that she never stopped to consider the possibility that she might end up behind bars, much less subjected to lethal injection. Like most murderers, she did something crazy while she was crazy.
There is no credible evidence that executions prevent murders—by reoffenders or anyone else—that long imprisonment would not prevent. There is also no good evidence for the opposite, liberal claim that executions cause more murders by cheapening life. The data do not support treating deterrence as a demonstrated benefit of the death penalty.
Retribution, then, remains the sole credible justification for executing citizens who commit murder or treason. Some killings are so disgusting, some people believe, that death is the only appropriate punishment. Families of some victims argue that it is an offense to them that their loved one is gone forever while the person who killed that loved one continues to draw breath; they yearn for closure.
Should the feelings of victims’ families trump serious political and ethical considerations—such as whether the state, an entity that is supposed to exemplify, embody, and define the best rather than the worst behavior among human beings, should kill other human beings? We cannot ignore the well-established historical record of a country that repeatedly convicts people of capital offenses, only to determine later that they were innocent all along.
Even if the state were to become incredibly efficient and effective at identifying guilty parties and executing them in a more civilized fashion than in the Pike and Hasan cases, the much-wanted closure argument collapses upon inspection.
A study analyzing news accounts of 138 executions carried out between 2006 and 2011 found that only 31% of relatives quoted said the execution brought closure, healing, or a step toward either, and 35% said they felt it represented justice. About 19% said it brought neither closure nor positive feelings. Thirteen percent said capital punishment was too easy.
A separate 2014 study of relatives who witnessed executions found that only 23% even mentioned closure, and those who did were evenly split on whether they had gotten it.
For those who subscribe to the Old Testament structure requiring an eye for an eye, the justification for state-sanctioned vengeance seems self-evident. If you are a practical American citizen fairly weighing the usefulness of this practice, however, there is not much point to the death penalty.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
