Death Penalty Arguments

* Re “The Death Penalty: Who Wins When the State Sanctions Killing?” Ventura County Perspective, July 23.

Professor Nathan Tierney’s sincere opposition to the death penalty is an unintended argument against state coercion and criminal punishment of any sort. He appeals, as one often does when no rational argument can be mustered, to the emotions of “our children.” They will know that it is “OK to kill as long as you do it legally.” Therefore, he concludes, the death penalty must be opposed.

By that same line of reasoning, of course, the children will also know that it is OK to lock someone in prison for the rest of his life and deprive him of life’s fundamental pleasures as long as you do it legally. Or is Tierney opposed to imprisonment too?

The children will also know that it is OK to use force, if necessary, to take a person’s property to give to someone else and to curtail a person’s liberty for the “greater good” as long as you do it legally. Or is Tierney opposed to taxation and environmental regulation, for example?

At the same time, with that intellectual perspicacity, those children will also know the difference between killing someone and killing someone who has killed, just as they will know the difference between killing someone in cold blood and (legally) killing someone in self-defense.

As Tierney states, even the most brutal killer was an innocent child once. But the killer is being punished for his voluntary choice of conduct, not for his original state. Even a child will know that. That choice of conduct has resulted in the death of someone, perhaps a still-innocent child who now will never have the opportunity to undergo the same moral epiphany about the death penalty as professor Tierney did.

As the great ethicist Immanuel Kant would tell us, by killing an innocent, the killer has freely willed the ethical rightness of his own death at the hands of society. It becomes society’s ethical duty to execute him.

Tierney is correct in that no one should take another’s life cheerfully for transient reasons. Would that the killer had thought of that before murdering his victim.

JOERG KINPPRATH

Professor of Law

Southwestern University

School of Law

Los Angeles