Predicting the Death of Capital Punishment

Despite some surveys suggesting that the death penalty still enjoys a fair amount of support in America, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell argue in “Who Owns Death?” that this ultimate form of punishment is on its way out.

Laying out “the fact of actual executions” is the main point of “Who Owns Death?” In eloquently grim detail, Lifton, a psychiatrist, and Mitchell, Lifton’s co-author for “Hiroshima in America,” indict the randomness and cruelty of executions and the heavy burden they place on the souls of those men and women who prosecute, defend and sit as judges and jurors, and those who participate in the process of putting someone to death--prison guards, clergymen and physicians.

Public opinion polls, the authors concede, still show that more than half of all Americans support the death penalty. There are two principal reasons, they add, why the polls don’t present the entire truth about the issue. The first is that recent polls actually show a drop in public support; the second is that, when informed about life without possibility of parole as a punishment, people polled are increasingly interested in that as an alternative to execution.

Lifton and Mitchell cite a recent poll by the rigorously nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, which found that of 2,000 Californians given a choice between execution and life without the possibility of parole for those convicted of first-degree murder, 49% chose death--but 47% chose life without parole. They quote from the institute’s study that, though attitudes haven’t shifted significantly, “opinions are not as hard on this issue as we might have thought they were.” They believe that public opinion will shift more heavily in favor of life without the possibility of parole as more people come to understand that this option in punishment is available.

Until that shift occurs, however, the authors concede that “there appears to be a need to keep capital punishment in place, for now.” “Doing so,” they write, “provides a collective vision of toughness and revenge, along with an all-pervasive illusion of control. . . . People can feel that this is the right thing for true justice--until they are exposed to the fact of actual executions and, currently, the alarming rise in the number of executions.”

Changing peoples’ attitudes includes exposing them to the increasing evidence that some innocent people are being convicted and sent to death row. Lifton and Mitchell point to the conclusive ability of DNA tests to exonerate; they note the release of prisoners after new evidence has been uncovered. On the political front, they also cite the action of Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois in ordering a moratorium on executions in his state after the Chicago Tribune published evidence showing that the death penalty cases were, as Ryan put it, “fraught with error.”

Though Lifton and Mitchell believe that the trend in law and public opinion is against the death penalty, they do not minimize the difficulties in getting their views generally adopted. One obstacle to getting a fair hearing for their views, however, is the circumstances of convicted Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh. “McVeigh,” they write, “is an ultimate test of anyone’s psychological capacity to oppose execution.”

As a possible way out, they note the observation of death penalty opponent Hugo Bedau, who would be willing to let the system execute a few mass killers like McVeigh if it would refrain from executing all others. This is an exception rather like what the Israelis accepted for the execution of Adolf Eichmann, even though Israeli law generally bans capital punishment.

The greatest flaw in “Who Owns Death?” is its title, which is based on a notion that the death penalty debate is over the question of whether the state “owns” the right to put others to death. The question is an overly intellectual, all-too-fancy academic concept that detracts from the sheer power of the authors’ argument on what is essentially a political question. Nonetheless, Lifton and Mitchell have powerfully advanced an argument about growing public skepticism toward the death penalty in America in this important book.