Death Penalty & Law: A Broken Marriage

So I haven’t blogged about anything law related in a while. It hasn’t really been a conscious choice, I just haven’t been inspired. And I do not want to publish crap you don't want to read. But my two seminars have been interesting: Tax Policy & Death Penalty.

Now I’m not going to take-on the impossible task of making a tax policy editorial interesting, yet. But the death penalty carries its own cache of controversy. Most people instinctually are either “for” or “against” capital punishment. I would guess that most of you have had a debate or two about the subject. And I’ve witnessed two friends kick the crap out of each other after drunkenly arguing the merits of capital punishment.

Law school, for all of its faults, usually facilitates a deeper and more searching discussion of controversial topics. The ‘language of law’ constructs a forum and provides the tools for an open debate. You get a chance to dig beneath the emotional reactions and get to the devilish details. Legal education breads cynicism, creating students who are often openly hostile toward any sort of emotional argument.



Unfortunately, this “deeper searching” just leads to further frustration when you find out that the best legal minds are just using fancier words to have the same kind of debate. Lawyers argue about procedure and evidentiary rules as a pretext to discussions about basic principles of reliability and justice. Judges opine about due process and remand on evidentiary disputes, when they should attempt to cure the pervasive racism that cuts at the roots of “equal protection.”

The more I learn about the death penalty, the less I like it. And I did not have a high opinion of it in the first place. Every aspect of the capital punishment system needs serious reform.

Maybe someday America will join the rest of the developed world and ban the dehumanizing practice. Maybe the Supreme Court will strike-down the death penalty on 8th Amendment grounds. Maybe there will be enough broad-based support to amend the Constitution.

Maybe, but I’m not putting any money on it.