by Allison Lee
TW: DEATH PENALTY. I am by no means trying to force my opinion regarding capital punishment onto you. This is simply my stance on the issue and if you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to click out.
Different year, same injustice—it’s a cruel cosmic joke placed upon us.
Well over half a year has passed since the events of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, and while some of our Instagram feeds may still find activism accounts scattered across it, many screens have reverted to fashion poses and pet pictures. While there is nothing wrong with double-tapping the adorable puppy standing on his hind legs, here’s a reminder: Just because your feed is back to normal doesn’t mean black lives no longer matter.
The unfair arrests and incarcerations of black people (especially in the United States) are nothing new to the world. However, news of a larger concern started flaring up over social media last month—the unjust sentencing of black people to the death penalty.
Before we delve into the whole debate about the ethics of the death penalty, I would like to bring to your attention the undeserving fate of George Stinney Jr., the youngest person to have been executed via the electric chair in the 20th century. George was accused of killing two white girls (Betty, who was eleven, and Mary, who was seven). Keep in mind that George’s story takes place in 1944 when discrimination was high and the jurors were white. It comes as no surprise that though George kept his hands firmly on a bible throughout the trial insisting on his innocence, his trial lasted only two hours, with the verdict announced ten minutes thereafter. Then, the boy was confined to a solitary cell for more than eighty days, banned from seeing his parents or a lawyer. George was only fourteen when he drew his final breath, right before he was electrocuted with 5380 volts to the head.
I think you know where this story is going: Seventy years after his execution, George was proved innocent by a South Carolina judge. Evidence concluded that George could not have single-handedly lifted the beam that brought about the demise of the two girls. What does this tell us? George was not sentenced to death for a crime (that he didn’t even commit), his fate was sealed because of his skin color.
It pains me to say that George’s case has been repeated throughout the years. One such Brandon Bernard—who was coaxed into erasing evidence at a crime scene when he was eighteen—met the same fate via lethal injection on 10 December 2020 despite all the efforts on social media to fight for his innocence. The courtroom once again mirrored that of George’s, with eleven out of twelve jurors being white. When his case made it to the Supreme Court, every conservative judge on the bench voted for his execution in a 6 to 3 ruling, inevitably stamping the seal of his death. A later survey showed that five of the nine surviving jurors agree the death penalty was too harsh of a punishment.
What’s most upsetting about Bernard’s case is that he had been a model citizen while serving time in prison. Not once had he been disciplined nor had he ever displayed any sort of misbehavior. Instead, Bernard devoted his time in prison to counseling the youth so that they might avoid the mistakes he made.
If reading this so far has stirred up an uneasiness inside of you, you can change the fate of Pervis Payne. Payne is set to be executed on April 9, 2021, for a crime he didn’t commit. In 1987, he was waiting for his girlfriend to return home when he heard a commotion from the neighbors. Turns out, they were being attacked. Payne rushed over to help immediately but was mistaken as the culprit and swiftly arrested by the police. The case quickly escalated and Payne was charged with murder. This case that Payne is associated with has never been tested for DNA, DNA which could vindicate this innocent man. During his trial, the prosecution employed racial fears to showcase Payne as a violent, black man, all to sway the court toward the death penalty.
Here’s the catch: Payne has an intellectual disability, therefore making it unconstitutional to execute him. I urge you to take seconds out of your day to sign this petition, so that a man may get years of his life back. And if you truly care about righting a system that has been rigged from day one, join the Innocence Project and donate to their cause. This is an organization whose goal is to acquit wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and through working with the criminal justice system to push for reformation. If you can’t donate, then sign up to receive emails that will entail other ways you can help because every effort goes toward saving a life.
At this point in the article, I’m putting my foot down to say that the death penalty should be abolished. A criminal justice system should not only exist to punish but also to rehabilitate. We need to come to realize that no matter how grave the crime, there are ways to hold people accountable without taking their lives.
What we seem to forget all too often is the fact that the priority of any criminal justice system should be to reduce crime in the country aside from just blatantly punishing wrongdoings. If the system only ever chastises and never gets to the root cause of the problem, crime levels will not waver even in the slightest.
Modern capital punishment is still legalized in 53 countries including China, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where the punishment is most commonly descended upon drug cases. While it depends on the country and the brutality of the criminal justice system, the prevalent forms of retribution are electrocution, beheading, hanging, shooting, and lethal injection. Capital punishment plays into the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’, providing a temporary, cathartic sense of vengeance for the victim, but doesn’t solve any problems in the long run. For that, and many other reasons which I will dive into below, this inhumanity has to go.
First of all, capital punishment turns an inmate’s death into a public spectacle. It’s bad enough knowing you’re on death row and even worse to know that your memory will be tarnished, your death paraded as ‘justice’. The occurrence of the death penalty is relatively rare, which is why the media will flock to cover it whenever there is an execution. Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui commented on this issue: “All executions violate the right to life. Those carried out publicly are a gross affront to human dignity which cannot be tolerated.”
Secondly, aside from George Stinney Jr. and Brandon Bernard, many individuals have been met with capital punishment even when they’ve committed no crime or their crime isn’t worthy of such an extreme consequence. It is inhumane that innocents have to be sacrificed simply because the criminal justice system refuses to do its job correctly and would rather chastise people based on their skin color. The death penalty is an irreversible thing. Imagine being a family member of someone who has been sentenced to death row. Imagine having endured that death only to find out decades later that your family member has been vindicated. The pain of that is probably worse than losing the person in the very first place and it’s the kind of pain no one should have to go through.
Running along the tangent of George Stinney Jr., Brandon Bernard, and Pervis Payne, the death penalty—especially in the United States—is a magnifier for discrimination. It doesn’t take a once-in-a-century Harvard genius to figure out that this punishment is placed upon more black than white offenders. To put it boldly, it’s almost as if the U.S.’s criminal justice system thinks it’s okay to end the lives of black criminals to teach the rest of their country not to commit a crime.
Next, enforcing the death penalty costs a lot more than you think. In fact, it is more costly than incarceration because capital punishment trials involve more detailed and expensive jury selection and appeals. On average, each death sentence takes $700,000 more out of taxpayers’ pockets compared to indefinite imprisonment. Every country that still allows the death penalty would be better off spending that money on rehabilitation programs to help their inmates re-enter society.
Contrary to popular opinion, the death penalty does not deter crime either. This is a lengthier discussion that has been proved by numerous studies and researches that say otherwise usually skew their numbers to cloud the truth (as explained in this paper by Radelet and Lacock).
The final and ultimate reason why the death penalty should cease to exist is the plain inhumanity of it. Jim McKean served as a juror in a felony murder case. In his letter to the editor of The New York Times, he said this: “But would I have voted for the death penalty had it been an option (it no longer was in my state)? No. Why not? Simple: He was a killer. I am not.”
And if you still are pro-death penalty after all that argument, ask yourself this: Why do we harm the person who has harmed another to teach the world it’s wrong to harm each other?