Should we do away with capital punishment

Should we do away with capital punishment

At its very core, the argument against death penalty comes down to the manner in which we understand crime and those who commit crimes. Do we view crime purely as actions of “inherently bad” people, i.e. attribute responsibility exclusively to the individual (and nothing else)?
Socialisation as a factor
It is impossible to view crime as something that only “inherently bad” people do and the view that the task of criminal law is to take away “inherently bad” people from our midst is untenable. The cliche that we are all products of our circumstances has much to offer here. This is not to suggest the absolute lack of individual agency in the things we do but rather to argue that the reasons why we do the things we do is influenced by a lot more than just individual will. In that context, a four-year-old being raped and murdered, or raping and mercilessly killing members of a caste or religious group because of visceral hatred are all events that challenge our humanity.
As a society, can we look at murderers, rapists, paedophiles, genocidaires and ask ourselves the tough question of how they got there?
The point is that there is a process of socialisation that contributes to an individual’s thinking that he can rape a woman, insert a rod into her and leave her on the street to die or that he can have such intense hatred for people of other communities that they should be stripped, paraded, raped and murdered.
Our demands for justice have to be tempered by this reality. Society then cannot demand to take the life of an individual when it has contributed to that process and outcome. Crimes are as much about social failure as they are about individual responsibility. Arguments on deterrence assume that crimes are individual problems, imagined and carried out by reasons of pure individual will. It assumes that fear will trump the massive influence of everything else in our lives.
Disproportionate impact
This is certainly not to argue that all persons with similar socialisation processes will do the same thing. That is precisely the reason for not deciding questions of sentencing only on the basis of crime categories. The burden of the death penalty has a disparate impact on the most marginalised and poorest sections of society. Our criminal justice system is in severe crisis given the rampant use of torture in investigations, a broken legal aid system and alienating trial processes. It is incapable of administering the death penalty in a fair manner and that is evidenced by the fact that over 30% of death sentences handed out by trial courts result in acquittals (not commutations) in the appellate process.
The state cannot seek to take life because it has an equal commitment to everyone within its fold. When a crime is committed, the perpetrator is not the only one breaking the social contract. Obviously the state has failed to protect the victim and society but at the same time it has also failed the perpetrator in equal measure albeit in a different way. At the risk of repetition, it is not to suggest that the perpetrator has no individual responsibility but that we must also recognise the failure of society and state.
As a society we find ourselves in a strange bind — on the one hand seeking more violent and harsher punishments for certain crimes and at the same time struggling with rampant impunity for certain others. Justice is not served in either situation. To tweak Martin Luther King’s words, the arc of the moral universe must bend towards a more empathetic version of justice rather than a retributive one.