On balance, Death Penalty as a punishment has a negative impact on the society

I hope we both have an enriching debate. I am going to argue that on balance, death penalty has a negative impact on the society. i. e the presumed improvement in law and order is not offset by the social costs of the decision. Let us start by taking a case which I believe would be universally abhorrent. Assume a person A kills innocent girls/ women by luring them into his villa. And then eats their cannibalized body parts after killing them. [1]Nobody in a right state of mind can have any sympathy with the perpetrator. We, in collective conscience believe he deserves the worst of the worse punishments, the point of no return, to signal our deep disgust with his actions. He deserves death, as the war-cry went, in this particular case. Let’s assume that A is guilty, and we KNOW this beyond reasonable doubt, for the sake of the argument. There are a few problems here. Would killing him numb the pain of the numerous girls that were killed? Unfortunately not, for they are gone. Perhaps his death would ‘bring peace’ to the families of the dead? By what kind of arithmetic would it diminish someone’s pain? Can you really measure the quantum of pain, and the quantum of reduction? Can the death of the girls be recompensated by the death of the perpetrator delivered cold by a hangman? Is an instant death a punishment worse than being socially excluded, and forced to relive his crimes, day after day? Why, and by what mechanism- is death an effective justice? Let’s us look at the concepts driving our understanding of death penalty being a sort of ‘just’ punishment. How death penalty is carried out in various countries, is by being based on an effectively ‘rarest of the rare’ condition. Most of the countries recognize that death by state has a limited place in a civilized society. For a state to decide that a person has revoked his right to live, he has to commit a crime so heinous that such a judgment can be legitimized. Death penalty cases in US, for example, the use of death penalty as a punishment has severely declined in the last six years [2]. As has the public support for death penalty [3]. In India, the death penalty has to be handed out contingent on the fact that the case falls in the ‘rarest of the rare case’ category. It is no longer a punishment handed out lightly. That judgment is reserved for the state to decide. So it is not sufficient that a person has died for the perpetrator to be granted death penalty, he has to die in a way horrible enough to invoke public fury, to justify that the death demanded another death. So a cheating wife who died because her husband shot her after the discovery might not by handed out death penalty (crime of passion), but a person who died because an insurgent killed her is eligible for it, because the latter is, for a lack of better word, rarer. The collective conscience condemns it. Even though for a family, the death is exactly the same. The pain is exactly the same. It’s just that the society has decided, by an arbitrary ranking of pain on an opaque measuring glass that the latter is more horrible, and deserves a more severe punishment. To measure a death based on a progressive scale of horror is both arbitrary and ultimately futile. The notion of ‘worth’ is constructed more by social and political exigencies (which inevitably foreground the ephemeral cost-benefit analysis of a given decision rather than universally testable claims to justice) than by any real response to pain or wrongdoing. A man who rapes + kills in an insurgency operation in Afghanistan, (Or Kashmir/ North-East India) for example, might not even be brought to trial- but a person who does the same thing in a city would be killed. The call for the highest of the highest punishment is frought with arbitrary standards that systematically devalue life of a certain individuals. However we CANNOT know beyond doubt the guilt of a person. Death penalty is bad because even if the state convicts one guilty person based on some incriminating evidences, the penalty sets up a precedent for others to be convicted for the same level of charges, increasing the level of false convictions. A court case is two humans trying to prove who’s the guilty one based on some circumstantial evidences they found. There is a high level of uncertainty. There have been numerous instances of people being found innocent after they have been conviced, based on technological advancement. In case a person has been awarded a life sentence, there is still a possibility of him being released honourably, for him to tie the threads of his life. There is a scope for recompensation. That is forever cancelled once the state kills them off. Also, more importantly, the false convictions feed off the momentum generated by the public outcry that calls for calming the *outrage of collective conscience*. Unfortunately, the monster forever stays hungry. Since 1973, 124 people have been exonerated and freed from death row. About half of these exonerations took place in the past ten years. Many other people on death row have been freed from prison through newly discovered DNA evidence, also in the past decade. The reasons for misidentification remains faulty eye witnesses, ineffective lawyers, withheld evidences, false confessions. Sometimes we forget that the judgment process consists of two humans effectively trying to rebuild what happened in the past through the eyes of stakeholders in the case. The whole process is shaky. To drive the point home: This is the list of people exonerated posthumously or were later found to be wrongfully convicted AFTER being punished with death penalty. [5] Perhaps devaluing certain lives would be a cost we would be willing to pay, if it lead to measurable deterrence impact? Unfortunately, empirical evidence is not conclusive on that count. The literature on this impact has been consistently non conclusive. While most deterrence research has found that the death penalty has virtually the same effect as long-term imprisonment on homicide rates, in the mid-1970's economist Isaac Ehrlich reported that he had uncovered a significant deterrent effect. Although scholars, including a panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, strongly criticized Ehrlich's work for methodological and conceptual shortcomings, it still continues to be cited as a prominent advocacy work. A recent judgment by the National Research Council, however, suggests that the “…research to date is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. Therefore, these studies should not be used to inform deliberations requiring judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide. ” What these evidences is that we do not know whether the death penalty has a considerable negative OR positive impact, thus the impact of death penalty has to be looked entirely from the point of view of moral impact on the society and the unintended consequence on the society. Summing up, death penalty is regressive for the society because it devalues the life of the individual i. e the very premise of awarding death penalty is ethically unsound. Also, there is a high possibility of innocent being prosecuted, and given the technology is forever progressing, there is a probability of picking up the threads later and recompensating the person to whom the wrongful act is done. IF not, and he’s legitimately guilty, a life imprisonment is a better retributive justice than a death penalty. From the society’s point of view, the Nithari killer is as good as dead once he’s locked in solitary confinement. The only reason people raised a cry for death penalty was because apparently, they found something ‘just’ in taking an eye for an eye. This collective conscience monster is dangerous, because it feeds off itself, and sensationalist news coverages in the media, killing off innocents both in and outside the case.