Is The Death Penalty “Cruel and Unusual”?, by Dennis Sansom
On August 6th, the state of Alabama executed 74 year old James Barney Hubbard for a murder he committed in 1977. He had murdered before in 1957. He deserved punishment. Because of his age and physical ailments (he had dementia, colon and prostate cancer, and hypertension), his defenders said the execution was a “cruel and unusual” punishment. Was it?
What does “cruel and unusual punishment” mean? The phrase is part of the Eight Amendment of the Consitution, and it indicates the moral guidelines underlying the punishment of criminals. Not just any act or form of punishment is moral. Only the proven guilty should be punished and their punishment must reflect the moral purposes of the rule of law in our society. Though the rule of law is often complex and imperfect, we believe it is necessary for an orderly and moral society. If a punishment is “cruel and unusual,” it violates the moral purposes of the law.
Lets examine what each word means. When is a punishment cruel? This sense of cruelty does not refer to mere pain and the restriction of freedom, because all punishment entails some pain and restrictions. It’s commonly thought that torture is what the word means. What is torture? Torture is more than inflicting pain on a criminal. We torture someone when we disregard their value as a human being, and subsequently we inflict excessive pain upon them, which is exactly what the murderer does to his victim. Torture occurs in many different ways (i.e., mentally and physically), but the common feature in all its expressions is the disavow of the person’s human worth. In this sense, therefore, cruel punishment is the kind which intends and acts disrespectively of the person’s inherent human value.
When is punishment unusual? A good way to answer the question is to understand when punishment is usual. We punish criminals when they’ve been proven guilty by the rule of law. The particular form of punishment must serve a bigger purpose than only hurting the criminal. We usually justify legal punishment in three ways--1) restores the rule of law and order in society; 2) deters future crime; and 3) rehabilitates the criminal. In this way, punishment represents the obligations citizens have towards the State and also the State towards its citizens. Citizenship entail the responsibility of the individual to obey the laws of the State and the State to uphold the law’s purposes to the individual. We punish criminals because they are citizens of our society. This is usual. Punishment becomes unusual, though, when it’s inflicted on a non-citizen or when it denies the citizenship of the criminal.
In light of the meaning of the words, we can define “cruel and unusual punishment” as a form of punishment which denies the inherent human value and citizenship of the criminal. Does the Death Penalty do this? I believe it does!
When the State puts to death a criminal, it sends two messages. First, the criminal has no more value of life and should die, and, secondly, the State has no more obligations toward him or her and, thus, denies him citizenship by killing him.
The State could deny the criminal’s citizenship by exiling him to some other place, but by executing him, the State, in a way, exiles him into death without any possible citizenship status. With the Death Penaly, the State denies any more responsibility to the criminal by declaring that the criminal lacks any merit as a citizen. He becomes a non-person to the State.
According to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the first message belongs to God alone. Only God can truly determine a person’s ultimate value, and when the State executes a criminal, in a way, it is playing the role of God. For this reason, religious people and groups, like the Church, should oppose the State taking that much power into its own hands. The State has every moral and legal right to punish capital offenders (even with life in prison without parole) but not to act as though the criminal is so devoid of any human value that he should not live anymore. That decision belongs to God.
Because the moral purposes of the rule of law must be upheld, criminals need to be punished, but as long as we use the Death Penalty, then we’ll be committing a “cruel and unusual punishment” and thus contradict the moral purposes of legal punishment.
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