Legal killing is not moral
When I was in my late teens, a Catholic girl grappling with her own emerging definitions of right and wrong, I remember coming across a disquieting quote from Thomas Aquinas.
“If a man is a danger to the community, threatening it with disintegration by some wrongdoing of his, then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good is to be commended,’ he wrote.
I say disquieting because I did not believe death was an appropriate response to criminal action. In my simple moral calculus, killing someone to show that killing was wrong did not make sense.
So Thomas Aquinas’ endorsement of executions troubled me. Many years passed before I understood that I had missed his point, something that came to mind when I heard the cheers rise outside the San Mateo County Courthouse. The clerk of the court had just announced that a jury of six men and six women had voted to execute a 33-year-old fertilizer salesman for murdering his wife and unborn son.
I wondered what the people were cheering about. I don’t imagine they would say bloodlust. What then? They surely would be hard-pressed to argue that Scott Peterson’s death will enhance the social good.
And this, I would argue, is what Thomas Aquinas wanted us to consider. It is why the death penalty, even for the most revolting and dangerous criminals, is an anachronism that debases the very society it is supposed to serve.
Thomas Aquinas’ sole concern in approving executions was the community, not the criminal. If execution was the only way to excise the cancerous presence of the criminal and keep the community safe, then it was appropriate. In other words, killing a criminal had nothing to do with what the criminal deserved or did not deserve. It had nothing to do with justice or revenge. Execution was a means to preserve social order and safety. In that way only could it be considered moral.
That argument no longer applies.
We have prisons and laws that guarantee permanent removal from society of our most dangerous criminals. We no longer need to kill them to keep them out of our communities. And as study after study has shown, the death penalty does not deter crime.
I admit if someone killed my husband or son, I probably would want that person dead. But I would never want our laws made by those consumed by grief and fury. Our laws should be crafted by thoughtful people guided by the community’s highest values. Laws should inspire us to our best behavior. The death penalty allows us to indulge in our worst.
Perhaps the most abhorrent fallout of the death penalty is what it requires of those 12 people in the jury box. We are finding out how they reached the decision to execute Peterson. What we can’t know, and what the jurors themselves can’t know yet, is how they will shoulder that decision from this day on.
Their demeanor in speaking to the press had none of the enthusiasm of the folks cheering outside the courtroom. Certainly, one can make a compelling argument that Peterson deserves to die for the heinous and calculated murder of his wife and unborn child. But we don’t serve the kind of society willing to carry it out.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].