But men may come to worse than dust.
In a comment to my post criticizing Scalia’s religious justification for the death penalty, a gentleman named Dudley Sharp posted links to a series of intelligent articles he’s written on the death penalty. Of particular note is the article titled The Death Penalty: Neither Hatred nor Revenge and the article titled Sister Helen Prejean & the death penalty: A Critical Review. Sharp’s observations in the latter article about the events depicted in the movie Dead Man Walking are similar to observations I myself have made. I’ve previously expressed ambivalence about the death penalty rather than a strong position for or against, and ambivalent I remain. In my most recent written thoughts on the subject (my critique of Scalia’s justification for the death penalty was directed not so much against the death penalty itself but against his invocation of the supposedly divine authority of the state to justify it), I tentatively concluded that we’d “probably” be better off without the death penalty, that it just isn’t worth it. But this opinion rested in large part upon my lack of faith in the competence and moral authority of people acting under the spell of the State, an abstraction whose very roots and origins are far from “divine” and in fact are hopelessly entangled with injustice, to “do justice,” particularly in matters of life and death. (Not that I really have faith in the competence of other people to “do justice” either, even when the death penalty is not on the table.)
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How can you have faith in the religious argument from someone who also states that a procedurally correct trial should end in the ultimate punishment even if an actual innocence claim exists. Justice Scalia’s scathing disent in the Troy Davis opinion states just that, in spite of the evidence that Troy Davis might be innocent.
1I hope it’s clear from my post that I have zero faith in Scalia’s religious argument in favor of the death penalty. That’s precisely what I was criticizing.
2