thou shalt surely die from Planck's Constant

Death Penalty poster
Photo by: amnestysfoffice

The Death Penalty is no deterrence to murder. If one looked at statistical evidence alone in this country it would seem that having the death penalty in fact increases the incidence of murder in your state. For 2007, the average Murder Rate in Death Penalty States was 5.5 per 100,000 population, while the average Murder Rate in States without the Death Penalty was 3.1 [DeathPenaltyInfo].

There will be some of my readers who will argue that it isn't the death penalty per se that has a deterring effect, but rather actual executions that put a chill into the heart of would-be killers. Wrong again. From 1976 to 2007 there were 921 executions in the Southern United States. The murder rate in the South? 7.0 and increasing over the 10 years.

In the Northeast during the same period there were 4 executions. The murder rate? 4.1 and decreasing over the ten years.

That's right. There are 70% more murders in the South despite 917 more executions. If I were an alien from Mars looking at the statistics, I would be completely astonished that anyone would be silly enough to think that executions were any deterrence at all. In fact, the safe thing for society to do would be to ban the death penalty altogether.

In general, Christians favor the death penalty over those who have no religious preference [The Pew Forum] despite the fact the Bible teaches us that the threat of death did not deter Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had a relationship with God that no one after them has ever had. They spoke with God directly. No filter through a burning bush or messages sent by Angels but one on one. God gave Adam and his mate dominion over the entire planet with one proviso: do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The penalty? "For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

Here we have the first death penalty clause in written history. And since it was given directly, ignorance of the law could not have been claimed. And were Adam or Eve deterred by the death penalty? Obviously not. The Old Testament, aside from being a written history of the relationship of Jews with their Creator, is also an instruction book on how to live in society.

The Lessons from Genesis

Let me digress slightly to tell you that the story about the Tree of Knowledge teaches us three things:

That the Death Penalty is not a deterrence to any behavior.

That Forbidden Fruit encourages the very act it hopes to prevent. Despite the Christian notion that this was why man lost his innocence (that the fruit was a metaphor for sex), the Jews of the period had no such prudish views on sex; the God of the Jews instructed them to have as much sex as often as they could: "be fruitful and multiply."

But the appeal for any object is directly proportional to its prohibition. Human nature is to want that which we cannot or should not have.

To watch out for slick salesmen that trick you into buying their goods. The "snake" twists God's prohibition to not eat of the Tree of Knowledge into "not to touch the Tree of Knowledge at the pain of death." When he shoves Eve into the Tree and she doesn't die, she's thus convinced that she also won't die if she eats the fruit.

Interestingly the vast majority of Catholics in America are in favor of the Death Penalty despite the Church's near total opposition to it [PBS]. I have never figured out how you can believe that life is so precious that we must protect it even before it is viable (pro-life) and yet find life so worthless that we allow the state to take it away from a fully viable one.

7% of all those who were once found to be guilty of murder are later discovered to have been completely, absolutely, undoubtedly innocent. I am certain that many more are innocent but the evidence cannot be found. I know that many of my readers are misguidedly still in favor of the death penalty, but now that you know that 1 out of 14 men ordered to be executed are not guilty, how can you in good conscience allow so many innocent men to be murdered by the state and still call yourselves civilized?

The Barbaric Company We Keep

It is a given that Islam is a barbaric, primitive, savage, unmerciful, uncivilized, murderous, intolerant religion and intelligent people everywhere rightly condemn it. How we in America can see clearly the evil of Muslim belief and yet close our eyes to the backward brutality of our death penalty is beyond me. China, Cuba, and almost all the Muslim countries have refused to ban the death penalty. During 2007, 87% of the world's 1,270 executions occurred in China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States [Wiki]. The most inhumane, anti-life, brutal regimes in the world. This is the company we keep? I don't get it.