Here's something I don't fully understand. Well, I guess I understand it in a pragmatic sense but not in a philosophical sense. A man named Gary Leon Ridgway just admitted that he killed 48 women. Let me write that out the long way for you: Forty-eight women. The courts have just made a plea bargain deal with him that will spare him the death penalty and commit him to life in prison with no chance of parole.
Now, if you're against the death penalty in all cases, that's probably the way it ought to work. But if you're not, and most people are not, this should be an outrage of the highest order. If a judge looked at a confessed murderer of 48 human beings and said, "I sentence you to life in prison," death penalty advocates would be demanding the judge's resignation and circulating recall petitions. If 48 murders don't get you the death penalty, what should? Maybe we ought to wait until the guy does something real nasty.
This article on the case suggests that the prosecutors made the deal because their county is short on funds and could not afford a costly trial. I think it would be interesting to poll the residents of that county and ask them (a) if they believe in the death penalty and (b) if so, if they believe in it enough to kick in a few bucks more in taxes to enforce it in a case like this.
Ridgway is white. I wonder if there'd be an outcry over the sentence if he were black. I wonder if he'd even have been able to make this deal if he were black. Do we think maybe that one day soon, that very same court is going to order the execution of a black man who killed only one human being, and who possibly had a little better reason than that he wanted to get out of paying his hookers for sex? Or is it that since Ridgway's victims were mostly prostitutes, that's not like killing 48 real human beings?
I'm not arguing here for any point other than that the death penalty in this country is enforced in an arbitrary, inconsistent manner. Its advocates advocate it in an arbitrary, inconsistent manner. I am enormously conflicted on the rightness of the government taking lives and I guess I can see the case for it if the implementation rises above questions of race and budget constraints…and of course, it would be nice if our court system did a better job of convicting only those who actually committed the crimes. In the absence of that, I find myself tilting towards the notion that there should be no death penalty, not necessarily because that's the right position but because it's the practical one.