While many people wonder how criminal defense attorneys can live with their jobs, I wonder how prosecutors can. And I especially wonder how prosecutors who work in murdering states* justify the work they do.
But a series of posts at the Crime and Consequences blog has helped me to understand one way that prosecutors can deal with the moral burden of condemning their fellow human beings to death: they can simply stop caring.
The point was driven home to me in a post by Kent Scheidegger. In talking about a lawsuit against the use of illegally imported drugs in executions, he wrote:
The case was captioned Beaty v. FDA in the District Court. It is presently captioned Cook v. FDA. It may have a different caption by the time it is decided. Arizona keeps "mooting" the lead plaintiffs.In case you don't understand what his callous tone is obscuring, let me put it a bit more plainly: the case has many different names because the state of Arizona keeps murdering the plaintiffs.
But this isn't an exceptional moment for that blog.
Bill Otis celebrated that there were as many executions in 2012 as there were in 2011, because it allows him to score political points against opponents of the death penalty. Celebrating state-sanctioned murder, rather than just treating it as an unfortunate necessity, takes a special degree of cold-heartedness.
Kent Scheidegger wrote about how the state of Arizona "finally" murdered one of its citizens.
Bill Otis celebrated the prospect that North Carolina might soon start murdering even more of its citizens, due to Republican electoral victories in the state.
The examples of callous disregard for human life keep coming and coming. I'll be the last to defend the crimes these men allegedly committed, the crimes for which they are being executed. But answering one crime with another should not be the American way.
Celebrating one group of murderers because their victims are also murderers is...obscene.
* I've long avoided the use of the term "murder" to describe executions carried out under the color of state law. I had two reasons for that: first, I thought the term was unnecessarily divisive; second, I reasoned that "murder" refers to unlawful killings, and the death penalty is carried out in accordance with state law. To the first concern, I can only say that there comes a time when seeking compromise turns into complicity with evil. To the second, I have come to realize that since the death penalty violates the 8th Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, it does constitute unlawful killing. Murder is the appropriate word for it.
I once wrote a post about how we should distinguish different levels of condemnation of certain practices. Something can be wrong as a matter of personal morality, social morality, laws, or the constitution. I still think that those distinctions are important, but I've also come to realize that the death penalty is wrong at every level. It should be morally abhorrent to those who are responsible for enforcing it. It should be morally abhorrent to all of us who live in a society that condones it. It does violate the constitutional norms on which our country is built, and that should be recognized in the law as we apply it.
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