XXIII

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

The question of capital punishment has been the subject of endless discussion and will probably never be settled so long as men believe in punishment.  Some states have abolished and then reinstated it; some have enjoyed capital punishment for long periods of time and finally prohibited the use of it.  The reasons why it cannot be settled are plain.  There is first of all no agreement as to the objects of punishment.  Next there is no way to determine the results of punishment.  If the object is assumed it is a matter of conjecture as to what will be most likely to bring the result.  If it could be shown that any form of punishment would bring the immediate result, it would be impossible to show its indirect result although indirect results are as certain as direct ones.  Even if all of this could be clearly proven, the world would be no nearer the solution.  Questions of this sort, or perhaps of any sort, are not settled by reason; they are settled by prejudices and sentiments or by emotion.  When they are settled they do not stay settled, for the emotions change as new stimuli are applied to the machine.

A state may provide for life imprisonment in place of death.  Some especially atrocious murder may occur and be fully exploited in the press.  Public feeling will be fanned to a flame.  Bitter hatred will be aroused against the murderer.  It is perfectly obvious to the multitude that if other men had been hanged for murder, this victim would not have been killed.  A legislature meets before the hatred has had time to cool and the law is changed.  Again, a community may have capital punishment and nothing notable happens.  Now and then hangings occur.  Juries acquit because of the severity of the penalty.  A feeling of shame or some bungling execution may arouse a community against it.  A deep-seated doubt may arise as to the guilt of a man who has been put to death.  The sentimental people triumph.  The law is changed.  Nothing has been found out; no question has been settled; science has made no contribution; the public has changed its mind, or, speaking more correctly, has had another emotion and passed another law.

In the main, the controversy over capital punishment has been one between emotional and unemotional people.  Now and then the emotionalist is reinforced by some who have a religious conviction against capital punishment, based perhaps on the rather trite expression that “God gave life and only God should take it away.”  Such a statement is plausible but not capable of proof.  In the main religious people believe in capital punishment.  The advocates of capital punishment dispose of the question by saying that it is the “sentimentalist” or, rather, the “maudlin sentimentalist” who is against it.  Sentimentalist really implies “maudlin.”