Here at matthewb.com, we so rarely cover any topics of meaningful heft. But in honor of Clarence & Tookie, maybe we should depart from the usual fluff to provide some death penalty fluff.

There's one major reason I don't support the death penalty. But I find some the more popular reasons against it to be less persuasive:

"The death penalty should be abolished because killing is wrong / it's barbaric for the government to kill people / it's cruel and unusual / etc."

You can't disagree with this one without seeming to object to the proposition that generally, Killing Is Bad. So let me agree: Killing Is Bad.

But we don't really think literally all killing is bad. If a policeman is being shot at, and he returns fire and eliminates the assailiant, that's technically a killing, though we excuse it as such.

The problem I get stuck on is that our government has a lengthy track record of killing people. It's been a major part of our foreign policy since 1776. We have a huge military whose members are trained, among other things, to kill people. Lots of them, if necessary. In addition to covert assassinations carried out by quasi-military agencies (CIA, NSA etc)

So I find it hard to explain why it's more barbaric to kill a prisoner who's been convicted of a most serious crime and received the benefit of due process of law, than various citizens of foreign countries.

Ah, you might say, these are essentially self-defense killings. We're killing people who are shooting at us. Really?

The US military admitted dropping a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house in the city of Mosul on January 8, and says the bomb killed five people. The homeowner, however, claims the bomb killed 14 people, including 7 children. The strike was intended for another target nearby. The house that was bombed was intended as a search target, not as a site to be attacked.

This news item passed largely undetected as the media was covering the dead miners story. These were just ordinary Iraqi citizens, and now – whoopsie! – they're dead. Those killings strike me as a lot more "barbaric" than Clarence & Tookie, that's for sure. But they provoked hardly any response.

Bottom line: as a generally satisfied citizen of the United States, I am by implication the beneficiary of a lot of killing. I don't know how to conceptually isolate the barbarism of the domestic penal system the way others apparently can.

20 Jan 06