Why I Support Capital
Punishment
As
Christians grow and cultivate the disciplines of reading and study, we
sometimes alter our views. Sometimes these views even change dramatically. No
one knows this better than I do, having been dramatically converted to Christ
and, subsequently, having my entire worldview turned upside-down. There was a
time, for example, when I thought John Locke’s understanding of social contract
was the ultimate theory of government. I now see that government draws its
authority less from the consent of the governed than from a sovereign God. I
have come to another of those points in my spiritual pilgrimage in which my
views have undergone significant change.
For
as long as I can remember, I have opposed capital punishment. As a lawyer I
observed how flawed the legal system is, and I concluded, as Justice
Learned Hand once remarked, that it was better that a hundred guilty men go free
than one innocent man be executed. I was also influenced by very libertarian
views of government; I distrusted government too much to give power to the
judicial system to take a human life. Then as I became a Christian, I
was confronted with the reality of Jesus’s payment of the debt of human
sin. I discovered that the operation of God’s marvelous grace in our lives has
profound implications for the way we live.
Naturally,
as I came to deal increasingly with ethical issues, I found myself seriously
questioning whether the death penalty was an effective deterrent. My views were
very much influenced by Deuteronomy 17 and the need for two eyewitnesses. I
questioned whether the circumstantial evidence on which most are sentenced
today in fact meets this standard of proof. I still have grave reservations
about the way in which capital punishment is administered in the United States,
and I still do question whether it is a deterrent. (In fact, I remain convinced
it’s not a general deterrent.) But my views have changed, and I now favor
capital punishment, at least in principle, but only in extreme cases when no
other punishment can satisfy the demands of justice.
Mercy
Requires Justice
The
reason is quite simple. Justice in God’s eyes requires that the response
to an offense—whether against God or against humanity—be proportionate. The lex talionis (“law of the
talion”) served as a restraint, a limitation, to ensure the punishment
would be no greater than the crime. Yet implied therein is a standard—that
the punishment should be at least as great as the crime. One frequently finds
among Christians the belief that Jesus’s so-called “love-ethic” sets
aside the “law of the talion.” To the contrary, Jesus affirms the divine
basis of Old Testament ethics. Nowhere does he set aside all requirements of
civil law. Further, it leads to a perversion of legal justice to confuse the
sphere of private relations with that of civil law. While the thief on the
cross found pardon in the sight of God (“Today you will be with me in paradise”),
the pardon didn’t extend to eliminating the consequences of his crime (“We are
being justly punished, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds”).
“What
about mercy?” one may be inclined to ask. My response is simple.
There can be no mercy where justice is not satisfied. Justice entails receiving
what we in fact deserve; we did in fact know better. Mercy is not receiving
what we deserve. To be punished, however severely, because we indeed deserve
it, as C. S.
Lewis observed, is to be treated with dignity as human beings created in
God’s image. Conversely, to abandon the criteria of righteous and just
punishment, as Lewis also pointed out, is to abandon all criteria for punishment. Indeed,
mercy extended to offenders whose guilt is certain yet ignored creates a moral
travesty that, over time, helps pave the way for collapse of the entire social
order. This is essentially the argument of Romans 13. Romans 12 concludes
with a proscription of personal retribution, yet Paul immediately follows this
with a divinely instituted prescription for punishing moral evil. It is for
eminently social reasons that “the authorities” are to wield the sword,
the ius gladii:
due to human depravity and the need for moral-social order, the civil
magistrate punishes criminal behavior. The implication of Romans 13 is that by
not punishing moral evil, authorities aren’t performing their God-appointed
responsibility in society. Paul’s teaching in Romans 13 squares with his
experience. Testifying before Festus, he certifies: “If . . . I am guilty
of doing anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die” (Acts 25:11).
Perhaps
the emotional event that pushed me over the (philosophical) edge was the John
Wayne Gacy case some years ago. I visited him on death row. During our
hour-long conversation he was totally unrepentant; in fact, he was
arrogant. He insisted that he was a Christian, that he believed in Christ, yet
he showed not a hint of remorse. The testimony in the trial, of course, was
overwhelming. I don’t think anyone could possibly believe he didn’t commit
those unspeakably barbaric crimes. What I realized in the days prior to
Gacy’s execution was that there was simply no other appropriate response than
execution if justice was to be served. There are some cases like this—the
Oklahoma bombing is a case in point—when no other response is appropriate, no
other punishment sufficient for the deliberate savagery of the crime.
The
issue boils down ultimately to just deserts. Indeed, just punishment is a
thread running through the whole Bible. Moreover, there is divinely instituted
tension between mercy and justice—a tension that, ethically speaking, may not
be eradicated. Mercy without justice makes a mockery of the sacrifice of the
Lamb of God. It ignores the fundamental truth of biblical anthropology: the
soul that sins must die; sin incurs a debt that must be paid. Punitive dealings
provide a necessary atonement and restore the moral balance disturbed by sin.
Purification, one of the most central of biblical themes, reveals to us both
the temporal and eternal perspectives on humanity. Purification comes by way of
suffering; it prepares the individual to meet his Maker. God’s redemptive
response to the sin dilemma did not—and does not—eradicate the need to bear the
consequences of our actions.
Need
for Moral Accountability
Which
leads me to a second observation. The death penalty ultimately confronts us
with the issue of moral accountability in the present life. Contemporary
society seems totally unwilling to assign moral responsibility to anyone.
Everything imaginable is due to a dysfunctional family or to having had our
knuckles rapped while we were in grade-school. We really have reached a point
where the Menendez brothers plead for mercy—and get it!—because they are
orphans, after acknowledging they made themselves orphans by killing their
parents.
Non-Christians
and Christians alike are not absolved from the consequences of their behavior.
Whether or not faith is professed, penalties for everything from speeding to
strangulation apply to all. In American society people are literally
getting away with murder, and the moral stupor that has descended over our
culture reflects a decay, an utter erosion, of time-tested moral norms—norms
that have been guarded for generations. Can anyone really wonder why evidence
of a moral dry rot is everywhere?
I
come to this view with something of a heavy heart, as some of the most blessed
brothers I’ve known in my Christian walk were on death row. I think of Richard
Moore in particular and, of course, Rusty Woomer, about whom I’ve written in The Body. I think of Bob Williams in
Nebraska and Johnny Cockrum in Texas. I have a heavy heart as well because I
don’t believe the system administers criminal justice fairly. It is merely
symbolic justice to execute 25 people a year when 2,000 are sentenced.
(Obviously, the system needs to be thoroughly revamped. Nevertheless, revamping
the system, in order that punishment be both swift and proportionate, would
accord with biblical guidelines and demands the Christian’s engagement.) But in
spite of the system’s flaws, I’ve come to believe God in fact requires capital
justice, at least in the case of premeditated murder where there is no doubt of
the offender’s guilt. This is, after all, the one crime in the Bible for which no
restitution was possible (Num. 35:31, 33).
Lest
we believe the Old Testament was characterized by indiscriminate capital
justice, Old Testament law painstakingly distinguished between premeditated
murder and involuntary manslaughter—hence the function of the cities of
refuge. In the case of involuntary manslaughter, deliverance from the
avenger’s hand occurred. In the case of murder, the convicted criminal was
put to death. Personally, I still doubt the death penalty is a general
deterrent—and strong evidence suggests it’s not likely to be a deterrent when
it’s so seldom invoked. But I have a hard time escaping the attitude of the
biblical writers, that judgment—both temporal and eschatological—is a certain
reality for those who disobey or reject God’s authority. We’ll never know how
many potential murderers are deterred by the threat of a death penalty, just as
we’ll never know how many lives may be saved by it. But at the bare minimum, it
may deter a convict sentenced to life from killing a prison guard or another
convict. (In such a case no other punishment is appropriate, since all lesser
punishments have been exhausted.) And it will certainly prevent a convicted
murderer from murdering again. In this regard, I find wisdom in the words of
John Stuart Mill:
As for what is called the failure of death
punishment, who is able to judge of that? We partly know who those are whom it
has not deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many
human beings it has saved who would have lived to be murderers if that awful
association had not been thrown round the idea of murder from their earliest
infancy?
God’s
Non-Negotiable Standard
So
in spite of my misgivings, I’ve come to see capital punishment as an essential
element of justice. On the whole, the full range of biblical data weighs in its
favor. Society should not execute capital offenders merely for the sake of
revenge, but to balance the scales of moral justice that have been
disturbed. The death penalty is warranted and should be implemented only in
those cases where evidence is certain, in accordance with the biblical standard
and where no other punishment can satisfy the demands of justice. In the public
debate over the death penalty, we are dealing with values of the highest order:
respect for the sacredness of human life and its protection, the preservation
of order in society, and the attainment of justice through law.
The
function of biblical sanctions against a heinous crime such as murder is to
discourage the wanton destruction of innocent life. And undergirding the
biblical sanctions against murder is the utter sacred character of human
life. The shedding of blood in ancient Israel polluted the land—a pollution for
which there was no substitute—and thus required the death penalty. This is the
significance of the sanctions in Genesis 9 against those who would shed the
blood of another. It is because humans are created in God’s image that
capital punishment for premeditated murder was to be a perpetual obligation. To
kill a person was tantamount to killing God in effigy. The Noahic covenant
(Gen. 9)
antedates Israel and the Mosaic code; it transcends Old Testament law per se
and mirrors ethical legislation binding for all cultures and eras. The
sanctity of human life is rooted in the universal creation ethic and thus
retains its force in society. Any culture that fails to distinguish between the
criminal and the punitive act, in my opinion, is a culture that cannot survive.
In this way, then, my own ethical thinking has evolved.
I’m
well aware that sincere Christians stand on both sides of this issue. One’s
views on the death penalty are by no means a test of fellowship. While we take
no pleasure in defining the contours of this difficult ethical issue, the
Christian community is called on to articulate standards of biblical justice,
even when it may be unpopular. Capital justice, I’ve come to believe, is part
of that non-negotiable standard. A moral obligation requires civil government
to punish crime, and consequently, to enforce capital punishment, albeit under
highly restricted conditions. Fallible humans will continue to work for
justice. But fallible as the system might be, part of the Christian’s task is
to remind surrounding culture that actions indeed have consequences—in this
life and the life to come.
This adapted essay was used by
permission of Prison Fellowship.
