CHAPTER 2
Argument 10 (17)
The Death Penalty creates a somewhat safer society
Safety and peace is something all of us, as citizens in an open society, want to feel. When we take an evening walk, when we go cycling on desolate roads, when we walk around or run in the forest, when we go by bus or the underground, when we go to the amusement park, to the movies, to the bar, when we are home alone, wherever we are we want to feel safe and secure. But many feel insecure today. There are many young people who feel so insecure that they carry a weapon when they move around in the city. Others don’t dare to go outside after dark. There are others who take medication to stay calm. People are afraid, afraid that the rapist, the robber, the violent criminal or the murder will one day stand there before them.
The capital punishment is of course not the solution to all of this. But the capital punishment makes up one link on the way to a safer society. The capital punishment means that some heinous criminals never again will walk on the streets, and that makes the society a somewhat safer place.
The woman who has been heinously abused several times by her husband will
finally be able to relax when the death penalty has been pronounced. She no
longer has to live in fear that her husband will violate her on his next leave,
after an escape or after being released.
After a man has raped and strangled two young children he was sentenced to
death. All of society can once again feel at ease and they no longer have to
keep the children indoors. Safety returns to society. And they do not have to
fear his upcoming release, or failed custody and rehabilitation treatment.
The man who terrorized the whole village with his constant threats, fights, his
aggressive behavior and abuse, was finally caught and charged with murder and
was sentenced to death. Security once again covered the village like a nice and snug blanket.
And there are thousands of similar examples that easily could be painted.
Of course murderers and violent criminals will always exist in society and the death penalty will only lower the number of criminals marginally. But it is inevitable that every violent criminal less that exists in a society will mean a safer society. A prison term on the other hand would mean that there would always be a pressing dark cloud of worries over a society.(1)
Also in prisons the interns and personnel would feel safer with the death penalty. It is not unusual with conflicts, violence and murder in prison. But some interns who have been sentenced to long prison terms or lifetime would probably deter from cruel acts of violence and murder if they knew that it could lead to the death penalty. Today, on the other hand, he who has been sentenced to lifetime in prison can’t be sentenced too much more and therefore he would probably neither be deterred from committing further crimes.
Therefore, with the death penalty even the prisons would be spared some of the most cruel brutality.
Death penalty against the enemy of the state
Murderers and violent criminals who repeatedly abuse people are like cancerous tumors in the body of society, the State.
If a human body is to be kept sound and healthy, then the aggressive cancer cells have to be quickly removed. In a body it is normal that the foreign aggressive cells are attacked by the body’s own "aggressive" immune system. It is natural and vital, because if the hostile and aggressive cells become to many, the body will finally die.
At the point where a violent criminal or a murderer attacks an individual member of society he has become an aggressive cancerous cell in the body of society. The death penalty may then rightly be viewed as the society’s instinct of self-preservation and natural self-defence which re-create security.
As the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote: "The death penalty inflicted upon criminals ... is in order that we may not fall victims to an assassin that we consent to die if we ourselves turn assassins. ... Again, every malefactor, by attacking social rights, becomes on forfeit a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws be ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. In such a case the preservation of the State is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish; in putting the guilty to death, we slay not so much the citizen as an enemy. The trial and the judgment are the proofs that he has broken the social treaty, and is in consequence no longer a member of the State. Since, then, he has recognised himself to be such by living there, he must be removed by exile as a violator of the compact, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, but merely a man; and in such a case the right of war is to kill the vanquished." 2
Footnote 1. See the reasons for this in Argument 8 and 15. Back.
Footnote 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, Book 2, Chapter 5, Translated by G. D. H. Cole. Back.
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© David Anderson 1998, 2002
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