Author’s argument against capital punishment is compassionate and thought-provoking, but could go deeper
If you’re going to put somebody to death for a crime, you’d want to be sure they’d committed it, right? Yet prisoners, guards, chaplains, lawyers and others who are acquainted with death row estimate that a sizable percentage of people there — perhaps 7 percent — never committed the crime for which they are convicted. In a third of death-penalty convictions that have been overturned, there’s been a signed confession by the accused. In 75 percent of those that have been reversed based on DNA evidence, the accused was “identified” by at least one eyewitness.
Those are some of the statistics you’ll find in “13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty,” by Italian activist Mario Marazziti. The book is best for dipping into rather than reading straight through — less an analysis than a series of chapters on different facets of the death penalty.
Marazziti, who projects a compassionate, reasonable tone, is at his best in writing about people such as the curator of the prison museum in Huntsville, Texas — the state with the largest prison population in the nation — who says, “My feelings about the death penalty are very mixed. But I guess it … goes to the basics that we shouldn’t be killing each other.”
In a chapter about death-row inmates who have been exonerated, Marazziti interviews Curtis McCarty, who was on death row for 19 years: “I learned humility … I do not hate. Anyone. If I did I would still be a prisoner.”
In a chapter titled “Life Row,” Marazziti talks with murder victims’ relatives who have come to believe that affirming life and putting people to death, whatever their crimes, are contradictory ideas. As Marietta Jaeger — whose 7-year-old daughter was kidnapped and murdered — puts it, “The loved ones who have been wrenched from our lives by violent crime deserve more beautiful, noble and honorable memorials than premeditated, barbaric, state-sanctioned killings.” These chapters in particular give the sense of how capital punishment affects the people involved — the accused, the convicted, the prison workers, the families of victims.
Marazziti points out that retribution, as a reason for putting people to death, often becomes emotionally empty. The cost of a murder trial and of keeping someone on death row for years of appeals is counterproductive, compared to a life sentence in prison. The experience of being on death row is often transformative for those who survive it, as they learn to value their life and the lives of others in ways they never did before their convictions.
The experience of overseeing the application of capital punishment often has transformative and unexpected effects.
Also thought-provoking are the chapters of statistics and facts, most of which could be useful in a game of trivia. Number of countries that execute by beheading: One. Number of countries that execute for drug-related offenses: 13.
Least effective are the chapters about Marazziti’s international campaign against the death penalty, which read as if his community of San Eligido single-handedly built the movement, which actually has risen and fallen through most of the 20th century. Marazziti’s practice of working on the level of governments and international diplomacy creates strange bedfellows for him, as when he lauds Uzbekistan, well known for its bloody repression of protesters, for eliminating the death penalty. He makes it sound as if the process of abolition is mainly a matter of petitions to governments, rather than a change in hearts and minds of populations.
The book leaves some questions unasked. Is life imprisonment without possibility of parole really a humane alternative, especially considering the amount of abuse and solitary confinement that takes place in U.S. prisons? Elimination of execution for drug-related crimes is a gain, of course, but what about elimination of the drug war? And if the president can sentence somebody to death by drone, doesn’t that count as a kind of death penalty? Similarly, the author doesn’t devote even one of his 13 chapters to exploring how intertwined the death penalty is with maintaining social control and repressing minorities and political oppositions.
The book suggests that nothing fundamental in our culture needs to change to eliminate the ultimate punishment; Marazziti’s view is that abolition would be consistent with the values of our civilization. But underneath its advocacy of democracy and humanism, Western civilization has a much darker tradition that includes warfare, torture, repression and exploitation, which kill many more people than are put to death by lethal injection. One likely reason that the death penalty exists is that it is rooted in this darker tradition, which ultimately elevates social control, property rights and profit over human rights. Yes, the death penalty needs to be abolished. But it’s only a symptom of a much larger problem.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper, Real Change News, in Seattle, Wash.
