Every other week I have shaken my head sadly at the ignorance and hate spewed by Tara Stroll. Reading her column on the death penalty (“The death penalty affirms the value of life,” page 7, Nov. 28), however, I cannot stay silent anymore.
Ms. Stroll argues that the death penalty deters crime and lowers murder rates. The most recent survey of studies on the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted by the U.N. in 2002, found that the threat and application of the death penalty does not lower murder rates any more than the supposedly lesser punishment of life imprisonment.
Ms. Stroll also says we should “send these people to meet their Maker” so that they will not repeat their crimes. Life sentences without the chance for parole achieve the very same thing. Life sentences are also able to be overturned in the case of a wrongful conviction. Lethal injections are not so easily rectified. But that doesn’t seem to worry our Campus Conservative. She states that the execution of one innocent person is worth the benefits of capital punishment. How odd, considering she claims the death penalty “shows how much our society truly values innocent life.” Perhaps some proofreading is in order, since she seems to forget what she says in the beginning of her column by the end of it. Beyond the obvious hypocrisy, her justification of innocent people being murdered by the state is both inhumane and ignorant. Her position would be different if that person were her father, her sister, her son. Would her grief be less, knowing that their death is an inevitability of the system? Would she shrug and say “Well, at least we’re also killing murderers”?
Ms. Stroll glosses over this by saying that there is no “official proof” that an innocent person has ever been executed. However, there is official proof that there have been innocent people sentenced to death. Recent advances in DNA testing have exonerated more than 100 inmates on death row, 100 people whom Ms. Stroll seems willing to write off. Since Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the state has executed 12 people while 13 have been exonerated. Are those odds that you want to risk people’s fates on, Ms. Stroll? Is that how you value innocent life?
What is truly disturbing is the fact that Ms. Stroll points to the tradition of “Judeo-Christian values” for justification of the death penalty. If we had an Islamic value system, would she support the death by stoning of women who had affairs? Our Judeo-Christian traditions also approved of burning witches and owning slaves. Just because our forefathers thought that it was right does not make it so. This is not just a question of what is “right” and what is “wrong,” for either side can claim they have the moral authority to pass judgment. But the arguments supporting the death penalty are paper-thin and stacked precariously, ready to fall at the first real scrutiny. We simply cannot place the fate of a life on this house of cards.
Alexandra Oates CAS ’07
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
