Charlie’s House

The Death Penalty & Jared Loughner

I’ve seen some talk about marching Jared Loughner up the gallows steps. People are rightfully outraged by his horrible acts of murder, and they want that outrage quenched.

I’m against the death penalty as a form of punishment or crime prevention. There is no conclusive evidence that the death penalty prevents crime. For every study that indicates that it reduces crime, there is another that indicates it has no effect on crime. Furthermore, killing human beings is wrong. Any kid can tell you that.

I’m hardly a pacifist. I’ve been a soldier, and while I haven’t had to shoot anyone, I have held people at gunpoint with every intention of shooting them dead. But violence – and killing someone is the ultimate expression of violence – should always be regarded as a failure. War is a failure of diplomacy. Self-defense is a failure of reason over force. Animals solve their problems with force. Human beings solve problems with reason.

Sometimes there is no way to avoid failure. Sometimes you have to use force because there’s no other way out of a bad situation. So, we have to fall back on our animal side to get us out of this bad situation. There should be no pride in this. No sense of justice or vindication; only sadness and embarrassment. “Today, I failed to be a human being.” To make matters worse, when you kill another person, there’s no opportunity to fix your failure. You can’t undo it so your failure is permanent.

But, the Loughner case presents the one time when I am in favor of killing (although the word ‘favor’ implies approval which is not the case). Loughner is a sociopath and from what I understand, no amount of treatment or counseling will “fix” someone who is willing to gun down children. So, the only thing to do is to kill Loughner. Not because it’s just or right, but because we lack the tools to correct the problem. He is a threat to society and always will be, the logical conclusion is to eliminate that permanent threat in a permanent way. It pains me to say this, because killing Loughner represents a failure to be human. We failed to identify him as a risk to society before his rampage. We fail to “fix” him afterward.

Perhaps we can keep him locked up in an asylum where psychologists can study him and maybe learn how to “fix” him or others like him him someday? Maybe that’s a better solution? But I can’t honestly say which is better – to be dead or to be a lab project for the rest of your life?

Either way, there should be no pride or sense of vindication in Loughner’s death. Only a sense of failure and sadness.