What Basic Need Does the Death Penalty Serve for People?

[Monday, March 2, 2008, 11:40 pm Thai time]

Why is this issue important to you?

I’m sure that the desire for revenge is hard-wired into human brains. It’s part of our DNA. If someone wrongs us, we want them punished. But what is different about humans who actively support the death penalty from humans who oppose it?

I don’t know the answer, but as Alaskans once more consider whether to reinstate the death penalty we should be asking people on all sides to look deep into their psyches to search out why this issues is important to them and if it isn’t, why not?

Siri Carpenter, at the American Psychological Associations Monitor cites Phoebe C. Ellsworth, PhD, a professor of law and psychology

"When people have committed themselves to strong support of a position, a position that is ideologically self-defining, of course it is hard to change," explains Ellsworth, "because it would look as though the commitment were not real--as though they are fickle about values they claimed were very important."

Since Ellsworth considered the death penalty 'ideologically self-defining," and since the percentage of Americans supporting the death penalty had dropped from 75% to 60% by 2001, she and colleague Samuel R. Gross, JD, wanted to know what psychological factors accounted for the drop.

The psychological factors Ellsworth and Gross have identified include:
* New information. Strongly held attitudes are more likely to shift when people believe they have new information, in part because they can "save face," even as their views change. In the late 1990s, Ellsworth and Gross maintain, heightened awareness of cases of innocent people being sentenced to death and increasing publicity about DNA evidence in capital cases made the problem of wrongful convictions appear new to many people, leading them to change their attitudes.
* New script. New information about wrongful convictions has been reinforced by a new "script," or way of organizing one's thinking about the criminal justice system.
"Ten years ago," notes Ellsworth, "the idea that you could have someone who was wrongly convicted and sentenced just seemed implausible to many people." More recently, however, stories of incompetent lawyers and of police who ignore alternative leads in investigating cases have replaced people's belief in a fair judicial system and made the notion of wrongful convictions more salient. Ellsworth argues that this new script, or shift in what information is salient, has weakened public support for the death penalty.
* New sources. Prominent republicans, including George Will, Pat Robertson and Illinois Gov. George Ryan, have publicly expressed reservations about the death penalty. Such unlikely sources of opposition to the death penalty have probably helped shift public opinion, Ellsworth argues. As she puts it, "It doesn't identify you as a liberal weenie anymore to say you're against the death penalty."
* New option. In 1997, the American Bar Association called for a moratorium on executions until it can be certain that the death penalty is administered fairly and impartially. And last year, Gov. Ryan announced such a freeze in his state. This option allows people to change their attitudes without betraying their earlier beliefs or appearing to join the enemy, Ellsworth and Gross argue.
Princeton University social psychologist Penny S. Visser, PhD, observes that the social psychological forces that Ellsworth and Gross identify share a common feature.
"In a sense, they provide political and psychological cover for changing a long-held attitude," she says. "They allow a person to maintain--to themselves and to others--that their old position was correct then and that their new position is correct now."

But this is rational stuff. I'm looking for the deeper psychological reasons. Things that cause people to feel strongly and thus push them to act or not act. Things that cause people to change a strongly held ideological stance.

A Gallup Report written by Lydia Saad posted last Novemer 2008, suggests that since 2001 the numbers haven't changed and remain about 64% in favor of the death penalty. She adds that most people do not believe the death penalty is a deterrant. The reason they support the death penalty is what I would call one of the gut level feelings.

Open-ended questions asked in previous years have shown that most Americans who favor the death penalty do so because they believe it provides an "eye for an eye" type of justice.

She amplifies this a bit in the conclusions:

According to a 2003 Gallup study, close to half of Americans who supported the death penalty cited some aspect of retribution for the crime as the reason

Is that what caused Reps. Mike Chenault and Jay Ramras to feel strongly enough to sponsor a bill to reinstate the death penalty?

I couldn't find anything from Jay Ramras on the topic and an email sent last week hasn't been responded to. But Mike Chenault has a statement on his legislative webpage about this bill.

Here are some quotes from it. (I'm excerpting points I think are of interest, not just selecting things to make him look good or bad. You can look at his whole statement at the link above to see if I'm leaving out anything important.)

The impetus for HB 9 really comes from what I view as society's inability to reform or rehabilitate certain criminals.


People who commit the most monstrous of crimes will not have the opportunity to reoffend if a death sentence is imposed.

He agrees with the majority cited in the Gallup Poll above:

I don't believe it's a deterrent to crime, I believe it should be an option for the justice system to brandish against the most heinous unremorseful criminals in our society.

He goes on to talk about a man awaiting trial in Federal Court for "the torture and brutal murder of another woman" who wouldn't be facing a possible death sentence if the Feds didn't have jurisdiction and he had to be tried by the State of Alaska.

He also anticipates a common objection to the death penalty:

No one supports innocent people being put to death for crimes they did not commit. .

Though I would add that some would be less concerned than others if such people were put to death. He goes on to say that

I've included safe guards in the legislation to help ensure that people are not wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death

I appreciate that he’s honest enough to recognize that ‘help ensure’ is the best that we can do here. He doesn’t write, ‘that will prevent.’ Would he lose sleep if an innocent man were put to death because of his bill?

And he's not worried about costs - which is a reason, according to the New York Times, a number of states are looking to get rid of the death penalty.

Another argument against the death penalty is the cost associated with keeping someone on death row. Frankly, I don't believe that cost should get in the way of dispensing true justice.

Now, if I were a real, paid journalist, I would look up Chenault's record on funding rural justice programs to see if he is consistent on this.


But my question is, what is it that deep down motivates people to fight to impose the death penalty when there are so many other important issues out there? People don't usually tell us their deep down unconscious reasons for doing things, mainly because they're unconscious reasons and they aren't aware of them. We have to look at clues. If we want to know what animals went by last night, we can look for tracks in the snow. This is like that, but much more slippery. Rep. Chenault does leave this track in his statement:

As a husband and father, I can tell you that I empathize with people whose families are hurt or killed and they take the law into their own hands. I want this legislation to give Alaskans the confidence that we have a system of justice they can rely on to handle the most heinous members of our society.

I'd rather rely on a system of education, employment, and law enforcement that prevented such crimes in the first place. The death penalty wouldn't bring my family member back.

But I recognize that this certainly gets to a fundamental issue that faces all human beings - that we cannot control everything. However much we might try, we can't control the world, only how we react to it. But not everyone recognizes that.

"As a husband and father." What does that mean?

Here's where things get dicey. I'm going to create a story to explain the above. That's all I'm doing - trying to come up with an explanation. It's a hypothesis, a guess. Read it with that in mind.

The husband and father is, in our culture, as in many others, supposed to protect his family. But when someone violates our safe space and kills a wife or child, that husband has failed in his duty to protect. In addition to the loss of a family member is the guilt one feels for not being able to protect them. And I’d go on to hypothesize that one way that guilt can be assuaged is to kill the murderer - after the fact. The death doesn’t bring back the lost family member, but it shows that I have done my duty by avenging my loved one’s killer. And that may explain why for some people, settling the score is more important than being 100% certain you are taking revenge on the right person. Or perhaps that need for revenge convinces one that this is the right person, even when it isn't. We need to take action. We do. And we don't want to know it was against the wrong person.

I too am a husband and father and I too have thought about my inability to protect my family from things that could happen to them. But I also recognize that life is full of dangers that I can’t protect my family from. I’d rather see us spend money that educates people how to parent better, how to reason better, and how to cope with frustration in non-violent ways. I'd rather see money spent to work with kids as they develop their moral competence so that fewer people are likely to commit heinous crimes.

What do we do with socio-paths? These are the people that Chenault fears - people who have no functioning conscience - who commit the kinds of heinous crimes that Chenault wants to use the death penalty for. These people are ‘morally disabled.’ Most have figured out how to live in society without becoming serial killers. But how do we prevent the Ted Bundy’s? And if we fail, does the death penalty offer "true justice"?

And why, when so many good people die daily for no obvious reason, should I care about saving the life of a killer? Because society intentionally killing someone is different from an individual or a natural phenomenon killing someone. We are better than that.

Perhaps my deep down motivations arise from the knowledge that my grandparents - all four of them - died in Nazi Germany because they were Jews. The death penalty for Jews was legal there. OK, I know some of you are saying, "But, that's a whole different story." I'm not talking here about rational reasons, but about deep down gut reasons. The reasons that cause us to seek out rational reasons to argue for our gut reasons. But I could add rational reasons to that argument if pushed.

Basically, if the question is life over death, and there is any doubt at all, we should pick life. If we put the death penalty off the table, if we take it away as an option, then we can start in on discussions about alternate forms of justice for the heinous crimes that Chenault talks about. And we can, more importantly, talk about what factors in society increase and decrease the likelihood that people will turn to crime. And then ways to dismantle the factors causing crime and supplementing those factors that increase the likelihood that people will become law abiding community members.


Civilization is about learning to curb our destructive impulses when the our instincts kick in. We generally believe that physical fights are not the way to solve problems and it is mostly illegal to hit another person. Even though it may well be a genetic inheritance from the times when self-defense was the only defense. We have constraints on sexual contact as well.

Laws don't prevent everyone from hitting or raping others, but they do establish expectations of how people should behave. And the vast majority of people, most of the time, abide by these limits. Not simply because the behaviors are illegal, but because laws make sense, generally. We have created alternate ways to settle disagreements - not always satisfactorily I acknowledge. (I could write several more posts on the wrongheaded restraining of natural behaviors too - like making young kids sit still for long periods of time when their natural behavior is to be active, or preventing women from breast feeding.)

I think the call for revenge is one of those impulses that society should find alternative ways to resolve. South Africa developed its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Another approach is Restorative Justice which

focuses on restoring the losses suffered by victims, holding offenders accountable for the harm they have caused, and building peace within communities.

And, of course, putting money into prevention as well as intervention would help eliminate much of the need for revenge in the first place. The idea of prevention is found in many fields, including prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault and prevention of school violence, just to name a couple. Lots of tools are out there.

And we know from story after story - whether it is the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Mafia, Palestine and Israel - that revenge often leads to a continuing cycle of revenge.

So, what's in your psyche that causes you to react strongly for or against the death penalty? I don't want to hear a list of rational arguments. I want you to look down deep to see if you can find those unconscious stirrings that get your juices flowing on this topic.