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The 34-year-old man who carried out a terrorist attack in 2017 — using a truck to plow down eight victims and injure many more on a bike path in Manhattan — was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences and a consecutive sentence of 260 years in prison. While prosecutors sought the death penalty for the killer, jurors told the judge they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict required for capital punishment.
Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman believes the U.S., one of the few developed nations that still allows the death penalty, is running out of arguments to keep it.
You can’t reverse the death penalty. But even if you could execute the death penalty with perfect accuracy, we know that the death penalty is also applied in a racially biased and unfair way based on skin color.
We know that from a fiscal conservatism perspective, which many on the Right claim to subscribe to, it is more expensive to go through the death penalty process than life without parole, because of the appeals and the cost of death row that are mandated and required. And when people say, “Well, just don’t give them appeals” — when you understand that there are innocent people on death row, how on earth would you justify eliminating appeals?
So there are so many different reasons to say we should not have the death penalty. And at the end of the day, the motivation often for the death penalty is revenge. And people will will write to me, they’ll say, “David, you know, you might feel differently about the death penalty if one of your loved ones had been killed in this attack.” And I agree with that. I might feel differently. But that’s a reason not to have the death penalty. What do I mean? I might feel differently, if it were my family member out of a desire for revenge, and revenge is not the point or purpose of the American justice system. So the fact that my view would be different in the heat of emotion is not evidence that we should have the death penalty.
