by Daniel Cubias
If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death. The Bible — Numbers 35:30
The dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. – Pope John Paul II
Each of us has, to some degree, an unhealthy capacity for revenge. And that trait flows from us as individuals into society at large. This unflattering characteristic is one of the driving forces behind capital punishment.
As opposed to many political or cultural debates, there is no middle ground in this. You either want to string killers up or you don’t.
The United States is among the few industrialized nations that still have the death penalty. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans support frying criminals. That’s a solid majority, but keep in mind that this is the lowest level of support in almost forty years.
One must wonder if the declining enthusiasm for capital punishment is due to the fact that the United States is becoming more multicultural. Indeed, Gallup says that white Americans favor the death penalty by a factor of more than two to one. A majority of ethnic minorities, however, are against it.
And this racial split carries over when the death penalty is actually applied. Of course, death sentences are more likely to be handed out when the victim is white. And “racial disparities in capital sentencing are an historical reality —and a particularly ugly one at that.”
Now, although Latinos are disproportionally represented in the U.S. prison system, the percentage of Hispanics on death row is actually lower than our share of the American population. This is one area in which it is good to be underrepresented.
Still, there were apparently a dozen extra Latinos slated for execution until recently, because that’s how many have been freed when new evidence exonerated them. They are among the more than one hundred prisoners who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, only to be released, sometimes years later.
The fact that so many people have been earmarked for lethal injection or the electric chair, only for judges to say, “Oops, you’re free to go” is one of the most damning arguments against the death penalty.
There is also the pesky worry that capital punishment apparently doesn’t work as a deterrent on crime. In fact, the states that execute the most prisoners have the highest murder rates, which is either ironic, logical, or coincidental, depending upon your political perspective.
With all this doubt about capital punishment, it’s little surprise that so many organizations are seeking to abolish it. For example, in California, the SAFE Campaign is working to replace the death penalty in that state with a sentence of life without parole for convicted murderers.
If those crazy Californians succeed, it may be the beginning of a groundswell that ends in capital punishment’s elimination.
Yes, we may be witnessing the slow death of the death penalty.
To learn more about Staff Writer, Daniel Cubias, visit Hispanic Fanatic.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of
the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.
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