The R Street Institute, a Washington-based policy think tank, has joined the growing number of conservative voices advocating for death-penalty abolition. In a commentary in the November/December 2018 issue of The American Conservative, the institute’s criminal justice and civil liberties policy director Arthur Rizer (pictured, left) and its Southeast region director Marc Hyden (pictured, right) argue that “the closer conservatism remains to its core values, the more credibility it brings to the table,” and that the core values of conservatism—promoting “government restraint, fiscal responsibility, morality, and public safety”—ideally situate conservatives to “champion capital punishment’s demise.” “If conservatives want to convince others that a smaller, more nimble government is best,” Rizer and Hyden write, “then those values should be reflected in all policy areas, including the death penalty.”
Rizer’s and Hyden’s argument against capital punishment starts from the premise that “skepticism of state power is at the heart of the American identity and conservative philosophy.” This, they write, is “for good reason. The United States government has a history of incompetence and malfeasance.” Criminal justice policies, they say, should not be immune from the traditional conservative “suspicion of government”—particularly policies such as capital punishment, in which “the United States has a track record of acting in an arbitrary and biased fashion.” Addressing issues ranging from racial bias, the possibility of executing an innocent person, the costs of capital punishment, its failure to make society safer, and the mistrust of big government, the article catalogues why the authors believe conservatives should oppose the death penalty.
On race, Rizer and Hyden write: “The simple matter is that the death penalty has an extensive history of overt bias.” Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, they say, “we still have not been able to banish the bias that permeates the justice system. … Justice must not only be blind, but also color blind.” In the U.S., however, “a murder victim’s race also seems to influence whether or not the accused will be put to death,” the authors write, leaving the implication “that, at least through the criminal justice lens, some lives are more valuable than others.” The death penalty, they write, falls short on another core conservative belief, “that the government is too often inefficient and prone to mistakes.” They ask: “Why should the death penalty’s administration by government bureaucrats be any different?” Recognizing the certainty that there will be some wrongful convictions, they say the death penalty carries with it inevitably “irreversible consequences.” “Conservatives take great pride in championing the sanctity of life and respecting its intrinsic value,” but—citing historical evidence of wrongful executions and data showing that there is one exoneration for every nine executions in the U.S.—the authors say, “a death penalty system that repeatedly and unnecessarily risks innocent lives does neither.” Likewise, they say, “numerous cost studies have examined the death penalty’s expense and found that it far outweighs the price of life without parole (LWOP).… Given the death penalty’s high costs compared to LWOP, it’s clear that capital punishment is antithetical to fiscal conservatism.”
The article concludes by urging conservatives to adhere to their core values in judging the death penalty: “Conservatives should return to the root principles of liberty and dignity to ensure that the criminal justice system is fair, just, and respects life…. Perhaps more than anything else, opposition to the death penalty should boil down to a lack of faith in a woefully error-prone government. After all, how willing are you to trust your life to this system?”
(Arthur Rizen and Marc Hyden, A Dying Shame: The state is not God, and the death penalty is not infallible., The American Conservative, November/December 2018.) See New Voices.
