National Think Tank Calls on Conservatives to Reject Death Penalty

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.