In a recent col­umn exam­in­ing Massachusetts’ con­sid­er­a­tion of the death penal­ty, con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist George Will cites the con­clu­sions of death penal­ty experts who have close­ly exam­ined the accu­ra­cy and effec­tive­ness of this pun­ish­ment. Will cit­ed the work of the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment and espe­cial­ly the expe­ri­ence of author Scott Turow. Will believes that Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s effort to find a fault­less death penal­ty will ultimately fail: 

A prop­er­ly, mean­ing nar­row­ly, drawn cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute is nec­es­sar­i­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Restricting that penal­ty to a few offens­es guar­an­tees that it will rarely be inflict­ed. Furthermore, the thick fab­ric of pro­ce­dur­al pro­tec­tions that courts have woven around cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment guar­an­tees the elapse of, on aver­age, more than a decade between a con­vic­tion and an exe­cu­tion, and has gen­er­at­ed con­sid­er­able uncer­tain­ty about who among those con­vict­ed of the few cap­i­tal offens­es will be exe­cut­ed.

Yet a pun­ish­men­t’s deter­rent pow­er depends not only on the pun­ish­men­t’s sever­i­ty but also on the swift­ness and prob­a­bil­i­ty of its appli­ca­tion.… Romney is right that DNA evi­dence, which oppo­nents of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment have used to free some inno­cent per­sons improp­er­ly con­vict­ed, can but­tress cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by estab­lish­ing guilt unas­sail­ably. However, DNA evi­dence is not deci­sive — does not pro­vide incon­tro­vert­ible proof — in most capital cases. 

A per­son­’s views of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment often turn, Turow believes, on the per­son­’s views of ​“the per­fectibil­i­ty of human beings and the dura­bil­i­ty of evil.” But imper­fec­tions and temp­ta­tions to evil are not con­fined to crim­i­nals; they taint all human sys­tems. And as for mak­ing a poten­tial killer’s ​“rea­son stare,” Turow says dry­ly: ​“Murder is not a crime com­mit­ted by those close­ly attuned to the real-world effects of their behav­ior.” Turow expects that the Supreme Court will even­tu­al­ly ​“con­clude that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the promise of due process of law are incom­pat­i­ble.” Be that as it may, if Romney, a rea­son­able man, reads Turow’s essay, he will have an even more round­ed appre­ci­a­tion of how the ulti­mate pun­ish­ment makes rea­son not mere­ly stare but ulti­mate­ly turn away. (Washington Post, October 30, 2003).


See Deterrence and Innocence.

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