New Conservative Voices Criticize Death Penalty as an ​‘Inept, Biased and Corrupt’ Big Government Policy

Calling the death penalty a wasteful “big government” policy that is “inept, biased, and corrupt,” a libertarian think tank and a New Orleans columnist have joined the chorus of conservative voices calling for the end of the death penalty.

In Conservative doesn’t mean supporting death penalty, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Tim Morris (pictured) argues that being a conservative requires neither “an unyielding fealty to a party or person [or] simply finding the polar opposite of some liberal position,” and that while he believes that “capital punishment can be morally justified,” “our government has proven to be … inept, biased and corrupt in carrying out that responsibility.” Likewise, in a July 22, 2018 commentary, If You Hate Big Government, You Should Oppose the Death Penalty, published on the Foundation for Economic Education website, Patrick Hauf writes that “[f]rom fiscal irresponsibility to wrongful convictions to botched executions, the death penalty is merely another wasteful government effort.” Hauf, too, criticizes what he sees as reflexive support for the death penalty among some conservatives. While many “pride themselves on their unapologetic use of the death penalty, its enactment,” Hauf says, “like most government programs, is both inefficient and ineffective.”

Morris, whom the newspaper describes as an “independent thinker with a Christian worldview and a journalist’s sense of skepticism,” dismisses the notion that all conservatives must support the death penalty. As evidence that government cannot properly administer capital punishment, he says “too many innocent people are being sentenced to death” and notes that 82 percent of death-row cases in Louisiana from 1975-2015 ended with the conviction or sentence being reversed. In another op-ed, he cites findings from a University of North Carolina study that a black male in Louisiana is 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim was a white female than when the victim was a black male. After detailing the reasons conservative political strategist Richard Viguerie and Pulitzer prize winning conservative columnist George Will also oppose capital punishment, Morris sums up: “the death penalty is arbitrary, racially discriminatory, and doesn’t deter crime. I don’t see anything conservative about supporting an inept, biased, corrupt system.”

Hauf also tauts growing Republican resistance to the death penalty, citing a 2017 report by Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty that highlighted a dramatic rise in Republican sponsorship of bills to abolish capital punishment and the results of a Gallup poll that reported 10-percentage-point decrease in support for the death penalty among conservatives in 2017. He notes the ideological inconsistency between principled conservatism and the death penalty, saying capital punishment is “one issue where conservatives often give far too much power to the government.” He writes, “many Republicans allow their ‘tough on crime’ mentality to overrule limited government ideals and innate skepticism of state overreach. This contradiction within the Republican platform, although rarely acknowledged, exposes a weakness in the party’s ideology. If Republicans pride themselves on their limited government philosophy, then why would they grant the government control over life and death?” There is, he concludes, “nothing ‘small government’ about capital punishment. … It’s time for Republicans to kill capital punishment off for good.”