Capital Punishment and Murders by Police

I am against capital punishment. I am also against police murdering innocent people. Being against the killing of a person convicted of a capital crime implies that one even more strongly and clearly must be against police murdering innocent people. It means that police procedures and weapons should never be employed in a wide range of instances where they are now standard operating procedure. If Americans were against capital punishment, then they would not allow police to be running wild and getting away with it as they are doing today in so many instances.

The first time I stated my capital punishment position in this blog was on May 2, 2011. It was on the occasion of bin Laden’s reported killing. Calls were being made at that time for the killing of Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. This occurred on Oct. 20, 2011. Accounts vary on how he was killed. There was altogether too much celebration of these killings, even if these men were guilty of capital crimes, but there had been no judicial proceedings that even reached that judgment.

Imagine that we Americans change our minds about capital punishment and decide that it is wrong. There are many grounds for doing so. Relevant to the anti-state philosophy of this site is the following from philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev:

“It has been said: ‘Those taking up the sword, will perish by the sword’. This was said for the state, since the state not only was the first to have taken up the sword, having been begotten in bloody killings, but it also elevated the killing into law, it admitted death as one of the laws of life. It is known, that capital punishment developed historically out of the blood feud, that the state out of concern took upon itself the task to organise retribution, having transformed it into something impersonal. The elements of revenge in the blood feud — are irrational, in it is stirred up a primordial chaos, but this chaos is infinitely more noble and holier, than the organised, mindfully deliberate, consciously-bestial retribution of the state, than its monstrous impersonalism. Death is something terrible and killing something reprehensible, but what can be said about death, elevated into a law of life, about killing, organised consciously by the masters of life in the name of upholding an illusory order of affairs within it. There is in the world an higher truth, than with this blood revenge, and to this revenge it summons us not, but the state is not mindful about this truth, it is not given for the state to have to answer for the horror of killing. For a man it has been said: ‘Do not kill’, but the state, the people of the state, the people in power have regarded this as not applying to them, they have attributed the commandment as applying only to their subjects and uphold their existence by a beastly law, nowise heedful about God.

“Death — is the most extreme, the most terrible expression of worldly evil, of the world’s falling away from God, and the goal of religion has always been the victory over death, the affirming of life eternal. If Christ’s death on the Cross was a victory over death, then together with this it was also a most powerful condemnation of killing. Capital punishment, true Christians have declared, is tied in with the deed of the torturing of Christ, it is a murdering not only of man, but also of God.”

If Americans had long ago decided that capital punishment was wrong, for reasons such as articulated by Berdyaev or for any number of other reasons, this would have been accompanied and have caused a large shift in thinking about killing people in general. This shift would have had to happen because consistency of thinking and feeling would have demanded it.

Why? One cannot be against killing a man convicted of a crime and then blithely be in favor of killing innocents in a war. One cannot be against killing a convicted criminal and be in favor of policemen killing people because they are unruly, or bang on a car window, or peddle contraband, or wave toy guns, or are surprised and confused when a SWAT team invades their homes.

There is a seismic shift in one’s thought and feeling when one comes to the idea that capital punishment is wrong. There has to be.

Of the 50 states, 32 have capital punishment and 18 do not. Americans and most states haven’t got the message. The federal government definitely hasn’t got the message. Police forces haven’t got the message. These bodies are ready, willing and able to murder innocent people by both direct and indirect means.

Too, brutality and torture have been part of the American playbook for a very long time. Torture is a punishment, a sentence, carried out when there has been no judicial proceeding of any kind. It is less extreme but analogous to the state’s death sentence applied in the killing of innocents.

This American nation is only Christian in myth. The nation’s leaders of state launch one aggressive and punitive war after another. They pervert the meaning of Christ’s life and death. Americans at large have not yet condemned these wars. They are just starting to condemn the killings by policemen. If they would understand why it is wrong to take the life of a man found guilty of a capital crime, then they would even more strongly want to change radically the procedures by which police operate. They would want to change radically the warring ways by which the U.S. government operates.

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12:56 pm on December 21, 2014