> But only 38% of Americans believe that the death penalty is applied
> unfairly in this country today. A majority of 57% say that it is not.
> Americans have actually become slightly more likely to say the death
> penalty is applied fairly in the last several years, compared with
> results from polls conducted in 2000 and 2002, during the height of
> publicity surrounding state moratoriums on the death penalty.
Last year I was speculating about why the death penalty was so popular in the U.S. Here's the crux of what I came up with:
http://thevanitywebsite.blogspot.com/2006/05/harsh-capitalism-harshest-punishment_30.html
The foundational myth of the American sink-or-swim economy is that it's essentially a meritocracy. Maybe not a perfect meritocracy, but close. In the long run, the myth goes, everyone (or almost everyone) gets his just deserts; what people have -- or don't have -- they've earned. Material inequalities are fundamentally a function of an individual's moral steadfastness (his willingness to work) and cultivated talent... so goes the myth, anyway.
This allows for only modest interventions in the economy: Since it's basically fair to begin with, the myth goes, all we need to do is attack those few stubborn pockets of unfairness and stay out of the way. Economic interventions, after all, are effectively admissions that the myth of the American economic meritocracy isn't entirely accurate -- that the economy isn't as fair as people say it is. The more robust the myth is, the easier it is to dismiss calls for economic interventions -- the myth keeps our markets free. ... This robust notion of responsibility is expansive and consistent: Rich people are responsible for being rich and poor people are responsible for being poor; and model citizens are responsible for being model and criminals are responsible for being criminals. And in each case, there is far more responsibility doled-out than the widely-recognized facts support: Many of the factors that make people who they are (for better or worse) are imposed on them by circumstances wholly beyond their control. Moreover -- and this is key -- the level of responsibility assigned in one sphere of social life, like economics, will correspond to the level of responsibility assigned in another sphere of social life, like criminal justice.
In the United States, then, since we assign a great deal of responsibility to individuals for their economic success or failure, we also assign a great deal of responsibility to criminals for their crimes -- that is to say near complete responsibility.
Here is where we come back to the death penalty. It typically takes a lot for a man to get to the point where he murders someone else. There's a reason, after all, why you don't hear a lot of stories about well-adjusted people killing others. People who end up on death row usually have serious mental health problems, substantial intellectual deficits, or unspeakably bad childhoods (and often a combination of two or more of these). As such, the "deliberative process" the typical death row inmate went through when he committed the murder(s) that landed him on death row would seem pretty alien to most of us, even though the law and prosecutors would like to suggest otherwise.
But since murder is criminal and heinous, Americans feel obliged to assign responsibility to the murderer -- the same level of responsibility (although of a much different kind) they assign to the successful Harvard-educated CEO who was the son of a successful lawyer: full responsibility. And as I mentioned back in part I, full responsibility for a premeditated murder must be the forfeiture of one's own life, since life is the only good that cannot have an exchange value.
The whole thing starts here: http://thevanitywebsite.blogspot.com/2006/05/harsh-capitalism-harshest-punishment.html
-WD