I don't believe in the death penalty, for several reasons. The first reason is that to me, life is really an incredible miracle. I am not a religious person, and because of that, I don't consider life preordained or inevitable in any way. Being a space buff, I am extremely aware of all those lifeless other planets and moons in our own solar system, and all those extra-solar planets which have been discovered and which are certainly sterile because of the "deadly" shape of the orbits they follow around their suns. I firmly believe that planets bearing higher life forms like ourselves are unusual in the universe. Life, therefore, is something I consider rare, precious, miraculous and extremely fragile. The special miracle of life is that I think of every sentient being as the creator and carrier of his or her own personal inner universe. I would go so far as to say that the real universe gets slightly bigger, richer and more fantastic because each and every one of us creates an image of the world in our minds.
Not only that: because I am not a religious person, I don't believe in life after death. I don't believe we continue to exist in another dimension when our bodies die on Earth. Therefore, I don't believe we get a second chance to find happiness or justice to make up for the bad things that happened to us on the Earth. I believe that the life we live here and now is what we get. This means that the magnitude of deliberately taking another person's life is staggering. To me, it literally means that you kill a part of the universe. You extinguish a consciousness, an "I" which is a unique part of the cosmos and which can never be explained or recreated.
Naturally, some of those unique consciousnesses are malevolent individuals who are bent on destroying others. I don't doubt for a minute that the overwhelming majority of humanity would be better off if these really bad individuals were eliminated. Killed. Executed. Whatever.
But, people. Are we capable of judging which individuals deserve to be killed? Do we know a bad egg when we see one? Do we have the wisdom to know when to snuff out the life and self and being from a person and snuff out an absolutely unique perspective of the cosmos from the universe?
Four years ago, the wife of a young, charismatic Pentecostalist pastor was found dead in the family bath-tub here in Sweden. A cursory post-mortem found that she had very high levels of pain killers and tranquillizers in her body, and the police concluded that this young mother of three small children had, for unknown reasons, killed herself. Naturally she had killed herself. The alternative, that she had been killed by her incredibly respectable and popular husband, was of course unthinkable. The police therefore did not consider her home a crime scene, and they did nothing to look for evidence that she might have been killed. The pastor remarried within a month of his first wife's death.
Two years later, the pastor's second wife was shot to death by the young nanny that he had hired for his children after their mother's death, and whom he had kept even after he remarried. Now the police was forced to seriously look into the pastor's business, and guess what they found? The pastor was carrying on a love affair with the nanny. He was carrying on an even more serious love affair with his second wife's sister-in-law! In fact, he wanted to get rid of his second wife so that he could marry the sister-in-law, but he didn't want to cause a scandal by getting a divorce. Instead he had for many months been "brainwashing" the young nanny, convincing her that God wanted her to kill the pastor's second wife! At first she refused, but after months of persuasion, she attacked the pastor's wife with a hammer. The wife survived, and the police knew nothing about the hammer attack because the congregation kept absolutely quiet about it. The pastor could go on brainwashing the nanny, and eventually she got herself a gun and shot the pastor's wife.
The point I want to make is this. The police did not suspect the pastor of murdering his first wife, because he was so respectable. They did nothing whatsoever to find out what had actually caused the first wife's death. The pastor's congregation knew about the hammer attack on the second wife, but they kept absolutely quiet it, because they totally believed in their pastor and didn't want to cause any problems for him. Because the police did nothing, because his congregation implicitly trusted him, and because everyone who had anything to do with him regarded him as a paragon of respectability, no one lifted a finger to protect his second wife. And the outcome was two dead young women, three small motherless children and a young nanny who became a killer for her love of a pastor and her belief in God.
My point is this. I don't think we are very good at judging other people. We are not good at being fair. We rush to conclusions. Who are we to give ourselves the right to sentence other people to death?
There is one more thing. In a democracy, we ought to feel a personal responsibility for the society of which we are citizens. To me, this means that if I believe that the courts of my country should be allowed to sentence a person to death, then I should be willing to be a part of a jury that sentences someone to death. But there is more than that. When a person has been sentenced to death, somebody must carry out the actual execution. If I support the death penalty, I must also support the actual, physical killing of people. I must support the pushing of a button which sends lethal current into a person's body. I must support the actual injecting of poison into his or her body. If I support the death penalty, then I should be willing to do the actual, manual killing of that person. Would I be willing to do that? And what would it do to me as a person if I willingly, deliberately killed another person, a helpless person who could not defend himself or herself?
I must say that I'm not willing to actually kill another person, certainly not a restrained, helpless person who is not an immediate threat to anybody. I don't want to know what it would do to me if I actually, deliberately did kill a helpless person. Therefore, I know I must say no to the death penalty.
Ann
