Maine actually abolished the death penalty over a century ago, conducting its final execution in 1887, after a man reportedly suffered and died as the result of a poorly constructed hangman’s noose. Despite declining support for the death penalty in recent years, and statements from liberals and conservatives acknowledging the injustice, inhumanity and unreasonable costs of the policy, many states continue to execute prisoners.
Last month's execution of a borderline retarded woman - 41-year-old Teresa Lewis - underscores the disturbing nature of how this practice is administered and enforced.
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens told NPR in a recent interview that the one vote he regrets in his more than 35 years on the court was his vote in favor of reinstituting the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, saying:
"I thought at the time ... that if the universe of defendants eligible for the death penalty is sufficiently narrow so that you can be confident that the defendant really merits that severe punishment, that the death penalty was appropriate," he says. But, over the years, "the court constantly expanded the cases eligible for the death penalty, so that the underlying premise for my vote has disappeared, in a sense.”
Two conclusions are inescapable:Capital punishment does not deter crime, and the death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice. It is up to us to keep the death penalty out of Maine and to urge others to follow.
You can also check out the ACLU page about the death penalty. And a moving video by fault lines on Youtube.
ACLU's EIGHT OBJECTIONS TO THE DEATH PENALTY
- Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment.
- Opposing the death penalty does not mean sympathy with convicted murderers. On the contrary, murder demonstrates a lack of respect for human life. For this very reason, murder is abhorrent, and a policy of state-authorized killings is immoral. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence, rather than reason, as the solution to difficult social problems.
- Capital punishment denies due process of law. Its imposition is often arbitrary, and always irrevocable – forever depriving an individual of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence.
- The death penalty violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It is applied randomly – and discriminatorily. It is imposed disproportionately upon those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of color, and on those who are poor and uneducated.
- Changes in death sentencing have proved to be largely cosmetic.The defects in death-penalty laws, conceded by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s, have not been appreciably altered by the shift from unrestrained discretion to "guided discretion." Such changes in death sentencing merely mask the impermissible randomness of a process that results in an execution.
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The death penalty is not a viable form of crime control. When police chiefs were asked to rank the factors that, in their judgement, reduce the rate of violent crime, they mentioned curbing drug use and putting more officers on the street, longer sentences and gun control. They ranked the death penalty as least effective.1
Politicians who preach the desirability of executions as a method of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to identify and confront the true causes of crime. - Capital punishment wastes resources. It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and correctional personnel. It unduly burdens the criminal justice system, and it is thus counterproductive as an instrument for society's control of violent crime.
- A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings.An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems – the worst possible example to set for the citizenry. Governments worldwide have often attempted to justify their lethal fury by extolling the purported benefits that such killing would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of capital punishment are illusory, but the bloodshed and the resulting destruction of community decency are real.
