Capital Punishment and the Drive to Re-Enact

[CW: rape]

In my state, California, there's currently a proposition on the ballot to abolish the death penalty: Proposition 62, on which you should vote Yes if you're eligible to do so. You should also vote No on Proposition 66, whose goal is to make the process of state-sponsored murder more efficient. So it seems like it's a good time to think a little bit about the desire for capital punishment as a socially-acceptable response to trauma.

Racism and Capital Punishment

The death penalty persists in the United States is to punish and control people of color, primarily Black people. The legacy of kidnapping and enslaving Black people and using their labor as the foundation of a new state is one of the things that differentiates the United States from almost every other economically powerful nation, and capital punishment is another. Historically, the application of capital punishment to people convicted of rape is one of the most clear-cut instances of the disproportionate application of capital punishment to people of color. The specific case I address here is a case of rape and murder, so keep in mind the history of how capital punishment has been applied to Black men accused of rape even though this particular case was a white-on-white crime. While capital punishment advocates often claim that the death penalty should be reserved for the "worst of the worst" criminals -- and the case I'm about to talk about is just such an example -- in general, the application of capital punishment to white defendants is quite inconsistent, and understanding that helps us understand how "worst of the worst" arguments serve to obfuscate the irreducible racism of capital punishment in the US. While the occasional white death row inmate might help dissemble the racist goals of the death penalty, the thing that predicts where it will be applied most strongly is race, not the severity of the crime.

Of course, people who support capital punishment don't generally try to be overtly racist, so they enlist survivors of violent crime -- generally, white survivors, who other white people sympathize with -- to camouflage their real agenda. Moreover, many survivors of violent crime don't want the people who hurt them to be executed. Nonetheless, there are survivors of violent crime who willingly enlist in the pro-state-sponsored murder campaign, as well as family members of murder victims, and I mean to clear away the cobwebs (well aware as I am that other people have expertly documented the white supremacy that lies beneath.)

Acceptable Trauma Survivors and Revenge

Survivors make good camouflage because most people find it at least somewhat understandable why people would want revenge against people who hurt them or their loved ones in the worst possible ways (sometimes misleadingly called "closure"). The desire for revenge -- specifically the form of revenge that involves having the government murder somebody for you -- is considered within the realm of reasonable responses to trauma, even though there is no consensus among the public on whether or not capital punishment is good public policy (among experts on law and violent crime, of course, consensus exists, and that consensus is that it's bad policy.) And yet we might ask: why?

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Acceptable trauma survivors -- those who are victimized by people unrelated to themselves -- are supported when they wish to deal with their trauma by having the state kill people on their behalf. Unacceptable trauma survivors take violence into their own hands -- frequently against themselves, rarely against others. Honesty about the prevalence of violence and abuse requires empathy for all survivors, without granting any class of survivors special permission to potentiate violence. Breaking the cycle of abuse requires ending capital punishment and confronting our collective desire to punish. We can acknowledge that we are hurting while working as hard as we can to control our natural desire to hurt others in response, to show them what it feels like. We have to confront our collective desire for vengeance in order to be freed from the misguided hope that further bloodshed will heal us.

Thanks to Gwen, Jon and Ken for their comments on a draft of this essay.

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