There’s an interesting essay by Joseph Bottum in this month’s First Things titled Christians and the Death Penalty, in which he reflects on the recent execution of Michael Ross. Bottom does an excellent job, I think, personalizing the loss felt by those whose loved were murdered by Ross, without giving in to the impulse for revenge.
In fact, the main point of Bottum’s piece is that our civil tort laws are designed to mitigate the human instinct for revenge. Civil justice replaces blood feuds with judicial procedures and damage claims. The criminal laws, in contrast, are designed to punish and deter crime, and to protect the public from criminals. One difficulty with the death penalty is that it’s often portrayed as a means of brining “closure” to the victims’ families. This was certainly the case with the Ross execution — one of the family members even taunted Ross as the lethal injection needle pierced his vein.
I don’t blame that family member at all. If my wife or children were murdered or hurt by someone like Ross, I’d want to stick the needle in myself, and worse. But this is where Bottom has it exactly right: the law should act to restrain that urge, no matter how justified it seems. And, whatever position we as Christians take on the death penalty generally, we must be careful not to portray it as a means of private justice.
Without the private justice rationale, Bottum questions whether there is any justification for the death penalty in a democratic society. When nations were governed by dictators who professed the divine right of Kings, those in power carried out capital punishment directly in the name of God. In a democratic society that purports to be governed by the people, the power to exact revenge, according to Bottum, is more tenuous. If a democratic state can protect itself without taking a life, for example by lifetime imprisionment, the rationale for capital punishment, absent mere revenge, dissipates.
Here, I think, Bottum’s argument falters a bit. Bottum acknowledges that Romans 13 is often cited by Christians who are death penalty proponents, including most on the Evangelical Religious Right. Bottum interprets Romans 13 to mean that the state can use force to defend itself, as when a police officer uses force to stop a crime in progress or a soldier uses force in a just war. However, Romans 13 refers to the rule as “an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” The agency given the state in Romans 13, then, is broader than only one of protection. It is an agency of punishment as well.
This doesn’t, in my view, suggest that the death penalty is a mandatory component of any civil state, or even that the death penalty is always a permissible component of the state’s punitive agency. The “sword” referred to in Romans 13 seems pretty clearly to be a broad term for force. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the distinction between civil and criminal justice, while helpful to the death penalty discussion, doesn’t settle it.