U.S. chauvinistic for inflicting death penalty on foreigners

Only a few months after a Mexican citizen on Arizona's death row was fortunately, from the standpoint of international relations, given a reprieve, two similar incidents are again threatening Arizona's and the U.S.' reputation abroad.

It is bad enough that we even have a death penalty when our State Department publishes an annual report on the status of human rights around the world and tries to influence practices in other countries and when our neighbors to the north and south and virtually all of our democratic allies have abolished it. To inflict it on the citizens of countries that do not have it amounts to U.S. chauvinism.

There are any number of legal circumstances that determine whether a convicted murderer receives the death sentence or life in prison, or whether a death sentence is commuted on appeal. Certainly the concerns of a foreign government in preventing one of its citizens from being punished far more severely than they would be at home is reason enough to commute in cases like the LaGrand brothers.

If concern for the feelings of friendly nations is not enough to sway the argument, then we should at least be concerned with the dreadful precedence this sets for the treatment of our own citizens living in countries with much harsher laws and punishments than ours.

Why is it that Americans still support the death penalty long after our neighbors and friends (many of whom have much lower homicide rates than ours) have abolished it? Part of the problem may be that the argument for abolition so often relies on appeals to sympathy for the condemned.

Arguments for sympathy for convicted murderers have to be all-time worst losers. While ordinary people might be moved to compassion for criminals from troubled backgrounds who commit lesser, non-violent crimes, convicted murderers will almost never arouse sympathy, no matter what the circumstances, and politicians looking for an easy cause will gleefully contrast a supposed lack of sympathy for the victim with efforts being made on behalf of the criminal.

For too long the debate in this country has been framed in terms that virtually guarantee that efforts at abolition will fail.

A better reason for opposing the death penalty is its effect on society as a whole, on all of us. Those effects might not be so easily recognized once we have become sensitized to the reality of capital punishment and have come to accept it as normal. One is reminded of the Rodney King jury and how repeated playing of the tapes of his beating at the hands of the police gradually destroyed its ability to shock.

The paradox is that criminals will always be the one minority who are despised and whose rights are restricted, and that is the way it must be, yet we must be careful how we proceed, for the types of punishment we choose must inevitably determine an important aspect of who we are.

Pat Montoya
Library specialist