Do Your Own Killing: Why I Oppose The Crap Out Of The Death Penalty

The horror show of an execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett has renewed debate over the death penalty, and with it the familiar arguments for and against it. On Wednesday, The Daily Banter‘s Bob Cesca made an excellent case for ending the death penalty, while ably expressing the ambivalence that makes public opinion on the matter so stubbornly immune to that case. Like Bob, many find it difficult to move past the “fuck that guy” stage of grief for Clayton Lockett, myself included. Bob wisely started his piece off with a description of Lockett’s crime, which frames his execution in a satisfying irony, worthy of Poe. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Now, as Bob pointed out, there’s a recent study that shows what any logical person already knows, and which other studies have shown too: we are executing innocent people. The current rate is pegged at at least one in 25. If that fact can’t get people to budge off of their support for the death penalty, then what else is there? How do 60 percent of human beings reduce the innocent deaths of their fellows to the moral equivalent of the acceptable limit of insect parts in peanut butter? Are we monsters?

Some of that is denial, some of it is likely the rationale that we can continue to execute people if we can just restrict it to people who are really, indisputably guilty (as if that’s not already the standard we pretend to use), but that’s not all of it. You can pile up every reason to end the death penalty, the lack of deterrence, the expense, the moral ill, even the occasional cruel and unusual fuck-up, and what are we holding onto? How do 60 percent of us just ignore all of that shit?

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.