STORIES
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THE DEATH PENALTY: SHOULD WE USE IT OR NOT?
A Florida State Grad says "NO"
By Lisa Orloff
In 1995, New York State reenacted the death penalty for first-degree murder. The return of capital punishment after a 21-year absence brings a tremendous challenge not only to the legal community, but also to social workers. The death penalty is the ultimate statement about the worthlessness of human life. When it is imposed, the conclusion is made that this person's life no longer has value, sense or purpose - an idea antithetical to social work and unthinkable to me as a human being.
I am the supervising social worker for the Legal Aid Society's Capital Defense Unit in Manhattan.
In New York, the district attorneys decide whether to seek the death penalty in a case, weighing not only the legal facts but learning whether or not there are mitigating circumstances.
It is our opportunity to tell the client's life story. Our clients have committed horrible crimes - for which there is no excuse - but mitigation involves an explanation: placing a client's crime into the context of an extensive social history of the client's life. A social history investigation is a methodical process with dozens of interviews, and thousands of pages of life history records (e.g., schools, psychiatric hospitals, the military). Connections are made between a person's family history, past experiences and behavior as adults. I have yet to meet a client who wakes up one morning and decides to commit a heinous murder. It just doesn't happen that way.
I have been asked if our clients exaggerate their problems in order to garner sympathy. Just the opposite is true: our clients tend to minimize their problems. Some clients think that the physical and sexual abuse they endured, or being raised by mentally ill parents, was "normal" treatment, so they don't even think of mentioning it to me. Others are so traumatized by abusive upbringings that they repress what happened. For example, I had a client whose father punished him by binding his wrists together and hanging him over a pipe. It was not until I interviewed his sister that I learned she watched his hands turn black as she sat in a chair next to him "keeping him company," ignoring his pleas for help for fear of retaliation from their father.
It was only after going through 800 pages of the father's hospital record that I found out the family lived in a basement where they used a plastic bag and newspaper for a toilet.
Mitigation is typically presented at two stages of a case. One is to help the prosecutors make their decision. The other stage is at the penalty phase of a capital trial.
Our office handled the first death penalty trial in New York since 1995. Our client, Darrel Harris, is a former corrections officer who had saved a fellow officer's life during a jail riot in 1986. Mr. Harris went on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and became addicted to cocaine and alcohol.
On May 19, 1998, he was convicted of the murders of three people at an after-hours club. On June 6, 1998, he was sentenced to death.
Should his appeals fail, the state will kill Darrel Harris by a series of lethal injections. Although state sanctioned, that is murder.
Being a social worker has taught me that no one is without worth. Working on death penalty cases has reinforced that belief.
Response from Hornsby:
The thrust of my counterpart's argument is twofold: First, the death penalty is unjust because it is imposed disproportionately on defendants who have traumatic and abusive life experiences. Second, the death penalty is state-sanctioned murder.
As we enter the 21st Century, my counterpart's first argument is the excuse du jour for abdicating responsibility. The Adopted Child Syndrome Defense, Post Menstrual Stress Syndrome Defense, and the Twinkies ("made me do it") Defense, all shift blame onto anyone except the true wrongdoer. Juries should consider a defendant's background to determine whether it "reduces" moral culpability. However, to suggest that bad childhoods "totally insulate" the murderer's true responsibility is an affront to those who do not commit murder, but live to overcome more traumatic life experiences.
Likewise, while it has emotional appeal, the death penalty is not properly characterized as state-sanctioned murder. This gossamer image unfairly obscures the moral distinction between crime and punishment. Ted Bundy's murder and sexual assault of at least 17 innocent girls and young women is not the moral equivalent of his execution.
As Stanford University scholar Thomas Sowell explains,
"If we took this kind of 'reasoning' seriously, it would be wrong to
take back by force what a robber has seized by force. It would be wrong
to imprison someone who illegally imprisoned someone else." America
does not employ the death penalty because it wants to take the life of the
murderer; rather, it does so because it so deeply values the innocent and
sacred lives of its own.