Ken Braun: Death and taxes are dangerous things to trust to politics

Ken Braun | By Ken Braun |
Follow on Twitter
on May 22, 2013 at 7:17 AM, updated May 22, 2013 at 7:18 AM
IRS Political Groups.JPGIf you can't trust the government and politicians with collecting taxes, how can you trust them to perform capitol punishment with any competency?

 In addition to their status as convicted (or accused) murderers, Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, Arizona boyfriend-killer Jodi Arias and accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were all in the news last week for another similarity: Prosecutors were considering having them killed. 

Tsarnaev may face a federal death penalty, otherwise the state of Massachusetts would have no such option because the state constitution has prohibited capital punishment since 1982. 

The federal government also enforced the only death sentence that has been carried out in Michigan since statehood. Like Massachusetts, that is the only way it can happen here: Michigan has banned the practice since statehood in 1847 and has the oldest prohibition against government-sanctioned killing in the English-speaking world. 

When we re-rewrote the Michigan Constitution in 1963, the delegate vote was 108-3 in favor of Article IV, Section 46: “No law shall be enacted providing for the penalty of death.” Whether you’re a bleeding-heart liberal or small-government conservative, anyone with ties to Michigan should take pride in this history.

Death penalty support from supposedly small-government conservatives makes little sense. To take just one current example: If you don’t trust government to enforce mere tax laws without veering into the scandalous and biased misbehavior that the IRS has recently committed, then by what logic would you give it the power to take lives? 

The mistakes of a politically biased, corrupt or just plain inept tax collector can be undone, but a hangman’s work is forever. A dozen years before we became a state, it came to light that our territorial government hanged an innocent man.

Criminal justice and public safety are among the most basic functions of government. Many “tough on crime” conservatives marry support for this unobjectionable public good to their personal notions of Biblical “eye for an eye” justice. The result is a flawed conclusion that government is not just cosmically competent at the killing of convicted murderers, but morally compelled to do so. 

I once had some sympathies with this thinking. Then came Bill Clinton, and a realization that even murderers could be victims of political bias.

Embroiled in what would be the first of many efforts to lie about and publicly shame one of his former lovers, Clinton ducked away from campaigning in the 1992 New Hampshire primary so as to return to Arkansas and make a distracting tough-on-crime show of signing the death warrant for convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector. 

The problem wasn’t Rector’s guilt, but his competency to stand trial. Before being captured, he shot himself in the head, inflicting a very crude but effective frontal lobotomy rather than a suicide. Rector was left in a fog of such dubious reality that on his way to the death chamber he cheerfully requested that the guards save his unfinished final dessert so he could finish it “later.” 

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens recounts the moral distress that ensued for several of the officials who witnessed or participated in the execution (such as the prison chaplain who quit shortly thereafter.) Whatever his guilt before debraining himself, the Rector who committed murder wasn’t the man who went to trial, let alone to his own death. 

We require governors to sign death warrants because they are expected to be a last line of defense to prevent ethically questionable killings. Just the opposite happened to Rector: A politician signed his death warrant so as to deflect attention from the politician’s dubious behavior. 

If you are a conservative who isn’t comfortable giving a man like Bill Clinton such power to abuse, then it isn’t “tough on crime” to give it to anyone else.
