Too Much?

Richard Cohen argues against the death penalty, stating that "the power to take life is too awesome to be given to government." Well, perhaps. But is the power to lock someone away in prison forever really a substantially lesser one? Or even to lock them away for thirty years? And yet, someone's got to have the power to punish criminals, and really, really bad criminals are going to have to be punished pretty harshly. The power to mete out harsh penalties is, needless to say, an awesome one and anyone's who's been to the DMV will naturally have some doubts about the wisdom of entrusting such awesome power to the state. But the state can make war, and therein regularly holds life and death in the balance. For what choice is there but to give the state that power? Someone's got to do it. And someone needs to mete out harsh penalties. The government is the obvious choice.

Which is but a lengthy throat-clearing way of saying that I think a lot of discussion of the death penalty occurs weirdly out of context. Executions are inhumane. But inhumane as opposed to what? Executing people is putting an awful lot of power in the government's hands, but an awful lot of power as opposed to what? Capital defendants often suffer from egregiously bad legal representation and the prosecutorial apparatus is all-too-often unscrupulous. But their legal representation is poor compared to whose? There's a lot to worry about regarding how the death penalty is administered, but it's entirely of a piece with general worries we should be having with the criminal justice system.