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Capital punishment in the United States is not justice! Both the criminal justice system and theologians are divided as to whether capital punishment deters criminal behavior. When comparing crime rates of states that use capital punishment to those that do not, it is impossible to argue that capital punishment is a deterrent. Statistics can be used to posit whatever you want them to say. But, from the perspective of Scripture, that is beside the point. What is the biblical reason for capital punishment? Specifically, killing another human being (an image bearer of God) demands taking the murderer’s life based on the principle of talionic justice. Whether this form of justice deters further murders is almost irrelevant to the issue. Justice demands payment. The universal and binding principle that God instituted in Genesis 9:6 is as applicable today as it was in Noah’s day.
Furthermore, in Romans 13:1-7 verse 4 is the key, for in this critical section on the authority of the state in our lives, Paul declares that the state has the authority to wield the sword. In this instance the state is “a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil?” The word for sword here is machaira, which refers not only to a sword used in battle, but also to a sword used in executions, as when Herod killed James, the brother of John, in Acts 12:1-2. Paul’s use of this word gives strong support to the state receiving from God the authority to execute. It gives no help in deciding which crimes are punishable by capital punishment.
In regards to capital cases, the justice system within the US is in shambles. There are many cases in which the case itself remains alive in the courts longer than did the murder victims. Consider the case of Fernando Belmontes: Over 25 years ago, Belmontes used perhaps 20 blows with a metal dumbbell bar to bludgeon to death Steacy McConnell, whose home he entered for a burglary. He emerged drenched with blood and carrying her stereo, which he sold for $100. She was 19!
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned Belmontes’s conviction for rather technical and, most consider ridiculous circumstances in his appeal. Thankfully, the US Supreme Court overturned the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. Columnist George Will writes that “Courts have enveloped the administration of capital punishment in so many arcane procedures that judicial opponents of capital punishment have vast latitude to speculate that a jury perhaps did not fairly fathom its rights and duties, and hence the punishment is impermissible. . . There is something grotesque about an execution a quarter of a century after a crime. But there is something repellant about the jurisprudential hairsplitting that consumes decades, defeats the conclusions of juries’ deliberations and denies society the implementation of a punishment it has endorsed.”
What the United States practices when it comes to the death penalty is not justice. It is an unadulterated mess. Justice is always slow and it needs to be deliberative. But when the brutal death of a woman 25 years ago is not dealt with in any final sense there is something terribly wrong with our system. Certainly, it is reasonable to conclude that the killer who brutally killed Steacy McConnell has been coddled, cared for and protected far more than the victim. It is difficult to view that as a positive and it is certainly not justice! I believe that capital punishment is a means of justice defended in the Scripture. But the manner in which the US carries out capital punishment I cannot defend. It is a sad and tragic story of justice gone amok!
See James P. Eckman, Biblical Ethics (Crossway), pp. 65-67 and George Will, Washington Post (16 November 2006). |
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