Another reason to end capital punishment
The list of reasons to oppose the death penalty in the United States grows longer every day. It is not a significant deterrent to violent crime. It is disproportionately applied to defendants who are Black or brown or who can’t afford good counsel. It is arbitrary: The same crime committed in one state — say, Illinois — and just across the border in another — say, Missouri — can quite literally be the difference between life and death. And, chillingly, scores of death row inmates have been found to be actually innocent through DNA testing or other means and exonerated.
To this sorrowful litany add the fact that the United States stands virtually alone among developed nations in wielding this brutalizing punishment.
In 2022, the most frequent executions in the world occurred in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt — and the United States. “It’s a very weird kind of company we keep,” Robin Maher, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, said in an interview.
Because the United States is such an outlier in clinging to capital punishment, many nations —including Mexico, Canada, and all of Europe — typically refuse to extradite alleged criminals to the United States if they face the possibility of death. It’s one reason the US government has been stymied in its efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, wanted on espionage charges over his alleged role in publishing classified military documents in 2010.
No matter what you may think about Assange — that he’s a hero of radical transparency or a treasonous leaker of government secrets — the failure of the US government to promise that he will not face the death penalty is a needless roadblock to resolving his case. The extradition treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom clearly states that Britain may refuse extradition unless the United States “provides an assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out.”
At an appeals hearing last month before Britain’s High Court, lawyers for Assange noted that the US government has not offered any assurance that it will not seek the death penalty should he be convicted. A prosecutor representing the US Justice Department at the hearing also said the United States could not offer such a guarantee if additional charges were filed after the extradition. Current sentencing guidelines suggest the maximum penalty Assange faces on the 17 espionage counts in his indictment is 175 years in prison, and US lawyers in previous hearings have argued that the more likely sentence would be in the range of 63 months.
But the specter of capital punishment, however remote, stalls the proceedings and sullies this country’s reputation among enlightened nations.
That the United States is so at odds with world opinion in its use of the death penalty is of little concern to its apologists. Indeed, conservatives on the US Supreme Court have been withering in their disdain for the standards of other counties. In 2005 the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that the execution of juveniles violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy applied an “evolving standard of decency” test, noting the emerging global consensus that executing minors is wrong. “It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty,” he wrote. The United States was at that time the only country in the world that still sentenced minors to death.
In an acid dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the very notion American courts might look to standards in the rest of the world “should be rejected out of hand.” He added, sweepingly: “Acknowledgment of foreign approval has no place in the legal opinion of this Court.”
But the world’s opinion does have a place. This country’s insistence on capital punishment poisons international treaties and agreements, complicates diplomacy, and limits America’s ability to call out unspeakable human rights abuses in other countries. And now it presents an obstacle to the government’s interest in bringing Assange here to face trial. Isn’t it time to say the death penalty has done enough damage and abolish it once and for all?