Life and Death: Capital Punishment Kills Compassion

By Mangesh Kulkarni

The spectre of untimely and unjust death has always haunted humankind. Capital punishment continues to be used as a form of deterrent/punishment in many legal systems around the world like the US and India. It is also threatening to resurface in countries which had abolished it earlier.

Death row shuts out alternatives; it is a final condemnation. There is no place here for compassion and forgiveness or reassessment and renewal. In France, right-wing forces are demanding the restoration of the death penalty. Here, it is instructive to revisit that trenchant critique of capital punishment, the renowned French-Algerian writer and moralist, Albert Camus, who lived during the first half of the twentieth century.

The popular image of Camus as a tough-minded, amoral modernist rests largely on a fleeting acquaintance with his first and most famous novel, The Outsider . A deeper understanding of the man and his oeuvre, however, brings to light his unflinching faith in humanism. Compassion is a key value in Camus humanist credo, and in his essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, he brings the spirit of compassion to bear upon the question of capital punishment.

Through a fine blend of ethical analysis and empirical evidence, he convincingly argues that the death penalty is both useless and harmful. Hence, he calls for its abolition: ''For years I have been unable to see anything in capital punishment but a penalty the imagination could not endure and a lazy disorder that my reason condemned. I argue for an immediate abolition of the death penalty''.

Denying the supposedly exemplary value of the punishment, Camus points out that its very mode of execution contradicts the claim: How can a furtive assassination committed at night in a prison courtyard be exemplary? Moreover, there is no proof that fear of the penalty made a single murderer resile. On the contrary, it seems to have exercised a morbid fascination over thousands of criminals.

Citing a report prepared by two doctors, he further argues that the punishment is in fact exemplary in a negative manner: The doctor is left with this impression of a horrible experience, of a murderous vivisection, followed by a premature burial.

A punishment that destroys the condemned, degrades the executioner, arouses public manifestations of sadism and excites a hideous vainglory in certain criminals, while forestalling nothing, is in truth only a form of revenge: A punishment that penalises without forestalling is indeed called revenge. It is a quasi-arithmetical reply made by society to whoever breaks its primordial law.

But revenge is rooted in instinct and ought not be granted the sanctity of law, which is intended to correct and not imitate nature.

Even if the principle of revenge is provisionally accepted, capital punishment turns out to be arithmetically unjust: As a general rule, a man is undone by waiting for capital punishment well before he dies. Two deaths are inflicted on him, the first being worse than the second, whereas he killed but once.

Camus also draws attention to the culpability of the larger society: The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can a society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence? Is it not responsible, at least in part, for the crime it punishes so severely?

Finally, Camus invokes the principle of compassion: Compassion loathes the definitive, irreparable measure that does an injustice to mankind as a who-le through failing to take into account the wretchedness of the common condition.

Capital punishment imposes a definitive penalty on a man whose culpability is often relative. It denies the condemned man his natural right to live and a chance to make amends. But without such a right, moral life itself would be imperilled. Hence the imperative of abolishing the death penalty.

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul

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