Death Penalty Bullshit: Fifteen Absurd Claims of Death Penalty Supporters, by Phillip Hansten
By Daniel Liechty | July 22, 2022
This is a very useful and engagingly written book, addressing a topic of longstanding concern in our society. Many younger people don’t know (and many of us older folks unfortunately forget…) that abolishing the death penalty nationwide was once a top-shelf issue for political progressives, and one on which progressives found allies among those with a variety of political and religious points of view.
With so many other of our once-taken-for-granted justice-ethics liberties under constant duress, we find ourselves awash in bullshit of all kinds, and so it does seem that movement to abolish the death penalty has receded to the back burners of our social consciousness. We should therefore be grateful that Phillip Hansten, for one, has continued to think about this cause and to keep gathering up the materials that now make up this fine little book!
As his subtitle implies, the chapters of this book are each focused on a central argument in favor of the death penalty – or perhaps better, point of view, because while any American reader will have heard these sentiment before, many of them are ubiquitous in our culture ethos, more at the ‘…yeh, but what about…!?’ level of discourse rather than as comprehensively argued positions. One of the great values of this book is that Hansten takes these points of view seriously, and then systematically presents the statistical and logical counter-arguments to each one. This is really the only book I know that looks at this kind of material, rather than being confined to the arguments of lawyers and moral philosophers, though these are amply represented as well.
A number of these chapters explore various facets of a problem – for example, topics relating to the overall issue of innocent people facing execution by the death penalty is the focus of no less than six of these chapters. I read especially closely the chapter dealing with the idea that the prolonged appeals process makes it very unlikely that a person’s innocence would not come to light before the executioner’s hand does its deed.
I was frankly floored by the reasoning of the SCOTUS opinion, led by Clarence Thomas, in the June 2022 ruling related to Shinn v. Ramirez, which basically stated that death penalty execution was not a matter of guilt or innocence, but only a question of whether administrative legalities were followed adequately during trial and sentencing. Hansten demonstrates in this chapter that I should never have been so floored – that essentially the legal appeals process has always focused much more on procedural legalities than on questions of guilt or innocence. One could easily conclude that, high-court dramas on TV and film notwithstanding, once an initial guilty verdict is rendered, all of the cards of the appeals process are stacked in favor of upholding that verdict, not toward overturning it.
In light of his systematic takedown of any legal, practical, moral or logical support for the death penalty, by the time Hansten arrives at the only ‘valid claim’ for such support, the reader already suspects his use of the word ‘valid’ is dripping with irony – and so it is. Essentially, Hansten suggests that all support for the death penalty boils down to what he calls the ‘warm fuzzy feelings’ we experience when someone is executed. If this is so, crusades against the death penalty may be doomed from the start.
Here Hansten leads us in a deep dive into Ernest Becker’s psychology of revenge heroism and scapegoat displacement, well worth rehearsing in this context. I am undecided if such warm fuzzy feelings are inevitable; after all, almost every other industrial democracy has abolished the death penalty long ago.
I do think at the very least we must conclude that there is something in the American cultural context that stokes these aspects of our emotional sensibilities. Reading this book, along with the daily news of mass killings in Buffalo, Uvade, Hyland Park, Centerville, Tulsa – just to name a very few among many others – I recognize those same revenge feelings in myself, in spades.
Hansten may be right that at least for the time being, opponents of the death penalty in the USA will have to rely very heavily on appeals to citizen rationality, of setting policy by taking rational decisions against our own emotional side that would experience so much satisfaction in knowing these killers fried and thus ‘paid for their (our?) sins.’ Again, I can only say that all of us should be grateful that people like Phillip Hansten are still plugging away, and inviting us to abide by the better angels of our nature!
Daniel Liechty, Ph.D., is a longtime reader and interpreter of Ernest Becker’s writings. He is a Professor of Social Work and Distinguished Lecturer in Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University. He was formerly the Vice President of the Ernest Becker Foundation.