The death penalty is a strange thing

It is at the same time extremely concrete and very abstract. We talk about laws, statutes, court decisions and officials. We talk about procedures and protocols. But beneath all that bureaucracy there is one very simple thing: there is a person who decides, and there is a person who is killed. And it is precisely at that point that the paradox of the death penalty becomes interesting.

In society, killing is fundamentally one of the most serious acts a person can commit against another human being. A murderer is punished for having taken another person's life. But in some societies, that same society reserves for itself the right to do exactly the same thing with the difference that this time the act takes place under the authority of the law.

The idea can be justified in many ways. Some say that certain acts carry such serious consequences that death is the only just outcome. Others believe that the death penalty protects society. A third sees it primarily from the perspective of the victim and their loved ones: if someone has taken another person's life, why should they have the right to keep their own? The more important question may be what happens to society's moral standing when it acts this way. Killing is always a process even when the law is followed, just as it is in terrorism.

The peculiarity of the death penalty is that every bureaucratic layer must be worked through in countries where the practice exists, and that bureaucracy is required in order for a person to be killed legally. There is a trial. There must be appeals. There must be a verdict. There are possible clemency requests. There are various officials. There must be people whose role is to prepare the execution. And finally there is the moment when all of this becomes practice. A person is taken to a place where their death is carried out by order of the state. At this point the language easily becomes cold. We speak of execution. Of method. Of protocol. Of procedure. Perhaps that is why. Because if the matter were stated as simply as possible, the sentence would sound entirely different:

The state is going to kill this person.

Bureaucratic language makes violence feel manageable. It turns a person's death into a process. In my own experience, armies and serial killers do the same. Perhaps there is something essential about the death penalty in that. Society tries to take something extremely chaotic, in this case death and make it a controlled event. For some strange reason death does not always cooperate when a person wants it to. The matter becomes even a legal nightmare only when an execution fails. That makes the paradox of the death penalty even more extreme. If the state decides to take a person's life, it should at least by its own reasoning be able to do so with certainty, in a controlled way and without unnecessary suffering.

Perhaps behind support for the death penalty there is partly a very human feeling. If someone kills a loved one, the thought that the perpetrator continues their own life can feel unbearable. In that case the death penalty can be seen as a restoration of justice. Which also brings with it a contradiction. If society's role is to do what an individual person is not allowed to do, should it not be different from the criminal? Or is the difference simply that one kills illegally and the other under the authority of law? The law resolves the question only legally. But the law does not necessarily resolve it morally. And perhaps that is exactly why this subject is so difficult to discuss. It is easy to talk about the death penalty when we speak abstractly:

"Serious crimes must be followed by serious consequences."

That sounds simple until the conversation reaches the point where someone has to pull the trigger. But the death penalty becomes an entirely different thing when you think about the last moment. The room. The condemned person. The officials. The family. The clock. And the fact that at some point all talk of justice becomes an irreversible physical event. At that point no one is discussing what the law means anymore. A person dies. By the decision of the state or someone else and perhaps that is exactly what we should think about whenever we talk about the death penalty. Not just the crime or the criminal. Not just the verdict or the condemned. But also the society that grants itself the right to decide when another person's life ends. What do you decide when it is your turn to roll the dice? Because in that moment society is no longer merely punishing a person for their act. It is also showing something about itself. Something we have known for a long time but have never truly felt. Society's soul is a computer without emotions that is permitted to make mistakes.