UPDATED An attempt to repeal Montana’s death penalty probably died on 30 March in the house judiciary committee on a 10-8 vote when Democratic Rep. Arlene Becker of Billings joined all nine Republicans to defeat SB-236, which had passed the senate with three Republican votes. Later, the bill was tabled 11-7.
This is disappointing, but not surprising. According to Mike Dennison’s report in today’s Billings Gazette, “Committee members on both sides of the issue often cited religious and biblical reasons or justifications for their vote today.” When a legislative debate degenerates into competing citations of religious authority, always delivered with Talibanic certainty, a reasoned outcome becomes impossible — and a primitive, quasi-sectarian outcome becomes inevitable. This was a vote for religious vengeance — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life — to be administered by the state.
That the committe’s anti-death penalty Democrats attempted to base their case even in part on Biblical first principles was a mistake because it legitimized religious debate as a proper exercise in a secular legislative body. Moreover, it was doomed to failure: philosophical and religious differences cannot be resolved through legislative debate. If anything, that kind of discussion only hardens positions.
I’ve followed this issue since college, where I used my platform as a columnist for the student newspaper to analyze the issue and to present arguments against the death penalty. Much information about the technical problems with administering the death penalty — men wrongly convicted, minorities disproportionately sentenced to death, botched executions, the terrible psychic toll on those who perform the executions — has emerged over the years, but the nature of the debate, and the classes of arguments employed, has not changed that much.
Anger, a desire for retribution, and a deep belief in the value of and need for harsh punishment, motivate the supporters of the death penalty. They focus on the heinousness of the crime to be punished, averring that only through death can the punishment fit the crime. Often they present their case with appeals to religious authority, suggesting that those who disagree are disobeying the word of God and are bound for warmer quarters unless they repent and join the hanging party. Relatives and friends of murder victims argue that they never will feel safe or have peace of mind until the person convicted of the crime is dead.
Opponents of the death penalty cite its cost, its uncertainty, its unreliability, its disturbing toll on the prison workers who kill the condemned, and argue that the state’s taking a life when viable options for non-lethal punishment and separation from society exist debases a civilization.
As additional information becomes available on how imperfect — and imperfectable — our system of criminal justice is, as evidence mounts that innocent men have been convicted and sentenced to die, more and more people who endorse the death penalty in principle cannot support it in practice because of its flaws. That recognition of reality spurred the repeal of the death penalty in New Mexico earlier this month.
I think the imperfect and imperfectable argument ultimately will prevail in Montana. In the meantime, I suspect that more than a few Democratic members of the house are relieved at not having to defend a vote to repeal the death penalty. Had SB-236 passed the legislature, and been signed into law by Governor Schweitzer, all political hell would have broken loose, with a divisive ballot initiative to reinstate the penalty of state administered homicide a certainty.