"What Death Penalty Opponents Don’t Get"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new commentary by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella now appearing at both The Marshall Project and The Huffington Post. Here are excerpts:

Opponents of the death penalty have had many occasions to celebrate in the new millennium.  Four states have abolished the practice in the past five years, while others have legally or effectively set moratoriums on executions.  Support for capital punishment in the United States is at its lowest point in four decades, and seems likely to fall further as the number of exonerations and gruesomely botched executions continues to grow.

But at what cost have these concessions been won?  The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's latest “Death Row U.S.A.” report found 3,049 individuals awaiting execution in the United States.  According to the Sentencing Project, at last count nearly 50,000 people were serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole — a number that has more than tripled since the early 1990s.  Over 159,000 were serving life sentences — many of them ... with minimums so long that they might as well be doing life without parole, too.

In many states, the expansion — and the very existence — of life without parole sentences can be directly linked to the struggle to end capital punishment.  Death penalty opponents often accept — and even zealously promote — life without parole as a preferable option, in the process becoming champions of a punishment that is nearly unknown in the rest of the developing world...

Complicating matters is the fact that life without parole rarely takes its place as simply a one-for-one alternative to the death penalty.  In New York State, for example, life without parole did not exist before the state’s brief reinstitution of capital punishment from 1995 to 2004.  During this period, there were never more than half a dozen men on New York’s death row, and no executions took place.  Yet today, nearly 250 people are doing life without parole in New York, and more than 1 in 6 of the state’s prisoners is serving a life sentence.

Connecticut, in abolishing its death penalty in 2012, legislated a punishment even more harsh than simple life without parole.  Thereafter, a new law decreed, those convicted of “murder with special circumstances” would be condemned to live out their life without parole sentences in solitary confinement. The measure was reportedly backed as a way to win enough support for the repeal bill.

Though the requirement that life/LWOP sentences be served in solitary confinement is codified into law only in Connecticut, it exists in practice throughout the nation. An unknown number of lifers have, like [New York lifer] William Blake, been placed in permanent or indefinite solitary confinement by prison officials, without benefit of any kind of due process.  So have most of the individuals on the nation’s death rows, including the supposedly fortunate ones who live in states that have instituted moratoriums, and are therefore unlikely to ever face execution.

Research has confirmed that even brief periods in solitary alter brain chemistry and produce psychiatric symptoms ranging from extreme depression to active psychosis. Some prisoners who have spent longer amounts of time in isolation describe it as a condition that slowly degrades both their humanity and sanity, turning them into blind animals given to interminable pacing, smearing their cells with feces, or engaging in self-mutilation....

William Blake has said that while he cannot bring himself to take his own life, he would have welcomed the death penalty 27 years ago had he known what a lifetime in solitary confinement would be like. Perhaps the time will come when people like Blake — and the American public — are not forced to choose among such monstrous alternatives.  In the meantime, it will be a shame if people who oppose state-sponsored death continue to advocate for state-sanctioned torture.

Long-time readers know that I largely share the perspective of these commentators. I find compelling the assertion that some (many?) LWOP sentences can often involve a fate worse than death, and I find moving the concern that too much of modern opposition to "state-sponsored death" in the United States tends to advocate, both formally and functionally, for a kind of "state-sanctioned torture."