The New York Times editorial board is nothing if not reliable -- reliable, that is, in its sneering, down-the-nose, and most importantly mendacious view of those who disagree with it about capital punishment.
It would seem that the NYT simply doesn't know that 60% or more of the American people have supported the death penalty for forty straight years. Or that, out of 112 Supreme Court justices, a total of four have found the death penalty per se impermissible; the other 108 have not. The three men most widely esteemed as our greatest Presidents -- FDR, Washington and Lincoln -- all not merely supported but used the death penalty.
Try to guess that from anything in this paragraph from today's editorial:
It is time to dispense with the pretense of a pain-free death. The act of killing itself is irredeemably brutal and violent. If the men on death row had painlessly killed their victims, that would not make their crimes any more tolerable. When the killing is carried out by a state against its own citizens, it is beneath a people that aspire to call themselves civilized.
All of this is tripe; most of it is tripe at more than one level.
1. It's hard to believe that a college-educated adult would write something as stupid as the assertion that a pain-free death is impossible. When a person is unconscious at the time of death, as huge numbers of ordinary people (and virtually all executed prisoners) are, they feel no pain. Or anything.
2. The act of killing most certainly is not "irredeemably brutal and violent." The millions of people who love their dogs but have nonetheless had to put them down to end their suffering have not chosen, and would under no circumstances choose or allow, a method that is "brutal and violent." They would choose what they actually do choose, a single drug that puts the dog deeply to sleep before its heart stops. That same single drug (or nitrogen gas) can do the same thing for human beings.
The NYT knows this, and is just choosing to lie about it. There's no other way to put it.
3. "If the men on death row had painlessly killed their victims, that would not make their crimes any more tolerable."
Actually, it would. For example, when an elderly man kills his wife as painlessly as he can (typically in order to end her suffering toward the end of a terminal disease), he never winds up on death row. The only serious question is whether he gets prosecuted at all. The NYT doesn't bother to name a single convict who wound up on death row after taking steps to painlessly kill his victim, for the simple reason that there is none. It's an emblem of the Fantasyland in which abolitionism lives that it puts the notion of trying to kill painlessly in a discussion of the butchers, sadists, strongarms, enforcers and hit men who actually populate death row. This is moral equivalence on LSD.
4. "When the killing is carried out by a state against its own citizens, it is beneath a people that aspire to call themselves civilized."
Could one of our liberal readers remind me again of how the need to "take a deep breath" and to have a "professional and well-mannered discourse" squares with the snarling condescension in the claim that those holding the opposing view are, not merely a bunch of dopes, but uncivilized? Because I really need to get straight on that explanation.
Not that the Times editorial's stratospherically snotty quality is the main problem. The main problem, as so often, is lying.
It's not that Americans "aspire" to call themselves civilized. We are civilized. We are not made less so by the fact that we retain a punishment for some ghastly crimes that is embraced by our people, our law, our history from the Founding -- and, if a point be made of it -- the great majority of the civilized world, in the past and now.
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