NYT: Douthat outdoes himself in specious logic

[markpkessinger]

In what is possibly the worst column Ross Douthat has ever penned (and that is saying something), in today's NY Times, Douthat argues that keeping the death penalty in place, despite the possibility of executing innocents, will keep society more focused on addressing the ills of the justice system, and that we shouldn't abolish capital punishment because it would send the message to the public that our system is incapable of delivering what most people would consider "genuine justice." Don't ask me to elaborate -- you really just have to read it to believe it. Fortunately, his twisted reasoning is fairly eviscerated in the readers' comments!

Justice After Troy Davis

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Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked. We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the larger problems with crime and punishment in America.

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Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe. The case for executing murderers is a case for proportionality in punishment: for sentences that fit the crime, and penalties that close the circle.

Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to support penal reform not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve execution, in other words, but because of it — because both are attempts to ensure that accused criminals receive their just deserts.

Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.

[trumad]

1. Read it this morning and was sutnned by it....

So Douthat thinks the DP is good because of the appeals process. Ya see---Davis would have never got all those appeals if not for the DP.

The thing Douthat fails to understand---which is incredible----is that Davis would still be breathing if not for the DP.

It's possibly the dumbest article I've ever read.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Very weird column. But if Douthat posessed a logical mind, ...

he'd be a Liberal.