Ann, I'm not surprised that you oppose capital punishment, but I am a bit surprised that you'd cite a fictional story as support for your position.
There was a case in Russia perhaps ten years ago. More than fifty people had been murdered by a presumed mass murderer, and if I remember things correctly, the murdered people were mostly children. One man had already been caught, tried, sentenced to death and executed for these murders, but unfortunately the murders continued!
Some time later another man was apprehended, tried, sentenced to death and executed for the murders. This time the evidence was very good, and the murders stopped as soon as the man was caught. He was guilty. What about the first man? He had already been executed for the same murders.
I don't know of any case in the United States where an innocent person has been executed, but my guess is that it has definitely happened. Particularly before DNA evidence was available.
And if capital punishment is wrong most of the time but okay for Hitler, how do we determine where to draw the line? Didn't Bill Church kill enough people to earn that fate?
I don't ever
recommend capital punishment. As for the case in Russia that I cited above, note that it wasn't necessary to
execute the murderer to make the killings stop - it was certainly enough to incarcerate him.
As for Hitler, I don't think he was much of a threat to anyone at the end of World War II. He was so utterly broken and defeated at that time. If he had been allowed to live out his life in prison, perhaps guarded by people who hated him, that would probably have been more of a punishment to him than an execution would have been. However, if Hitler had died in prison, it might have been necessary to give him a grave that could later have been used as a place of worship for neo-Nazis.
So I don't ever
recommend capital punishment, but sometimes I don't dislike it as much as I usually do. What about Billy Church? I wouldn't recommend capital punishment for him, but I wouldn't protest if he was executed, either. I can certainly see that he might be a very serious threat even inside prison. Who is to say that he couldn't help run his organisation from the inside of the slammer?
But I insist that if a person is to be executed, then it
must happen after due process. That still won't guarantee that the executed person isn't innocent, and it won't prove to Amnesty International that it was right to execute this person, but it does mean that the law will be upheld to the best of that society's ability. If nothing else, if a person is executed after due process and the whole thing still feels absolutely wrong to us, then we should assume that we dislike the law as such, and if we live in a democracy, we should see it as our duty as citizens to try to convince others in our society that that particular law should be changed.
Let me anticipate the ending of your story and assume that Superman is going to be found innocent of second degree murder. What should he tell the public afterwards, whose trust he needs if he is going to be Superman? Should he say this:
"My dear fellow Americans. As you know, I ripped out Billy Church's heart when I realized that he was behind the murder of dozens of people, and he had hatched a horrible plan to more or less take over our society. Now the law has spoken, and it says that I didn't break the law when I acted as Billy Church's judge, jury and executioner. Therefore, I now know that I can do the same thing again - I can kill a person on sight if my personal morality deems it necessary. So I want you to realize that when I return to my Superman duties, I do so as an inhumanly powerful alien who consider it my right to kill you if necessary. I advise you to remain calm, however, because I will probably find no reason to kill you."
No, Terry, of course Superman will not say that. But is that not what the law will say if it acquits Superman of second degree murder?
Ann
