Revenge or mercy

Is what we want really revenge?

A Badger Poll, released May 1, shows that 64% of respondents favor the death penalty. Yet they don't believe it deters crime: 56% said execution would not prevent murder.

In fact, Sen. Alan Lasee (R-De Pere), president of the Wisconsin Senate and proponent of the death penalty, believes deterrence is not the issue. He was quoted in March, by The Daily Reporter, as saying, "It's not about deterrence. It's about justice."

What do we expect from "justice?"

There are usually three main arguments for espousing the death penalty:

Deterrence -- which clearly most Wisconsinites don't believe works. This agrees with statistics in states like Illinois and Texas which have death penalties and continue to have as high, or higher, a rate of murder than states without the death penalty.

Safety -- which is already provided by places like the "supermax prison" in Boscobel, a state-of-the-art incarceration facility. And Pope John Paul has said many times that if non-lethal means are sufficient to protect society, they must be used.

Closure for victims. There may be some relief to a relative of a murder victim to see the murderer killed. Yet what type of relief is it? Do they get their loved one back? Is the horror of their loss erased? All they have is seeing another person die. Does that bring healing? Does it heal us, as a society?

The only person executed under Wisconsin law was John McCaffrey, hanged on Aug. 21, 1851 in Kenosha for killing his wife. Between 2,000 and 3,000 men, women and children watched him die, in what was described by witnesses as a crowd scene of "morbid excitement." The process of McCaffrey's strangulation took 18 minutes.

Kenosha editor and later state assemblyman Charles Scholes wrote, "The crowd has been indulged in its insane passion for the sight of a judicially murdered man."

Appalled by public support of such spectacles, lawmakers abolished the death penalty two years later. It was not a popular decision. Wisconsin Bar Association records show that, in 1854 and 1855, three murder defendants were lynched. In 1856, a majority of Wisconsin newspapers used this as a basis for demanding a reinstatement of the death penalty.

Why? Because the majority of people favored "frontier justice."

Thomas Paine, the 18th century English philosopher whose writings strongly influenced the American Revolution, wrote about the death penalty in his 1792 The Rights of Man: "The effect of these cruel spectacles exhibited to the populace, is to destroy tenderness or excite revenge; and by the base and false idea of governing men by terror instead of reason, they become precedents."

In 1856 Wisconsin, what Sholes called "mercy-expecting people" prevailed and the death penalty was not reinstated.

Let's hope mercy continues to prevail over revenge.