Bogus Question

Nick Gillespie is propagating a major fallacy about opposition to the death penalty. He writes:

If anyone deserves to be executed, surely it is Scott Peterson, who acted in a completely premeditated fashion, showed no remorse, and on and on.

Now, just for background, I'd like to say that on a personal level I'm completely indifferent as to whether or not Scott Peterson lives or dies, and I'd prefer to live in the possible world in which Scott Peterson had never been born, so that I wouldn't have had to spend months of news-watching artfully dodging any coverage of the Peterson case. (Though of course, our intrepid infotainment-media would have found something else to seize on during the same period, and I'm just guessing they would have filled the void with a child abduction or a wife-slaying, and not, say, investigation of the Torture Memo. Or oppression of women in the Muslim world.)

Though he doesn't say so explicitly, and in fact, backtracks away from this position somewhat ("[T]hat's the question: If anyone deserves to be executed..."), Gillespie is lending creedence to the idea that one can oppose the death penalty but be for it in really extreme cases. And that's patently false. Opposition to the death penalty---well principled opposition, and opposition from a libertarian standpoint, certainly---relies heavily if not exclusively on an intuition about the legitimate scope and uses of state power, of which putting citizens to death is not an example. Building any exception into that opposition is just a way of taking a pro-death penalty position. Of course no one (almost no one) is for the death penalty under anything but exceptional circumstances. The only difference between a captial punishment supporter and an opponent-but-for-x-y-and z-cases is the criterion for determining those circumstances. Moreover, Scott Peterson's case may be one of terrible brutality and malice, but it's hardly outside the norm for murder cases. So if he's the sort of criminal whose execution this sort of nominal death penalty opponent would support, then it's perfectly clear that the position is affirmation and not opposition.

Also, shouldn't it be obvious that opposition to the death penalty is only meaningful in precisely the sorts of purported-to-be-exceptional cases that offend societal moral intuitions the most deeply? Who is arguing for the death penalty in cases of mundane, everyday felonies? [There is somebody, I'm sure--ed.] I'm against capital punishment in all cases because I think that a realm of autonomy manifestly inclusive of one's own physical existence is intrinsic to the very notion of citizenship, and that no citizen, therefore, no matter how bestial a criminal, is property of the state such that he can be executed by state fiat. And since the government really is a social compact, I'm revolted by the fact that every application of the death penalty makes me a party to a premeditated killing.

Now, I recognize that any practicable moral system includes an escape hatch for "emergency" scenarios, such that, e.g., killing in self-defense is morally justified. The death penalty, and the notion of "exceptions" to the rule against state-sanctioned killing, is plainly not such an emergency case. Prisoners in shackles do not create the immediate overriding imperative for lethal action that's necessary for an emergency to obtain. The upshot of that is that opposition to the death penalty not only can't admit of exceptions, but is a rare example of a moral legislation that is both absolute and practicable. So practicable, indeed, that all the other industrial democracies are trying it. And if Sweden jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge...then shouldn't you?