Kristen Gyles | Life and its selective sacredness

On this week’s episode of ‘Inconsistent Abortion Arguments’, we’ll discuss the matter of life and the selectivity with which it chooses to be sacred. Please be reminded that we are not here to talk about the widely debated immorality (or morality) of abortion, but rather to urge readers to exercise a little consistency.

We have all heard many times that the murderous act of abortion is testament to the fact that the society does not value life and that it is simply wicked to destroy a life we never created. This argument is a reasonable one – the latter part, at least. No human can be credited with the creation of life and, therefore, does not reserve the right to destroy that which was never theirs.

Now, if the persons who advance this argument were as consistent in their reasoning as their continued thrust to prove abortion to be wicked and murderous, I would be more accepting of the narrative.

The truth is, life is only sacred and holy and God-given when we feel someone should be afforded the chance to live. The irony across the abortion debate is that the persons who are staunchly against abortion for what they deem to be moral reasons, are oftentimes the very ones who advocate for the death penalty.

Roughly 70 per cent of the Christian population supports capital punishment and actually tend to favour capital punishment more than irreligious people. This is something I find strange. Surely, the death penalty cannot derive its ‘rightness’ from the theocratic laws which governed ancient Israel, because, of course, the overwhelming majority of Christians don’t keep Old Testament laws.

In other words, Christians really have no grounds to be arguing on the basis of the Old Testament they don’t even live by. So what is the reason for the passionate support for state killings?

Life is not so sacred once you are actually born from the womb?

Or is it that once the guilty verdict is delivered and the gavel hits the sounding block, the ownership of the criminal’s life is no longer God’s anymore but now man’s? Another marvel of humanity.

THE SANCTITY OF LIFE

I don’t think anyone who thinks it is right to murder murderers in an effort to scare other potential murderers, should have an issue with abortion on the basis of the ‘sanctity of life’. The sanctity of life is not like us – hopping from here to there with inconsistency. Life is either sacred or not sacred, and is either God-given or not God-given. And if life is sacred and God-given, man has no right or basis on which to determine who should live and who should not live.

The last time I made the unpopular step of citing research that claimed one in 25 inmates on death row are actually innocent, someone completely ignored the research only to respond by stating that I need to “come to Jamaica”, where it is extremely expensive to keep persons imprisoned for life; and so, I’m guessing, we need the death penalty to ease the financial burden of feeding and housing these criminals.

Since I’m here again on this topic, I’ll clarify for those who need help. From year to year, a literal few criminals are found so egregiously wicked so as to qualify for capital punishment. These few persons who would be put to death, leaving the slew of remaining criminals still eating and sleeping on our tax dollars, would in no way ease the country’s money problem. And that should be obvious. If four out of 4,000 inmates are put to death per year, in what way does this even remotely affect the country’s financial standing?

In 2020, 17 persons were sentenced to death across the entire United States. This statistic perhaps needs to be repeated for persons who seem to think the country can depend on the death penalty for saving an extra buck. Seventeen persons were given death sentences out of the over two million imprisoned. Transferring these results to the Jamaican context, I wonder if the country would end up administering the death penalty to as many as even one person each year. It might literally be more expensive procuring the equipment to administer a lethal injection to the one or two persons yearly.

Usually, I don’t try to debase clearly moral issues to a matter of affordability, but in the case of the death penalty, not even affordability is an argument. There should be nothing more affordable about enforcing a death penalty than not enforcing a death penalty.

A MORE REHABILITATIVE FOCUS

Also, on a separate point, it is only in our best interest as a society that our justice system adopts a much more rehabilitative focus. Criminals can, if they are willing, overcome wickedness and depravity, and many do. Of course, many don’t, which is why they should remain confined and isolated from the rest of society, but rehabilitation has to become a more deliberate thrust of our justice system.

The generally retributive intent of our justice system has not been doing anything to curb crime. Many of the most nefarious and diabolic criminals don’t even value their own lives enough to care too much about a death penalty. After all, they watch their ‘colleagues’ die early deaths at the hands of either the police or other criminals, anyway. So the fear of being put to death is unlikely to be what punches any holes in the barricades between them and their consciences.

What should be our focus, is rehabilitating these criminals who oftentimes start out as misguided and wayward youth, and confining those who refuse to respond to rehabilitative efforts.

But, to go back to the issue at hand. I still maintain that if we don’t have the right to kill a developing foetus, we certainly don’t have the right to take the life of a walking, talking, full-fledged human being.

No matter how graphic our descriptions of the wicked acts these criminals carry out, the killing of killers, whether through jungle justice or by the State, will never be in keeping with the hypocritically recycled argument that life is sacred. Life is either sacred or not sacred. Let’s decide which it is.

Kristen Gyles is a mathematics educator. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.