Recently, The Week’s Bonnie Kristian covered the burgeoning conservative movement against the death penalty. She questioned whether a pro-life philosophy can coexist with a pro-death penalty position. She wrote,
Of course, there are some conservatives for whom capital punishment is already a pressing issue. “For those of us who are pro-life and maintain the far-from-radical notion that our government shouldn’t kill innocent Americans, the death penalty fails to live up to our standards,” argues Marc Hyden of Conservatives Concerned About The Death Penalty (CCATDP), a nonprofit that exists to question “a system marked by inefficiency, inequity, and inaccuracy.”
She notes,
As CCATDP enumerates, the problems and perils of capital punishment in modern America are many. There’s the risk — as in the Glossip case and too many others, like Marlon Howell or Cameron Todd Willingham — of accidentally killing an innocent person. More than 150 people sentenced to die in America have been exonerated in the last four decades, some after spending 30 years or more on death row.
She also highlights the racial and economic disparities as well as the high cost of capital punishment as compared to life-without-parole. Additionally, Kristian makes it clear that the death penalty is riddled with failures, as she wrote,
With inequities like these, Hyden argues, there’s nothing “limited or wise about giving an error-prone government the power to kill its citizens, especially when many of us don’t trust the state to even deliver mail.”