Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Page A

desires as a fig leaf for their own judgments. When the system works as it is supposed to, however, we subordinate the survivors’ wishes to other elements in our calculus of justice to determine what’s best for all of us.
    Nor is this wrong, in my view. While the magnitude of loss is by far the greatest for the bereaved, the community as a whole has been deprived of the victim’s potential. And when we punish, we do so in the name of all of us. The unique role of the jury in expressing the will of the community is the seeming reason that American law has exalted the jury’s role in capital matters, where, as in no other criminal case, it is empowered to pronounce sentence. (In acceding to this arrangement, the courts have also relieved judges of having to wield the law’s most uncomfortable responsibility on many occasions.) And we don’t decide what the community’s interests are merely by asking victims how they feel. We know how they feel: full of grief and rage. The law ought not prolong or complicate their suffering as it tends to do—but part of that is because prosecutors and legislators make empty promises of swift and sure justice, when they know that in capital cases our jurisprudence requires saturation certainty, and thus prolonged litigation, before an execution takes place. The legal system surely owes victims an outcome that is just by common lights, so they feel no obligation to take matters into their own hands, as was portrayed in the film In the Bedroom . And the Commission’s report pointed out that we can do a far better job in providing compassionate services for victims. Cops swarm the scene, but nobody tells the family how to get a death certificate.
    Yet capital punishment defines far too much about our society and us as its citizens for us to condemn defendants to death solely for the sake of victims whose loss will never be fully erased. In a democracy, no minority, even those whose tragedies scour our hearts, should be empowered to speak for us all. Allowing survivors to rule the death penalty process makes no more sense than it would to allow only the families of the dead in the World Trade Center attack to determine what will be rebuilt on the site. At the end of the day, if we are to subscribe to the death penalty, it must benefit the rest of us, as well.

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DETERRENCE
    D URING THE THIRD PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE in 2000, Jim Lehrer asked both candidates whether they believed the death penalty was a deterrent.
    â€œI do,” George W. Bush answered, without disagreement from Al Gore. “It’s the only reason to be for it.”
    Mr. Bush, so far as I can tell, was wrong on both scores. There are a number of compelling rationales for capital punishment. And deterrence, upon examination, doesn’t appear to be one of them.
    When I started my Commission work, I felt that if it could be established that a death sentence, as opposed to life imprisonment, actually deters other people from committing murders, it would have to weigh heavily in any candid assessment of the subject. As a result, I became an unbearable noodge to the Commission’s gifted research director, Jean Templeton, who is both a lawyer and a sociologist by training, as I sought her assistance in wading through the learning in this area.
    At one point, I even persuaded Jean to undertake a very informal statistical cross-comparison between Illinois and surrounding states. We ended up measuring Illinois against Michigan, and Missouri against Wisconsin, death penalty states versus non-death penalty states, pairs that had similar urban density, racial makeup, and income levels. The murder rates were higher in the death penalty jurisdictions. Indeed, Texas, which has performed more than a third of the executions in the United States since 1976, has a murder rate well above the national average. On the other hand, in the last decade, not only has the consolidated murder rate in states without