Downplaying a heinous New Orleans crime from three decades ago provides added emphasis as to why Louisiana needs to deter crime by aggressively enforcing capital punishment.
At the end of last year, outgoing Democrat Pres. Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life imprisonment. There are few crimes under the federal penal code that qualify for capital punishment (which Biden, ironically, helped to expand three decades ago), with the overwhelming majority of such cases tried for crimes under state law in the 27 states that have the death penalty as a punishment option.
Biden didn’t commute the sentences of three convicted of murder in a terrorizing manner. That moral and intellectual inconsistency – so, blowing up or gunning down people as an expression of some political ideology is qualitatively worse than having someone killed because she saw a police officer physically harass a youth and reported it, as corrupt New Orleans police Len Davis, a beneficiary of Biden’s leniency, did – aside, signaling by this action that getting a certain kind of ideologue into a chief executive’s office will convey free lifetime room and board to those who forfeited their lives will cause more crime, including homicides.
That’s the conclusion the preponderance of, and particularly the higher quality, research into capital punishment reveals. Additionally, its presence may bring more murderers to justice, in that with it on the books this encourages the guilty to pleading to a charge with a life sentence instead of risking a capital sentence by going to trial, where anything could happen and a murderer could find his way into a not guilty verdict.
However, the deterrence effect substantially weakens when potential miscreants see a state unwilling or unable to carry out capital sentences, figuring its threatened use as a paper tiger. That’s why it was important when last year that the state, under leadership from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and Republican-led Legislature, elected to expand execution methods to kickstart carrying out sentences which have been bogged down for a quarter-century by politics.
This can help check Biden-like moves such as the one Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards attempted in the months before Landry took office. He tried to trigger resentencing of as many as 40 death row inhabitants, but fortunately opponents in the legal system used administrative law to thwart him.
However, having a substantial backlog creates these potentially problematic situations that erode the deterrent impact. It seems nearly a year after the expansion nothing has been done to address the backlog in Louisiana, which needs to change not only to enhance deterrence but also to avoid future possible mischief detracting from that.
In short, executions, while nauseous and horrific, are necessary as a moral act to save innocent lives. In fact, the more faithfully these are carried out, the fewer of these we will need to see in the future, as the deterrent impact will cause these to be almost unnecessary if certainly rare.
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