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The law is often used to promote public health. As society has advanced, so too have our laws.
In The Plague, an asthma patient says “my real interest in life was the death penalty.” The death penalty is when the state kills someone as punishment for a crime.
The patient’s interest in the death penalty began in his childhood. His father was a Director of Public Prosecutions, a lawyer responsible for prosecuting criminal offences. As a young boy, he watched the trial of a man accused of murder. During the court proceedings, his father—whom he viewed as a decent man—was “clamouring for the prisoner’s death.” Such harsh punishments, the boy was led to believe, were “inevitable for the building up of the new world in which murder would cease to be.”
The patient’s views changed when he watched a man being executed by firing squad. From that day on, he was unable to sleep well. The horrible event led him to reject sophisticated arguments for killing another person. In the patient’s words,
if you gave in once, there was no reason for not continuing to give in. It seems to me that history has borne me out; today there’s a sort of competition who will kill the most. They’re all mad crazy over murder and they couldn’t stop killing men even if they wanted to.
His experiences with the death penalty—from seeing his father clamour for the death of another person to witnessing an execution first-hand—made him realise that the killing had to stop. He no longer believed that the death penalty could be justified.
The patient had much in common with Albert Camus. Camus spent much of his life opposing the death penalty. This opposition appeared in many of his works. In addition to The Plague, his breakthrough novel The Stranger raises questions about it. More pointed is his 1957 essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” a passionate and well-researched argument for ending the death penalty.
Camus’ opposition to the death penalty began with a story that a young Camus learned about his deceased father Lucien. Lucien left early one morning to watch a public execution by guillotine. The execution, the elder Camus believed, was justified, for the condemned man had brutally murdered an entire family. Nonetheless, Lucien was sickened by what he saw. He returned home, laid down, and threw up.
This childhood story founded Camus’ basis for opposing the death penalty. However, there was a brief time at the close of World War II when his opposition wavered. Camus believed that the horrible crimes of Nazi collaborators justified their executions.
However, only a few months later, Camus began to see an excess of revenge unfolding in France. Many people were clamouring for collaborators to be executed. Camus still believed that some French collaborators deserved execution for their crimes. However, he now worried that justice was belated and its implementation was inconsistent. For France to heal, it was time to move on from executions as their form of justice.
Canada does not have a death penalty. But many other countries do. Consider that research shows that the death penalty does very little—if anything—to reduce murders. Also consider that in several American cases, evidence emerged that proved a person innocent, after they were executed. Can the death penalty be justified in democratic societies today?
