The very barest spark of a good idea exists in the Republican right wing’s call for small government. At its sanest, the insistence on small government comes from a place of distrust for large institutions. They argue that such large gatherings of individuals suffer from a lack of oversight and are prone to corruption, wastefulness, and failure. Even with our justified optimism about the capacity of a benevolent government, few liberals would argue that the government is incapable of wrongdoing.
One governmental institution liberals are quick find fault with is our judicial system. With its well documented discrimination, all too frequent mistakes, and predisposition for overzealous jurors, our judicial system is deeply flawed. Part of this is simply an unfortunate necessity of the system.
The American Judicial system relies on trying people by a jury of their fellow human beings and this leaves the final verdict vulnerable to the same failings which plague all other human endeavors. In the case of the judicial system, those on the Right might be correct to distrust the government. Well… they would be if they distrusted it at all.
All of their vocal distrust seems to evaporate where criminal justice is concerned. When it comes to trying criminals, the Republican right seems to have absolute faith that our government makes infallible decisions, especially involving the death penalty.
To a rational person, their usual talking points about government being inept and inefficient should lead to the conclusion that our courts also make mistakes. With this recognition of our court system’s possible wrongness, an empathetic person would think to only rarely if ever resort to the death penalty. Even without empathy, someone who views the government as incompetent ought to view the death penalty as an example of heinous governmental overreach. These principles make the Right’s insistence on making the death penalty a more frequent practice questionable at best.
One can only hope that this is just hypocrisy and the Republican Right does not truly believe their own talking points about the incompetence of government. If it is not hypocrisy, then the Republican Right’s ghastly love affair with capital punishment may well be reckless irresponsibility. If they aren’t making an exception for the judicial system in their professed distrust of government, then they must be making the same pessimistic assumptions about the competence of our justice system and simply not care that the men and women it condemns to death may well be innocent.
