The Case For Voluntary Executions

Between 1973 and 1995, twelve percent of criminals who received the death penalty did so voluntarily. They chose to give up their appeals in favor of a quick death. However the state does not allow a criminal to choose to be executed unless they have been sentenced to a capital crime. To many criminals facing fifty-odd years behind bars without the possibility of parole, suicide in the form of state execution might seem a preferable option. Why not let them choose death?

One standard answer might be to say that suicide is the act of an irrational mind, and that we shouldn’t allow those who can’t be rational to inflict harm upon themselves. While we shouldn’t allow mentally incompetent prisoners to choose voluntary execution, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be on the table for competent criminals. For a man or woman facing a lifetime of seemingly pointless existence, suicide might be a perfectly rational option. Competency should be required, but a desire to commit suicide is certainly not evidence of mental instability.

One might also argue that criminals don’t deserve the right to voluntary execution. There are several reasons why criminals should have this right. First, we reserve the death penalty as the most severe punishment for the most heinous of crimes. To choose what is, to most, a more sever punishment, should be palatable to those who don’t like being soft on criminals. We would certainly allow a person to request that they pay a greater fine, or do more community service. Second, the right to life, like any other right, has two parts. The right of free speech means that one has both the right to speak, and the right not to speak. The right to property means that one has the right to one’s property, and the right to forfeit that property. The right to life is no different- in order to be a right, one must have the ability to cease to exercise that right, otherwise the right becomes an obligation, not a privilege.

Some say that the death penalty is more costly to the state than life in prison. In the case of voluntary execution, this is not true. Voluntary executions would be far less expensive than life in prison. The drugs required to execute a prisoner total about one hundred dollars, and the total cost of the execution can run at around three hundred all together. It costs about twenty three thousand dollars a year to incarcerate someone. One execution costs about what it takes to incarcerate someone for five days. So if a prisoner chooses voluntary execution and is executed, the state has saved money so long as the prisoner would have lived five more days had he or she not been executed. The death penalty however, when imposed by a judge as capital punishment, does cost more on average than life in prison, due to the high legal fees generated by appeals in drawn-out death penalty cases.

Finally, voluntary execution can provide a valuable forum for the political grievances of the prisoner. An author on the subject of suicide, Georgia Noon, argues, “Suicide is an intensely private act, yet its social impact is profound. Human action, however personal it may be, necessarily involves action with other people; the individual cannot be understood in isolation from his social matrix. …Suicide shows a contempt for society. It is rude. As Kant says, it is an insult to humanity in oneself. This most individualistic of all actions disturbs society profoundly. Seeing a man who appears not to care for the things which it prizes, society is compelled to question all it has thought desirable. The things which make its own life worth living, the suicide boldly jettisons. Society is troubled.” Choosing to die forces society to consider what it might not have wanted to consider before. Like self-immolation in Vietnam, political “martyrdom” can draw attention to a forgotten cause, and be a positive force in society.

Suicide is an unpleasant thing, but it mustn’t be ignored just because it isn’t a pleasant thought. It’s not always an act of the deranged or the depressed. Sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, it can be a force for something other than evil. At the end of the day, there is a fundamental question we must ask ourselves as a society. Should we be in the business of telling people what decisions to make about their own existence?