At Doublethink, Sonny Bunch cites the horrifying murders committed by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky in Cheshire, CT in 2007, and concludes:
As far as I am concerned, those two have made their lives forfeit. I want the state to take vengeance upon them for the evil that they have done. If they were to be drawn and quartered and their remains were scattered to the four corners of the continental United States, you wouldn’t hear peep out of me.
Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty ... I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line.
Left unexamined is the irony that Bunch borrowed his description of the murders in question from a New Yorker article with a clear anti-death-penalty slant--indeed, one that suggests that America's high murder rate and high execution rate are opposite sides of the same coin. ("If the history of murder contains a lesson, [Cesare] Beccaria believed, it was this: 'The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.'")
Bunch does suggest several reasonable caveats about limiting the death penalty to crimes that are the most egregious and where guilt is the most certain, though I fear they are politically impractical: This is one case where the slope appears to be slippery.
But what struck me most is the way Bunch uses his moral intuition that Hayes and Komisarjevsky deserve death as a basis for policymaking (i.e., the death penalty), and then immediately cuts the legs out from under his own argument by suggesting that same moral intuition would be unperturbed if the (alleged) murderers were drawn and quartered--a law enforcement policy I think it's safe to assume he does not support.
