Death Penalty and messaging.

[Savannahmann]

There is a professor at Berkeley. He teaches courses on how to craft your message to appeal to people. Professor Lakoff has written books, and many articles on messaging to get the progressive point of view out. I've read many of his articles, and I see his point of view, but I've arrogantly believed that he missed the point behind his belief. An example if I may. The country was still discussing the "death panels" nonsense from Sarah Palin when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and was dumping oil into the Gulf of Mexico at an astonishing rate. Professor Lakoff wanted to get the media to call the accident the "Gulf Death Gusher". The idea obviously was to stimulate the discussion on pollution and global warming, and shift people's image of the use of fossil fuels from awesomely convenient to what it is, unsustainable.

The obvious problem is that people can immediately imagine some conference table surrounded by shadow where people passed decisions on who would get what treatment. Shifting the image of fossil fuels would be much harder, and take much longer.

I said that the Professor is right, and he is, that messaging is vitally important. The problem is that you can't do it in a two or three word phrase most times. The Death Penalty is one of those. As an experiment a couple years ago, I tried an idea out on someone. Florida had just botched an execution, and the death penalty was a subject of fairly common conversation. Instead of debating the morality of the death penalty versus life in prison, I took a different approach. I suggested life in prison because it was more cruel than the death penalty. Again, the message was adapted for the audience.

The argument goes like this. When an individual is sentenced to death, they aren't put to death right away. Usually there is at least ten years of appeals with an average of three such appeals going all the way to the Supreme Court. That means that the lawyers for the State, paid for by the taxpayer, spend ten years writing and arguing the case over and over again. While the Public Defenders office, paid for by the taxpayer, spend the same ten years arguing their side over and over again. Essentially, the taxpayer funds the full career of at least two, and possibly more, lawyers all on this one case. (Obviously not true since the lawyers work on more than one case, but you see the image being created I hope). Now, no such appeals process automatically follows the sentence to life in prison without parole. The convicted individual is warehoused, and forgotten. So even with the cost of putting them in prison for life, it is cheaper in the long run than the execution, since food and housing and clothing is far cheaper than paying a half dozen lawyers for a decade.

Now, the argument turns to punishing those who commit a heinous crime. Rape and murder, especially of a child, is always a popular example. So the obvious answer is revenge, they have done something horrible, and deserve something horrorible done to them. This is very easy to turn to a non death penalty answer.

What is more cruel? The person sentenced to death knows that they have a decade at least to consider it, and many things will happen during that time. Some small technicality could well get the case overturned, or retried. Many times the sentence is just never carried out, as the prisoner dies of old age before all the appeals are exhausted. What the sentence does is give the prisoner hope. Hope that there will be a legal trick, or some sort of thing that will see them released on a technicality. The cops, who lie regularly, could be caught lying on some other case and cast all the cases they have worked on in doubt.

But lets talk about punishment. The purpose of punishment is to make the individual who has done wrong, suffer. Children are punished by spanking (remember this discussion is with a RW type, I am not getting into spanking now so please leave it alone) by being put on restriction, given labor in the form of something dirty or unpleasant. What is the worst suffering you can endure? It isn't torture, because torture is done with the knowledge that eventually it will end, either with your death or with your surrendering information. It isn't being executed. The worst punishment we can do to another human is to remove hope. A person on death row has hope. They hope that the court will overturn the conviction, or the sentence. They hope that the cops will be caught lying, and it will cast doubt on the conviction. They hope that the Governor will save them. They hope in other words, that the future will change.

A person sentenced to life in prison has no such hope. There are no automatic appeals. The Governor never commutes the sentence of someone on life. There are never any documentaries about an innocent man serving life. They are warehoused and forgotten. What could be worse than that? No personal meetings with a minister. No young idealistic lawyer who tells you of the great efforts they are taking on your behalf. No young director who meets with you and wants to tell your story and how you were wrongfully sentenced to die. No write ups in the news paper about the cruel and unforgiving government/society. The convicted is just put away for ever and forgotten. No hope, no one cares.

You see my friends, by turning the conversation and painting the sentence of life in prison as the more cruel option, the more vengeful option, I was able to get people to consider life in prison as a valid alternative. I even used the phrase a fate worse than death, life without hope. My small scale experiment with people in town went very well. Many people thought that this might be something good because remember that the RW hates Liberal lawyers who always go before the court and convince some judge about how awful Christmas is or something like that. So the idea of paying some liberal lawyer for a decade before the guy is actually put to death is distasteful to say the least as far as the RW is concerned.

We are smarter than the RW. We read more, consider more, and we apply logic, common sense, and something other than the base racist/homophobic/patronizing beliefs to a question. But merely being smarter doesn't mean that the average person is going to listen. Professor Lakoff is right about that. However, he's wrong in thinking that renaming something is going to win the argument for our side. Even if someone in the press had used the term Gulf Death Gusher, the discussion would not have been about the problems with pollution and the unsustainable policies toward fossil fuels, it would have been about the media/left wing trying to manipulate the population. We would have solidified resistance instead of starting the discussion on a national level about the oil industry.

We can end the death penalty, and we can reduce support for the barbaric practice. But to do so we must craft the message for the people we are trying to convince. Just shouting that it is a barbaric practice has done nothing. Arguing that it is cruel and the prisoner suffers in direct violation of the cruel and unusual prohibition in the 5th Amendment doesn't work. The reason is that they want the prisoner to suffer. That is sadly true on our side as well. I remember being saddened that many people on the left were outraged that Ken Lay had died before he could be sent to prison and endure the dehumanizing events that are too common there. The left wanted him to suffer, and were angry that he hadn't suffered enough before he died.

I admit, and acknowledge that there is a certain dishonesty to my arguments. The goal of my minor experiment was to see if I could convince a few people to get to my destination via a different path. It was an application of the ends justifying the means, the right destination for the wrong reason approach. It was successful in the small scale experiment. Perhaps this will inspire someone to craft an argument that is better (almost certainly more honest than my own, right destination for the right reason) or not. I just wanted to tell you what my experience had been. Now, those of you who disagree, flame on.