Hannah Cox on Conservative Opposition to the Death Penalty

In this episode, Herb is joined by Hannah Cox, National Manager of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, to discuss the various flaws in the death penalty system that have led many conservatives to work for its abolition. Tune in on Spotify, iTunes, or from our website at http://rehumanizeintl.org/podcast.

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Intro/outro music: "Belize," by Monty Datta. https://montydatta.bandcamp.com/track/belize 

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Learn more about Rehumanize International at rehumanizeintl.org!

 

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Transcription:

Maria Oswalt: Hello and welcome to Episode 15 of the Rehumanize podcast.

Herb Geraghty: Hello and welcome to the Rehumanize podcast. I am joined today by Hannah Cox, who works with conservatives concerned about the death penalty.

Herb Geraghty: Her work has led to the repeal of the death penalty in two states while supporting dozens of Republican lawmakers to sponsor repeal bills across the country.

Herb Geraghty: I am excited for Hannah to join us because as with every issue within the consistent life ethic that Rehumanize works on, people oppose the death penalty for a lot of different reasons. And I feel like to me at least, the arguments that conservatives concerned about the death penalty bring to the table are actually some of the strongest. So welcome, Hannah.

Hannah Cox: Thanks so much for having me.

Herb Geraghty: So I guess my first question is just simply, why should conservatives be concerned about the death penalty?

Hannah Cox: Well, like you mentioned, there's just so many problems with it, so I'm often asked, what's the number one issue? What's the number one problem with it that's making people change their mind on the right? And I don't think it's truly any different than the issues that are presented on the left, honestly. I just think that for a long time, people weren't being presented with the information about how the system functioned, and so there were a lot of people that sort of had a knee jerk reaction to the death penalty. There were many people, and I used to be one of them, who thought that it was needed, that it deterred crime, that it was something murder victims' family members would want, that it saved money. And none of those things are actually correct. But as a whole, it just took a bit of time to really get that data, get those stories in front of people. And usually when we do, we see a lot of people pretty quickly move away from supporting it. So, you know, the same old issues come up.

Hannah Cox: Of course, I think the innocence problems in the system get a lot of people's attention. As we've moved more into the age of information, people have become more aware of just how frequently we're finding wrongful convictions in the system. And I think they're starting to recognize that when we do find them, it's usually not the result of the system working.

Hannah Cox: It's not the result of the government catching its own errors. It's actually usually thanks to the pro bono work of outside groups like the Innocence Project coming in and combing back over these cases. And it's quite hard to overturn a wrongful conviction. So I think that, in and of itself, is enough for a lot of people to turn their back on it. We've had one person exonerated for every nine executions in this country. That's terrifying. That's a lot of wrongful convictions. We know, with that rate, we execute innocent people every year. Every year there's a new case that comes up in the states where most people believe the person to be killed is innocent. And we see a lot of those go through. And so I think that's probably the biggest issue. But there's just so many problems with it that kind of move on down from there, whether you're getting into how much it costs, the lack of a deterrent effect, the opportunity cost where we're wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the system across the country every year when it doesn't work--it doesn't provide a deterrent. It doesn't provide the services the victims and their families largely need. And so that's an opportunity cost. That's money that we're spending that should be redirected toward things that actually would prevent violence, towards solving more crime, which we still do a very bad job at, or towards giving victims the services that they actually need to find healing and to begin to repair their lives.

Herb Geraghty: I think something that's so important about the work that you guys do, other than just sort of getting the information out there, is working with lawmakers in sort of red states that I think a lot of people outside of the movement might assume would all be, you know, pro death penalty [and] tough on crime in the strongest ways possible. But you guys have made a lot of headway in the state legislatures, where it really matters.

Hannah Cox: Yeah, we've found incredible success in the past couple of years. I think politics flows downstream from culture. And so when you really start seeing the large number of Republicans that we work with sponsoring bills to get rid of the death penalty, I think that shows you where the culture is on this issue. And we're really kind of hitting a crescendo effect at the moment. We've had, I think, 10 or 11 states in the past year that have had close to 60 Republican lawmakers signed on as sponsors to repeal the death penalty. And, of course, hundreds of others have voted in favor of those bills on the right. And so not only are Republicans opposed to the death penalty in large numbers at this point, but they're actually the ones really championing and leading at many of the state legislatures and doing so successfully. They were the difference makers in the New Hampshire campaign two years ago. They were the difference makers in the Colorado campaign this year. We've been successful two years in a row now at overturning the death penalty. And we have every reason to anticipate that trend will continue in the next year with either Wyoming or Ohio.

Hannah Cox: And so there's a lot of exciting stuff happening at the state level.

Herb Geraghty: So I think I want to talk about, sort of, the reasons that you think conservatives might support the death penalty, and why they shouldn't. Because I think to me, the one that I hear a lot from people who maybe haven't been exposed to all the research is that it should save money. That by killing people, we're not paying to keep them in prison forever, and so it saves money to just kill them and move on with it. But I've seen data that suggests that's not true.

Hannah Cox: Yeah, nothing could actually be further from the truth, but it certainly is an old stereotype. And I think, again, it's largely held by people who just haven't actually been that close to the system. They haven't really done any research into the policy. You know, unlike some more complicated policies that people maybe refrain from having an opinion on when they know they don't have enough information, the death penalty can be a very emotional issue for people. And so it's one that I think a lot of people maybe have a knee jerk reaction to, make assumptions about, and they don't actually go do their due diligence and actually look into the system to see if they know what they're talking about or to see if their assumptions are actually true. And what I found when I was in that position and actually did start looking in and checking myself, was that I was really wrong about a lot of the ideas I had and assumptions I had made about the system, one of them being that it was cheaper. We know that the death penalty is the most expensive part of our justice system on a per offender basis. I think that's actually pretty commonly known, that the death penalty is drastically more expensive than other punishments.

Hannah Cox: But people always make the mistake of assuming that that is because it takes too long to carry out. And that's frequently what you'll hear defenders of it say. That's not at all accurate, actually. If you look at it, the main cause, the main driver of those costs is the trial itself, where 70 percent of the additional costs of the death penalty are incurred. That means even if a jury is presented with a death penalty trial and votes for a sentence less than death, which they do more times than not by the way, that taxpayers are still paying a good bit more to have a death penalty trial than they would to have a life in prison without parole case. Now, if you really think about it, if you step aside and put down your presumptions and think about this, why would it cost so much more to have a death penalty than life in prison without parole? If the cause was that it takes too long and it's because we're incarcerating these people for so long, then life in prison without parole would be about equal, because those are people that spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Hannah Cox: But instead, we see the death penalty is about a million dollars more on average than a life in prison without parole case. And so, again, that comes back to the trial: how much more we spend bringing these cases forward. They're just not really worth it. And again, I think the worst part is not only is that fiscally responsible, but it's actually negligence. It's something that makes our communities less safe, because we're spending those excess millions of dollars on a system that fails. It doesn't work to deter crime. It will never work to deter crime. We know from research and from psychologists that the actual deterrent to crime is the assurance that someone will get caught. We only solve about 60 percent of homicides on average in this country. We're really bad at solving crimes. It's even worse for lesser offenses. And so the the actual odds are right now, if you commit a crime, your odds of getting away with it are actually pretty good. And I would argue in large part, that's because of the money we waste on security theater like the death penalty, instead of going out and actually spending those resources to stop crime or to prevent violence in the first place.

Herb Geraghty: I really like that--that framing of the death penalty as security theater. I don't think I've ever heard that before, but I think that's really accurate. It's sort of done for the peace of mind of the general public in some ways.

Herb Geraghty: And it's not--it's not deterring crime. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think that that is a pretty common misconception, I guess, that I--if I wanted to kill someone, well, I don't want to be killed, and so maybe I won't go do that. Like, it seems sort of common sense that it would be, you know, a deterrent effect to have a death penalty. But you say research says that's not accurate?

Hannah Cox: Research does not show that that is true whatsoever. And in fact, we find that regions that do not have the death penalty or that do away with it tend to actually stay about even in their crime rates or even see a decrease in crime rates, whereas regions that do continue to use it--which is very few places in this country at this point, we only have about 10 states that are actively still doing this--they tend to have much higher rates of violent crime.

Hannah Cox: So I would say there's actually even a correlation in the other end that would indicate the death penalty contributes to higher rates of crime. Because, again, it's an opportunity cost: we're not spending those dollars on smart public policies, on things that actually work. And there's a good number of people that want to keep digging their head in the sand and do this, because I think it feels easy to them, right? The death penalty is an easy answer to violence. It doesn't take much nuance. It doesn't really take understanding trauma or science or violence. You don't have to do the messy work of getting in and trying to repair people. You don't have to really dig in and start dealing with the pain that so many find. What you'll find is those who commit crimes were usually first victims themselves; they're often victims of really traumatic experiences before the cycle of violence repeats itself in their lives and they end up being offenders. And so there's--there's some really messy work that I think needs to be done if we really want to understand violence in order to prevent it. And there are things we could be doing, but they're not simple solutions. They take more effort, they take more intelligence, they take more nuance and thought and planning and preparation. And I think that to some extent, there's a lot of people who really just don't want to do that work, and they want easy solutions. The death penalty feels good. It feels like vengeance. It feels like justice. It seems like this is a simple solution. It's not. It's something that continues to actually, I think, contribute to the root causes of crime, which again, are largely trauma. It creates new victims and other family members who lose a loved one.

Hannah Cox: It often amplifies the pain of the victim's family members themselves, which is why we see so many of them turn out to work against it and work to get rid of the death penalty. Because it's something that exacerbates their pain and really pushes them through a cycle of the system, for decades at times, instead of giving them the resources they might need to actually begin to rebuild their lives. And so it's something that just compounds trauma, compounds violence and pain and the effects of it and actually makes it worse. So it's not something that we really see providing any actual benefit. But again, I think it's something that, for some, feels easy, feels good. And so they, again, have kind of an emotional knee-jerk reaction to it and support it. But I want to circle back to the fact that I just don't think that's most people these days. I think it used to be. But these days what we find is that there are a lot of people, especially on the right, who have become aware of the need for criminal justice reform in general and, especially once they become aware of the flaws in the justice system, don't think that the system should be able to carry out matters of life and death. And so we find we actually have a lot of support for getting rid of it. And for those who maybe aren't as up to speed on the policy itself and on how it works, typically within a couple minutes of talking to them about all of this data, I'll see a lot of people change their minds pretty quickly. They'll say, "Oh, I didn't know that. OK, I guess I'm OK if it goes away in that case, let's try something better."

Herb Geraghty: Yeah. I think the death penalty is really one of those issues that, once you just get the data, it's a lot--it's a lot harder to keep supporting it. Which I think is good that we're on the right side of the issue, I guess.

Herb Geraghty: Another thing that I read about on your website that I really--I really liked was the idea that when it comes to the death penalty, justice is not blind and that fairness is a moving target. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that when you talk about it?

Hannah Cox: Yeah, well, we see that there is really stark disproportionality in the death penalty and how it's allocated. We see that only about two percent of counties bring the majority of death penalty cases. To date, all executions since reinstatement have come from less than 16 percent of the nation's counties. And so while a lot of people think that there is a difference in the level of criminality committed for people to get the death penalty, they think that these people are somehow more violent or what they did is more heinous than others in the prison population, that actually isn't the case. That actually isn't really how we determine who gets the death penalty. You'll find if you start digging into the cases of those on death row versus those in the life in prison without parole or sometimes even just general sentencing, that oftentimes you'll see very similar-looking cases. And it really just comes down to one county aggressively pushing for the death penalty and others don't. And so really, we see the number one driver of who gets it comes down to the location where the crime was committed. And that's true across every state in this country. So that's pretty arbitrary. That's actually partially why it was banned in the 1970s at the the US Supreme Court level: they proved that it was so arbitrary and so racially biased that it violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. They didn't find that it violated the "cruel" aspect of the Eighth Amendment but [rather] the "unusual" aspect of the Eighth Amendment, because it was so arbitrarily allocated that it was as random as being struck by lightning. And so they overturned it for a period of a couple years.

Hannah Cox: And then states basically added some mitigating factors and some aggravating factors that were supposed to try to put barriers up to ensure that it was only for the worst of the worst, and that we weren't racially biased in how we allocated it, and that we were making sure we didn't have so many wrongful convictions. But we--you know, we did that in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And so we've got a lot of data, a decade's worth of data now, to look at how that's worked. And we see that it operates in the exact same manner. It's still really based on where the crime was committed, and the next [strongest] determining factors are the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. And we see both of those play really significant parts in who gets it [and] who doesn't. And then, of course, there's a lot of socioeconomic bias overlap within that as well. Basically, if you're somebody who can afford a private attorney, a good defense, the likelihood that you're going to get the death penalty is really, really low.

Hannah Cox: We don't see people of means--even of moderate means--as a whole on death row. And the number one combination of people across this country on death row are black defendants who had a white victim in the case. Even though we know that most crime, most homicides are carried out by people known to the victim. Most people live in socioeconomic racial bubbles in this country, and so of course you see the data shows that numbers of white on white crimes are higher, black on black crimes are higher. You don't have as many crimes that are across different races. And yet that's the leading cause of people on death row.

Herb Geraghty: Wow. I think--I don't know, I just find that statistic one of the most shocking, I guess. I think I know that within the criminal justice system, there are racial biases.

Herb Geraghty: I think that it's pretty hard to find people now who won't admit to at least some racial bias within, you know, policing and prisons and sentencing and everything like that. But I think the stat about it being a white victim making a difference is really jarring to me.

Hannah Cox: Yeah, there's something really creepy about it, right? It feels very sinister. And I think so often when we talk about the systemic racism in the justice system, people who aren't as familiar with the system, who don't really understand its intricacies as well, they assume what we mean by that is, like, there's people plotting in a room to make the system racist. That's not how it actually gets put into place. Instead, we had a lot of laws that were put into place for hundreds of years in this country that were racist. And just because we had the Civil Rights Act of 1960 doesn't mean that all those laws are just eradicated from our books. And so you still have a lot of laws that were intended to have racial disparities and their implications and that still produces racial disparities and their implications. As one example, we just saw the Supreme Court this year--this year!-- overturn laws in Louisiana and Oregon that allowed for non-unanimous juries. We have transcripts from when those laws were put into place where they basically were advocating at the state level to water down the votes of black people on juries when they had to start including them after the civil war ended. And so those things were still around. When you have non-unanimous juries, you might have two black people on a jury and ten white people, and we say these two votes don't count. And we just watered down the votes of black juries who might have voted for more lenient sentences for people of color.

Hannah Cox: We continue to see black men sentenced with all white juries in this country. And so there's subliminal biases, right? There's subconscious bias that enters that equation. There's the implication of the laws. And all of it contributes to the system that continues to be much more punitive towards people of color, much more likely to arrest people of color, much more likely to wrongfully convict people of color, to sentence people for the same crime much more harshly if they are black than if they are white. On and on and on it goes. But I do think of all of the racial disparities we see in the data throughout the justice system, the one that really--it just feels so icky to me is around victims. When we see how we decide what victims get what attention, which victims' cases we decide are worth an excess million to pursue a death penalty case for, and which ones we might not even solve--you know, go back to that 60 percent homicide clearance rate. That means 40 percent of victims, on average, get absolutely no justice, no closure, nothing whatsoever. And I think that there is a subconscious bias in how we allocate our resources to victims in this country, in which victims get more attention, which victims we think need to absolutely make sure we solve those cases, and in which ones we say, "All right, this one has to go to the death penalty trial." And consistently we see that it is for white victims that we put precedence.

Herb Geraghty: Yeah. And to be clear, when we're talking about this, we're not saying that--I don't know... I feel like--I don't think that seeking the death penalty is somehow more just to a victim or a victim's family. But it's more just those biases that I think clearly exist that lead to that disparity, especially when, as you've said, the cross-racial homicide rate is very low.

Herb Geraghty: And so the fact that it's, you know, offenders--or accused offenders--that have a white victim, is so just very jarring.

Herb Geraghty: And I really like the language that you guys use on your website about justice should be blind.

Herb Geraghty: We sort of have these ideas of a government who is just and a justice system that applies these laws equally.

Hannah Cox: Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. And without a doubt, we fail to do that.

Herb Geraghty: And I think the last thing I want to talk about is the idea of the death penalty as, for the families of the victim, that it is the only real way to provide closure in the case of a homicide.

Hannah Cox: Yeah, I mean, I think there's this perception by defenders of the death penalty that this is something that, largely, victims' family members want. And we often see, especially lawmakers who are arguing in defense of keeping it, say that this is for the victims. Right? "We're doing this for the victims." You even saw US Attorney General Barr and Trump try to say that when they resumed federal executions, even while the victims in these cases have been advocating against it and asking them to stop. There's something really gross about it that happens in that way. I see that repeat itself throughout general assemblies. I know this year in Colorado, where we were ultimately successful in overturning the death penalty, we had a murder victim's coalition, a family member coalition, that was showing up that had three or four dozen people in it, tons and tons of people that were there. They were holding press conferences. They were meeting with lawmakers, and the lawmakers who were determined to vote to keep the death penalty, wouldn't meet with those people. Wouldn't come to their press conferences. Wouldn't sit down with them. But then had the gall to get up on the floor and say that they were voting to keep this penalty for the victims. And they used them as scapegoats. And I think it's really gross. So I don't ever want to do the opposite and speak for victims' family members. They're not a monolith. Certainly there are some victims' family members who support keeping the death penalty.

Hannah Cox: But I will say that in the legislatures where I've been, when we're working on repeal campaigns, they usually are about one to thirty-six against keeping it. So I think that as a whole, we see a lot larger number of victims' family members really show up and advocate getting rid of it, versus the other way around where we see victims really show up and want to keep it and say this is something that has helped them. So as a whole, I think it makes sense when you, when you really work around the system, you see how families get brought in and out of court for decades. They have to go back and forth. They're constantly having to relive the worst moment of their life. Many of them have a problem with the death penalty from the beginning. And the prosecutors and police don't respect them or their wishes and pursue it anyways. So that's quite traumatic. We see that these millions of dollars get wasted on pursuing this death penalty instead of actually giving them resources that they need, whether that be counseling, whether that be assistance with child care if they've just lost a spouse, whether that be relocation help if they're in a dangerous situation or area. There's a lot of things that they actually say they could use or need when they have experienced crime that we don't do for victims and their family members because we're wasting so much money on security theater.

Herb Geraghty: And so I think my only question left is, what do we do? How do we get involved? As you said, public opinion really has shifted. It's more common to oppose the death penalty than to support it. Yet we still have, I think, over half the states have the death penalty at least on the books. So what do we do to create the culture that we need to abolish it?

Hannah Cox: Yeah. Well, I think so much of it is just going and doing the work of talking to others in your world about the problems with it. I think we have to really move the culture in order to get to a place where then the politics, the legislature follows through. And so in some states we're further ahead than others. And some states there's still a lot of work left to do to talk to Republicans and Libertarians and others on the right. And even those on the left; there's an assumption that everybody on the left is in favor of getting rid of it, and that's actually not even true itself. We need to continue working across both sides of the aisles just to get this information in front of people, let them know the flaws with the system. I think it's always good for people to contact their local state House and state Senate members and let them know what they want to see happen on this. And those are really the best ways you can effect change.

Herb Geraghty: Great, how can we follow Conservatives Concerned?

Hannah Cox: Yeah. Conservatives Concerned is under our acronym on Twitter, which is CCATDP. We're on Facebook @Conservatives Concerned. Our website is ConservativesConcerned.org. And so those are three really great places to connect with us.

Herb Geraghty: Ok, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Hannah. Do you have anything else you want to promote or share a final message?

Hannah Cox: I think that's it. Thanks so much for having me.

Herb Geraghty: Well, thank you so much.

Maria Oswalt: Thanks for tuning in to the Rehumanize podcast. To learn more, check out our website at rehumanizeintl.org or follow us on social media @rehumanizeintl.