I’m a liberal, but I support the death penalty for sex crimes against children

Carli Pierson
·4 min read
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, left, looks over the electric chair in the death chamber at Greensville Correctional Centre before signing legislation outlawing the death penalty in the state (AP)
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, left, looks over the electric chair in the death chamber at Greensville Correctional Centre before signing legislation outlawing the death penalty in the state (AP)

My father is a born-again evangelical Christian and one of his favorite jokes about me is that if I go any further left, I’ll fall off the face of the earth. I, on the other hand, have been trolled countless times on the Internet for my progressive views, called a socialist and other, much worse, names. Needless to say, we have little in common, especially when it comes to politics.

We do, however, see eye-to-eye on one very big, and controversial point: we both believe in the death penalty for anyone who commits sex crimes against children. Period.

So, when I read The New York Times’ report that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida was being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly paying a 17-year-old child to travel with him and engage in a sexual relationship – I was furious, nauseated, outraged, and many other adjectives that my editor will not let me put in this editorial.

Gaetz has denied the allegations and claimed that he is a victim of an extortion plot by a former official from the Department of Justice.

And this is not just a hot take. I am a survivor of sexual violence. In fact, most women I know have experienced some type of sexual trauma or aggression. I am a mother of two young girls. I am also an attorney who has worked with victims of intimate partner violence, children (boys and girls) who are survivors of sexual violence, and every news headline about allegedly predatory men who violate children brings out the most feral, guttural instincts in me to rid the earth of such vermin.

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My degrees, human rights specialization and training, my work on an innocence project case in Florida, talks, lectures, and books I’ve participated in and read on the issue of capital punishment, race, social justice, civil and human rights go flying out the window when it comes to allegations of sex crimes against children. Can you blame me?

Now, I know that capital punishment has a sordid, equally nauseating history as a mechanism that was applied almost exclusively to Black men, both extrajudicially in lynchings (and other types of murders), as well as legally via court-ordered executions. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “people of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution”. My home state of Colorado has one of the highest percentages of non-white people on death row (80 per cent).

And this is not a law review article; I do not pretend to know how to write capital punishment legislation to prevent the racial targeting and injustice that remains a thickly layered malignancy, omnipresent since the creation of the US justice system, and for which the federal government remains obscenely overdue in paying reparations for.

This country’s unforgivable history of human enslavement and the flagrant, continuing persecution of Black people is the only factor that keeps me up at night when I question the death penalty. I am afraid that, if such laws were put into place, they would be applied unjustly and overwhelmingly to African Americans and that is an equally terrifying prospect.

I also know that criminal punishments don’t generally serve as deterrents – most people who commit crimes do so without knowing the exact law they are violating or the specific consequences they might face depending on the relevant state or federal statutes involved. And deterring and preventing sex crimes and other types of child abuse necessitates a wide variety of interventions, mostly socio-economic.

Most crimes are also a result of factors like lack of access to economic opportunity, social, political, economic and historic disenfranchisement, systematic persecution by the State and its justice apparatuses, as well as mental health issues. But these excuses never hold water with sex crimes against children – you don’t rape a child because you can’t pay the rent.

Again, I don’t propose to know the answers about to how write the statutes that would reintroduce the death penalty for the worst crimes committed against children, but I ask what would you want if it were your child, or niece, nephew, grandchild, or any child for that matter? If we are going to remain in the 53 or so countries that permit capital punishment – shouldn’t sex crimes against kids be the main reason we apply it, always and exclusively, on a case-by-case basis and with substantial physical evidence to support a conviction in an objectively fair trial?

I see no other justification for such a horrific punishment, except this one major exception. Regardless of what ends up happening with Rep. Gaetz’s case – I hope this sparks a wider debate about what we can do to avenge, and prevent, crimes against our youth.