Dig Up Ken Lay and Put Him in the Chair

Lindsay Beyerstein poses a death penalty hypothetical:

Suppose that the State of Texas passed a law to make truly massive Enron-level corporate fraud punishable by death. Could that law be constitutional? Or would executing property criminals be considered cruel and unusual punishment?

Executing Enron executives may sound extreme, but lets consider for a moment the true scale of the wrongdoing by Ken Lay and his cronies at Enron. I would argue that if you support the death penalty at all, you should support capital punishment for the top-level Enron execs.

I don't support the death penalty, but if I did, Kenny Boy would have been first in line. Ken Lay did far more harm than the average murderer, or even the average terrorist. He left thousands of people destitute, including workers whose pensions evaporated and students whose college savings disappeared. How many people will die in poverty because of Lay? How many students lost the opportunity to go to college because of the Enron swindle? How many lives were shortened because the innocent employees of Enron and Arthur Andersen lost their jobs and health benefits?

On the larger scale, Lay's crimes also undermined trust in the stock market. His influence peddling damaged the integrity of American government. Enron money helped the Republicans take the White House. It's not for nothing that Kenny Boy got to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Let's not forget that Enron inflicted deliberate power outages in order to extort money from the energy consumers of California. Did anyone die as a result? If you kill someone in the process of holding up a liquor store in a death-penalty state, you're liable to be executed for your crime, even if you didn't intend to kill the victim.

If the severity of the punishment is supposed to be proportionate to the severity of the crime, Ken Lay did enough harm for capital sentence, several times over.

I'm against the death penalty, period...but I have to agree that if are going to kill some criminals, and if the penalty is supposed to be proportionate to the harm done, then the Enron folks (and a lot of other white collar criminals) aren't bad candidates. In fact, the death penalty would make a great deal more sense applied to white collar crime, because it might actually have some deterrent value.

As applied now, the death penalty doesn't come close to being a deterrent. I've interviewed scores of inmates in the California penal system (including a couple of murderers), and one thing they all share is a fundamental inability to reason out the consequences of their actions. The idea that any of them could possibly think about consequences far enough in advance that a non-trivial probability of execution ten years down the line would change their behavior is several steps beyond ludicrous. (Granted, most of the guys I talked to also happened to be developmentally disabled...but still, the principle holds true for most or nearly all inmates.)

White collar criminals, on the other hand, are nothing if not planners. Make the risk greater than the reward, and they will alter their behavior accordingly.

Again: opposed to the death penalty. Still, Lindsay has an excellent point. If you're going to apply it to people who cause deaths while committing crimes, then you need to apply it to people who cause deaths while committing crimes.

[That's all, folks]