Legal protections against wrongful execution paradoxically make death sentences easier to impose.

Evidence

Sarat (1995) notes that the greater the protective legal reviews and appeals to prevent the execution of innocent people, the greater the diffusion of responsibility across legal jurisdictions. Diffused responsibility makes it easier for jurors to vote for the death penalty. Retentionists want fewer protections and speedier action on appeals and executions of those sentenced to death. Sarat argues convincingly that if protections are reduced and executions are increased, jurors will be more reluctant to sentence a defendant to death because they would be faced with evidence that their decisions are, in fact, consequential. In many respects, the policy of capital punishment and its implementation is an elaborate, painful, and costly undertaking in which society fills death rows but is reluctant to execute in large numbers those it sentences to die for their crimes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2010

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The empirically testable inversion — fewer safeguards would produce FEWER death sentences — upends the entire retentionist reform agenda. Worth sitting with: moral disengagement engineered precisely by the institutions of fairness.
• XREF: Parallels the Milgrom/Champagne fairs material: how institutional design shapes behavior in ways opposite to designers’ intent — here safeguards enabling rather than constraining killing.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice’: the state’s structural reluctance to carry out the executions it authorizes mirrors societies authorizing ritual killing while maintaining distance from the act itself.