Capital Punishment

Coahuila's legislature has approved the death penalty for kidnappers who kill their victims. The party-line vote brought the PRD and the PAN together in opposition, but the plan, a pet project of the well liked Governor Humberto Moreira (see previous post), passed with the support of the PRI and the Green Party. (An odder breakdown of opposition versus support of a bill I've not seen.)

Regardless of your opinion on the morality of the death penalty, this will not succeed in limiting the number of kidnappings, as long as the overwhelming majority crimes remain unpunished (between 98 and 99 percent of the total, according to most studies). Another problem: kidnapping is usually the work of a criminal group, not an individual or a pair of crooks. So, is the 19-year-old niece of the boss who fed the victim before she was killed as culpable as the boss himself? Are the four men who took the victim from his car with the expectation that he would be back in his house later that week as worthy of the death as the person who pulled the trigger? I certainly don't mean to defend anyone who would take part in a kidnapping, but developing a standard to assign blame adequately is going to be a huge challenge.

It's also interesting that, if you look at the broad progression of western civilization as moving away from the death penalty, this marks a step backwards for Mexico. The country has long taken a principled stance against the death penalty and, until recently, life sentences as well (for years it was a hang-up to extraditions to the United States). Unless I'm mistaken, the prohibition on the death penalty is enshrined in the Constitution, so I think a Supreme Court challenge would be inevitable.