On Drones and the Death Penalty

It has been shown that the bureaucratic involvement in the decision as to whether a person should die is fraught with mistakes. These errors show up in the way evidence was collected, the accuracy of witness testimony and in the actual delivery of lethality. And the most egregious fault is that innocent lives have been taken.

These statements are ostensibly true regarding the process and culmination of the decision to implement the death penalty. They are also true about the process and culmination of the decision to kill an enemy combatant using a drone. It is acknowledged that it is possible to use drones as part of a declared war against a force of unambiguously belligerent fighters. However, the role of drones discussed here is in the realm of the so-called war on terror in which these machines are used to target people living among non combatants in areas that are not declared war zones.

When the bureaucratic factors listed above were acknowledged in regard to the death penalty, the logical response was to suspend it or to eliminate it. The reason is that even though it is possible to make the process of determining a person is indeed guilty of the crime for which they are charged foolproof, it requires more time and money than our society wants to spend.

I believe the same constraints should be applied to the use of drones to deliver deadly force to an individual or small group of people. That is, it is possible to ensure that only true enemies are the victims of a missile fired from a drone, but the cost and effort to do so are not feasible in terms of monetary price or effective military strategy.

With both the death penalty and drones, error free government sanctioned death is not possible to achieve without a significant investment in terms of determining unassailable evidence, that action being taken is based on unbiased legal principles and not on false judicial decrees, that no personal exigencies or vendettas are involved in the gathering of evidence or decision to prosecute and that the delivery of lethal force is done to ensure innocent lives are not taken.

For these reasons, I believe the use of drones to assassinate enemy forces should be halted.