I had been thinking about doing a Critique of the Week about the death penalty, and then I never got around to doing it. And maybe I never would have, except I heard a snippet of the Republican debate in South Carolina during which Alan Keyes said these words:
"We have to have the death penalty in order to demonstrate proper respect for life."
If I may be permitted a digression:
In the old interactive fiction computer game based on Douglas Adams's classic "Hitchhiker's Guide" series, one of the last hurdles involved impressing Marvin the Paranoid Android with your ability to do two contradictory things at the same time. The way to do this was to be holding "tea" and "no tea" at the same time. When you try to do this, the computer tells you, "Common sense dictates that this is impossible." In order to accomplish this task, you have to get into your own brain, where after blundering around for a while you find a small speck labeled "Common Sense." You pick up this speck. Once you have performed this common-sense-ectomy on yourself, you can then pick up both the tea and the no tea, and Marvin lets you into the room.
I often feel, when I listen to Republicans talk, as if they have all performed this operation on their own brains. I, however, have not had the opportunity, and therefore when I hear someone tell me that the way to show respect for life is to execute people, I tend to say, "BULLSHIT!"
It has always chafed me that the same crowd who wail so loudly about how women are murdering their unborn children is the same crowd that gleefully supports the state-sponsored murder of adults. How do they wrap their "pro-life" principles around the death penalty? Well, it would be fun to watch if it weren't also tragic. I imagine that in Alan Keyes's head, if anything was happening at all at that point, it was something like this:
Well, first things first: not all people on death row are guilty.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois, 12 people have been executed; 13 death row inmates have been released after being cleared of the murders for which they were convicted. One of them was recently cleared very shortly before his execution. By his lawyers? No. By a journalism student from Northwestern who investigated the case and discovered the actual killer, who confessed. If the Illinois court system has--at best--a 50% success rate when it comes to determining whether the defendant in a capital punishment case is guilty or innocent, can we assume courts in other states are 100% accurate? What happens to innocent defendants who are convicted of capital crimes and do not have sympathetic and industrious college undergraduates on their side? They get executed, is what happens, and now the entire state becomes the murderer of an innocent person. By its own logic, then, the entire state should be executed. Texans, does this give you pause at all?
And of course, the statistics are familiar: black men accused of killing whites are more likely to get the death penalty than white men who kill anyone; men are overwhelmingly more likely to get the death penalty than women; and so on and so forth. Nobody in any state has ever been able to prove that the death penalty has been administered impartially there. And it's not that they haven't tried.
Second: It is not OK to kill people.
All right, this is a purely subjective statement. But I don't believe that it is ever OK to kill someone, and I don't think any good can come of persuading ourselves otherwise. It may be necessary, it may be understandable, it may be unavoidable, but it's never OK. Maybe there will come a time in my life when I'll have to kill someone to save my life or the life of someone I love, and in that case maybe I'll do it. But I won't feel OK afterward. If you have to take life, you should take it in extremity, in pain, in doubt and in anguish. You should never take life out of a smug conviction that what you are doing is A-OK. The death penalty makes murder something that everyone can feel good about. Just listen to George W. talk about how proud he is of the job Texas has done. Murder becomes something taken for granted, an unquestioned part of the fabric of public life. This is bad for us.
So I'm only one woman and this is just my opinion. But you know what? If you look below the rhetoric to the way we carry executions out in this country, you find out that even the death penalty boosters agree with me. Because if George W. and all his prison wardens believed that killing murderers is really the right thing to do, they wouldn't go to all this trouble to separate the system and the people who commit this murder from the responsibility attached to it. Used to be someone had to swing the axe, and he knew who he was. With the introduction of machines you can duplicate the action of killing--have two switches for the chair, three buttons to push on the injection machine--so that nobody has to know who actually committed the murder. We work very hard to give ourselves the impression that these people are not killed by humans, but rather by technology. We want it all to be as clean, remote, and distant as possible.
If executions are morally right and ethically necessary--if they really demonstrate the high regard in which we hold human life--why do we act like we're ashamed of them? Why should we make it easier the people who do our killing for us to pretend that it's not their responsibility? Matter of fact, why should we let these people do it for us at all? Why shouldn't we all volunteer to do our part? Why shouldn't George W. shoot the inmates himself? Wouldn't that be an excellent way to convince voters of his high regard for human life? Why do people avoid this responsibility when in fact, they should embrace it with open arms?
Because we know that it's not the right thing to do. It may be the practical thing to do; prison sure is expensive. It may be the satisfying thing to do; revenge is sweet. It may be the safe thing to do; dead men don't kill people. But it isn't the right thing to do.
So let's stop pretending that it is. If we want to execute murderers, for all those other reasons, then let's do it in a way consistent with our rationale. If this is really about blood for blood, then let's do it up right. Let's release the inmate into a small park and have the victim's relatives hunt him down with shotguns. It would be much more satisfying, and could profitably be televised on Fox. Or, if this is about utility, then let's not waste money on lethal injection machines, last meals, and special execution rooms. Let's just send a guard down to the cell with a knife, a drip pan and a splatterproof apron. If we decide that this thing that we all recognize on some level as wrong is necessary, then let's not be cowards about it. Let's get our hands dirty so we know, when we look at them afterward, exactly what it is that we've done.
I've never killed a person. I have killed a cat. She was my cat, and I loved her, and I didn't want her to die. But she had been very sick for a long time and I knew she was never going to get better. I also knew that if she didn't get better, she would slowly starve to death. So we took her to the vet and we asked him to kill her. We stayed with her while she sat on the table, patting her and telling her we loved her. Then we held her while the vet injected a poison that stopped her heart.
We hated doing this. But we knew that we were doing the right thing for her, as painful as it was for us; and because we knew that, we were there.
You show respect by taking responsibility. And I don't see that happening over there on the right. Certainly George W., who has presided over more executions than any of his current or potential opponents, doesn't look as if he ever took responsibility for his own bad grades in high school, let alone the taking of human life.
And Alan, I dunno what your deal is, but you can't have it both ways. You can have respect for life, or you can gratify your desire for revenge. But you can't do both. Because you may have had your speck of common sense removed, but some of us are still holding onto ours.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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