So Why Stop With Murderers?

The horror and pain preceding death and the anguish thereafter caused to the survivors are seen these days as major criteria in imposing the death penalty. Indeed, some capital cases do involve the molestation and subsequent killing of small children. Some follow a rape. Some, a very small percentage, are accompanied by torture.

But the great majority of murders giving rise to death-penalty verdicts are wanton and apparently senseless, and death comes with extraordinary, terrible swiftness. Thus, it is the survivors who suffer, not generally the murder victims, who are alive and well (though possibly frightened) one minute and very dead the next.

So, since today’s execution enthusiasts make vengeance a chief criterion, based on the rage and suffering of the survivors, perhaps they should seek support for extending the death penalty to avenge the bereaved and suffering parents, husbands or wives, children and friends of:

--Victims of the driver whose negligence rends and tears the body of his (or her) victim, who thereafter lingers days or months in a hospital in excruciating pain before dying;

--Victims of the manufacturer who knowingly keeps from his employees information that the chemicals they are working with are toxic, therby leading to the agonizingly slow and painful deaths of some of his workers by cancer;

--Victims of police killings where the district attorney refuses to prosecute for the murder but where the jury in a civil action brought by the grieving family ultimately finds that the officer (or officers) wrongfully and unlawfully gunned down the hapless citizen.

The public is frightened. Afraid of crime. Afraid of “criminal” killings. But the will of the public to execute only a few of the perpetrators of the vast number of real, genuine criminal killings that daily occur in our complex society is misguided and, ultimately, self-defeating. If suffering is the criterion, let’s kill all the “criminals” listed above. Or let’s not kill anyone.