Here’s One You Won’t Want to Read
The topic today is the death penalty, but I can’t find much clever and new to say about this crazy business of avenging murder with murder. It seems the same arguments have been raised, and rejected, for centuries. People are in no mood for more bleeding heart rhetoric. They are in a mood only for blood.
My only hope is to trick them with a story, a parable perhaps. Give them pathos. Give them wit. It’s tough to find anything witty, though, in California’s plans for Robert Alton Harris. It only makes me sad, and sorrow just won’t play in a state that favors capital punishment by an 80-20 margin.
I considered building a column around Barbara Graham. Certainly she’s the stuff of fables--a stylish, 32-year-old murderess whom the newspapers of the 1950s dubbed “Babs the Party Girl.” Babs proclaimed her innocence to the end and clattered to her execution in high heels. On that last walk, she was counseled by a compassionate guard to breathe deeply when the cyanide dropped. This would hasten death, ease suffering.
“How the hell do you know?” she snapped.
Now that’s an exit line--quick, memorable and freighted with lasting wisdom. Four decades later, we still don’t know much about this death penalty business, do we? We want to believe it persuades others not to kill. Statistics and history indicate otherwise. Long ago, in England, pickpockets worked the crowds that gathered to watch pickpockets hanged. We want to believe it is applied only with careful justice; tell me then why Harris will be gassed, but Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and hundreds of equal scum will be spared? We want to believe that it is moral, that God sanctions the slaughter.
But how the hell do we know?
The problem with Graham is she is overexposed. They made a movie about her. Plus, she’s dead. We saw to that. So I visited Pat Brown. If any living Californian personifies the death penalty, it is this former governor. Tough guys Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian put one killer to death between them. Brown presided over the execution of 36. This is ironic, because his opposition to capital punishment undermined his political career.
He was sitting in his Century City office. It was early afternoon and I was his last appointment. I’m not sure what I expected from this old man, now in his 80s: an unburdening, remorse perhaps, a few tears. I got none. Political instincts die hard. When I told Brown my subject, he straightened up, summoned an aide to monitor the interview and played it careful the whole way.
Would he be judged, later, for sanctioning three dozen deaths?
“I haven’t the slightest idea in the world.”
Did he have any advice for Gov. Pete Wilson, who has the power to spare Harris?
“I wouldn’t give advice on that. It’s a moral decision of the individual.”
Well, did any good come of the executions?
“I can’t say, one way or another.”
Thirty-six dead, and the caring man who sanctioned it all can’t to this day say what good came of it.
I toyed, finally, with gallows humor. Satire is a good ally on sensitive subjects. I could suggest executions be televised--not as news, but as entertainment. The guillotine would be the prop. The rolling head would provide great slow mo. The show would follow the Big Spin and be called the Big Snip. There would be an underlying point, of course, to this madness. If we are serious about a return to barbaric justice, let’s go all the way.
Later, I discovered I had been beaten even to this punch. Camus, in his “Reflections on the Guillotine,” argued that France erred in making executions private: “If people are shown the machine,” Camus wrote, and are “made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination will repudiate . . . the penalty.”
No, it’s all been said before. But let me offer one last thought, straightaway, no gimmicks. It’s important to understand why we intend to kill Harris. It doesn’t have to do with deterrence. It is because we are angry and scared. Angered by murder, not only of two teen-age boys, but the whole epidemic. Scared--not of Harris, he can’t hurt us--but of appearing to be weak. We don’t want the criminals to know how frightened we are. We want to look tough. We lack the courage to spare the killer.
And finally, we act in ignorance. We don’t know if killing Harris will stop a single murder. We don’t know if it is moral. We can’t even be sure it will give the grieving families the peace they deserve. All we know for certain is that, to punish one murderer, we will bloody the hands of 30 million.
