A Day for the ‘Hang ‘em’ Ghouls

I remember a vivid, terrible description of a guillotining in France early in this century, where the violent pace of the whole episode--maybe a minute from the moment the prisoner was led out into the public highway where the blade awaited, to the moment head, body and basket were driven away--mirrored the essential barbarity of the whole process of capital punishment.

Watching TV news on Tuesday, as Karla Faye Tucker was put to death in Huntsville, Texas, I hadn’t quite realized how sedately bureaucratized the whole process has become in the years since the death penalty was restored in the U.S. The tone of the news anchors was deferentially solemn, respectful of the pain of one and all, from Gov. George W. Bush to the “families of the victims” to Tucker sympathizers, among them Jerry Falwell. The prosecutor who successfully argued for the death penalty similarly spoke of his own distress, but also glowingly of the Texas penal system and of the application of justice in the U.S. as second to none in the world for compassion and humane values.

Dr. Guillotin, a child of the 18th century Enlightenment, sold his contraption to the French Assembly by arguing that decapitation should no longer be reserved for aristocrats and that the swift certainty of his invention answered the demands of both democracy and productivity. There was a lively debate amid the Jacobin terror as to whether death by guillotine was instantaneous. Supporters of the negative side invoked the story of Charlotte Corday, who stabbed revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat to death in his bath. It was said that Corday “blushed with indignation when the executioner, holding up the head to public gaze, struck it with his fist.”

No such excesses marred the execution “process” in the “facility” at Huntsville. All observers stressed the smile sealed forever on Tucker’s face. Like a friendly cat under the dining room table, the phrase “lethal injection” purred its polite way through the reports, as a process almost ennobling in its merciful decorum.

Tucker’s redemption was seen by supporters as advertising the cruel folly of the death penalty. But more powerfully at work was a profound Calvinism, of the sort that inspired the famous tale of the wild lad in Switzerland, found guilty of a capital crime, instructed in the Bible, admitted into the Christian faith, taught the motions of human conscience and then, and only then, put to death. And so Tucker was helped into the next world by Gov. Bush, declaring that the real decision-maker here was the “higher power,” a piece of buck-passing sanctimony I trust enough voters will remember should he ever seek higher office beyond the confines of Texas.

So Bush Jr. proved he was man enough to kill a woman. Falwell and Pat Robertson asserted that they believed in redemption, called for clemency but passed up the opportunity to stand outside the walls of Tucker’s prison for a final demonstration.

But at least they spoke up, which is more than did the women’s groups unavailable to answer Camille Paglia’s awful piece of offhand glibness, that she supported Tucker’s execution on the grounds that she, Paglia, is an “equal opportunity feminist.” Where were other women in the public arena to argue that neither women nor men should ever have to face this capricious doom? The only one I heard say this was Bianca Jagger, speaking for Amnesty International.

And what of Bill Clinton, whom these women have covered for so many times? He certainly helped to stick the poison needle into Tucker’s veins. At moments of political peril he’s not hesitated to push men like Rickey Rector into the execution chamber to give himself a boost among the hang ‘em crowd. He signed the 1996 anti-terrorism bill, which makes it almost impossible for people on death row to use the federal courts in their appeals. His Supreme Court justices were no help.

So praise Karla Faye Tucker and Larry King, who gave Middle America a chance to hear eloquent arguments against the arbitrary and capricious application of the death penalty, which has seen 90% of federal death penalty cases in the Clinton era filed against blacks and Latinos. Don’t praise the press, now so cowed that it felt compelled to tie the label “pickax murderer” to Tucker’s toe as they trundled her corpse off to the morgue. Let’s stop being so polite, so respectful about these execution rituals. What sort of people are these “families of the victims” who wait 14 years to see, ringside, someone officially killed in compensation for their own loss? Better find peace in forgiveness and compassion than in these ghoulish urges to be in the front row for a hanging.