Death Row, Up Close and Impersonal

Dead man missing.

President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is standing at his Oval Office window as midnight nears, eyes on the falling snow, hand clutching rosary beads, thoughts on the condemned man whose life he has the power to extend.

Conflict over capital punishment drives tonight’s episode of “The West Wing,” NBC’s smart new hit series whose White House setting and characters are conducive to sharp debate on controversial moral and political issues that affect the nation.

Yet not debate that’s conclusive or thorough, necessarily, for here’s the anomaly. The catalyst in this episode depicting a weekend of high-level hand-wringing--namely the death row prisoner whose fate has brought Bartlet to this 11th-hour apex of presidential angst--is an abstraction here, as faceless and voiceless as a tree stump. You won’t see him going public with his case, as confessed murderer Karla Faye Tucker did with CNN’s Larry King and elsewhere on TV before being executed in Texas two years ago.

In other words, the character most pivotal to tonight’s story is invisible.

Despite the usual lighthearted banter around the edges, tonight’s interesting episode is heavy with gloom. Bartlet to an Oval Office visitor: “Certain decisions I have to make while in this room . . . it’s helpful in those situations not to think of yourself as the man but as the office.”

Easy for him to say. But can visitors properly weigh the death penalty in a TV drama without getting to know or even observing the person to whom it’s applied? Or is the narrower agenda here not to humanize the convicted man in society’s cross hairs but to show the impact of life-and-death decision-making on a sensitive president?

“This show is not here for me or any of us to teach you something,” Aaron Sorkin, creator and executive producer of “The West Wing,” says in the current issue of the media-watching magazine Brill’s Content.

Nonetheless, many viewers are bound to see this as a primer on government and morality.

Liberal Democrats, Bartlet and most of his key aides appear as anti-capital punishment as public opinion polls say the nation is overwhelmingly for it. Citing one such poll, Bartlet tonight has his staff rushing to summarize the issue and the case in question to find reasons “the public would find palatable” for him to commute the condemned man’s sentence.

“Is there any evidence that capital punishment serves as deterrent?” asks one top aide.

“Speculative evidence, at best,” replies another.

But where is the potential beneficiary of this intense activity? Behind an opaque veil. Instead of a warmblooded human, he is a political issue, a spiritual or intellectual component in a dialogue, an anonymous plot point en route to the episode’s conclusion.

We know that this man assigned to die in Indiana by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. on a Monday is named Simon Cruz, that he was convicted four years ago of murdering two members of a drug cartel, that his trial and legal defense may have been flawed, that the Supreme Court’s rejection of his appeal makes his last hope the compassionate, but pragmatic Bartlet.

Because we never see or hear Cruz, or learn anything personal about him, we have no emotional investment in his life, either positive or negative, beyond whether it ends on schedule via the big needle or continues after the episode’s closing credits. We have no idea if he is unrepentant or claims to have found the Lord as Tucker did, if he’s a snarling sadist or a possible victim of circumstances, if he has admitted guilt or claims to be innocent. In a sense, he’s already dead, existing not as an individual, but only as a symbol.

That can be good. Without Cruz as a diversion, the issue of capital punishment alone occupies center stage.

“Violence begets violence, vengeance is not Jewish,” a rabbi (David Proval, who plays a murderous gangster in HBO’s “The Sopranos,” ironically) says in a sermon aimed at one of his Saturday morning congregants, White House communications director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff).

“God is the only one who gets to kill people,” counsels Bartlet’s childhood parish priest (Karl Malden) when summoned to the Oval Office by the president, a devout Catholic.

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But there are flaws in the episode’s heavy reliance on spiritual arguments, for if capital punishment is a deterrent, as many of its advocates insist, then isn’t the death penalty justified as act of self-defense? Or is Malden’s sage priest, for example, a pacifist who is opposed to killing even to avoid being killed, as soldiers do in war and police in defending themselves against criminals?

Subtracting Cruz the person from this scenario, moreover, also omits a potential argument from the anti-death penalty crowd, namely that any good achieved by the death penalty is outweighed by the possibility of wrongfully convicted people dying by execution.

In addition to California, 37 states have the death penalty. One of them is Illinois, where only recently Gov. George H. Ryan imposed a death penalty moratorium, citing 13 death row inmates who have been cleared of murder charges since that state reinstated capital punishment in 1977. One was just two days from execution when evidence exonerating him was discovered.

Although no foe of the death penalty as a concept, Ryan said he wants to make sure “only the clearly guilty are being executed” before proceeding.

Is Cruz “clearly guilty”?

You won’t know from tonight’s episode, or hear any vigorous philosophical arguments either for killing or sparing him beyond the pleas of the rabbi and priest, preaching Scripture from a Burbank sound stage.

* “The West Wing” can be seen tonight at 9 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.