How Far Have We Come Since Hangings?

Long ago, in the days before Jerry Springer and the World Wrestling Federation, people satisfied their baser need for entertainment with a trip to the town square to watch real-live heathens burned at the stake, witches drowned and traitors peppered with buckshot.

Cultures chose their instruments of torture carefully. The ancient Romans devised the cross. The French brought us the guillotine. And in the Old West, cowboys were partial to hangings at dawn.

While our predecessors considered them even-handed, these practices seem barbaric today. Yet a couple months ago, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City sent out 1,100 personalized invitations to Timothy J. McVeigh’s execution.

Only 10 ringside seats were available in the death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind., for the invitation’s recipients--survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing and victims’ family members. But U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft approved the ultimate “reality” show for the rest: a closed-circuit telecast, in Oklahoma City, of McVeigh’s execution. Victims’ families vary greatly in their feelings about the death penalty for the man who set up the truck bomb that gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500. Doris Jones lost her daughter, Carrie, who was pregnant with what would have been Jones’ first grandchild. She resents all the attention McVeigh has gotten in the press. “Right now I’m paying for his air, for his food,” she says. “My daughter no longer can eat, read a book, breathe. . . . I don’t feel it’s right.”

Bud Welch, whose daughter, Julie, died in the blast, felt similar outrage. “I didn’t even want trials for Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols after they’d been arrested and charged for the bombing; I simply wanted them fried,” he says. For nine months, Bud Welch returned to the bomb site every day. He smoked up to three packs of cigarettes a day for his nerves and downed several cocktails so he could sleep at night. Then one day, watching the steady stream of tourists at the bomb site, Welch realized that anger was destroying him. “Vengeance and rage motivated McVeigh and Nichols--rage against the United States government for what happened at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho,” he says. “I realized that to execute either one of them was an act of vengeance and rage.”

Welch now speaks against the death penalty. In 1998, while on tour in western New York, Welch a private reconciliation with McVeigh’s father, Bill.

“What I found that morning was a bigger victim of the Oklahoma City bombing than myself,” Welch says. “I can travel all over the country, to Europe and to Africa, talking about Julie and bragging on her, but when Bill McVeigh meets a stranger he probably doesn’t even tell them he has a son. When the invitation arrived in the mail this February, Welch did not respond. He wishes he had entered the lottery for seats; if he’d won, he would leave a seat empty in Terre Haute to represent his opposition to the execution and the spectacle surrounding it.

Six years ago, Timothy McVeigh committed the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil, an act further compounded in the American psyche because its perpetrator--a high school track runner, a decorated Gulf War veteran, a quintessentially American kid--struck in the heartland of America.

His execution will be in large part symbolic. No death can make up for the innocent lives lost in Oklahoma City or El Salvador or Cambodia or the West Bank or Rwanda. Once we start smudging out those who have committed crimes against humanity, we’ll have a list of human symbols a mile long.

McVeigh will be eliminated by a relatively painless lethal injection. Perhaps we have come so far since the days of town square hangings. But I’m willing to bet if we brought execution out of high-security lock-down and started offering brown-bag executions in the park, public policy would swiftly shift toward abolishing the death penalty.

No matter how “uncruel and usual” executions have become, we can’t quite deny the queasy rumbling in our stomachs. We’re ready for alternatives. Deep down, we’re more humane than we’re willing to admit.