McVeigh’s Execution Will Heal Neither Survivors Nor Public

The public mood surrounding Wednesday’s scheduled execution of Timothy McVeigh is peculiar, far different from a victory lap for capital punishment. Many of the interest groups and political actors who should be delighted that the federal government is about to end 38 execution-free years seem edgy and dyspeptic.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is worried that the defiant defendant is getting too much of the wrong kind of attention. A spokeswoman for a victims’ lobby told National Public Radio of her outrage that this mass killer is the center of attention, not the dead and injured. Federal law enforcement officials are nervous because executing a political terrorist is a tricky business when even a tiny group might share his grievance.

Yet this would seem the best imaginable case for the executioner to please us--the condemned man is unrepentantly guilty of a terrible mass murder, and there is doubt neither about his guilt nor the quality of his legal representation. The appeal process was not throttled by the rush-to-judgment federal statute but stopped by the defendant himself. McVeigh is white and of normal intelligence. Why isn’t this a feel-good execution?

Because the closer we come to the execution, the more it appears to be empty of promise for either public good or private relief for victims and family.

For starters, the fact that McVeigh and his peculiar theories of political protest are getting all the attention is an inevitable result when democracies execute in publicized cases. This will be McVeigh’s day. The public attention always belongs to the condemned at execution just as surely as the bride is the public focus of a wedding.

By shifting our attention from crime to punishment, the process of execution confers more publicity on the criminal than the crime. Offenders who thrive on notoriety benefit. When T-shirts and Web sites celebrate the notorious offender, victims and families suffer again.

But at least the victims and their families will feel “closure,” won’t they?

Probably not. There is not a shred of evidence that surviving kin feel better or recover faster in capital punishment homicides than in killings not punished by death.

To be sure, some survivors feel relief when the long death penalty process ends, but that happens because the extra pain and uncertainty imposed by the death penalty process is over. Calling that a positive impact of execution is like arguing that toothaches benefit people because it feels so good when they stop.

Besides, those Oklahoma City families that have made their recoveries hostage to capital punishment being carried out will still have Terry Nichols to worry about, and after that the unindicted. The myth of executions as family therapy is one of the great political inventions of the last decade.

The primary parties Wednesday will be the U.S. government and McVeigh. The government’s interest in reducing terrorism is so great that the spin masters who passed a law limiting federal death sentence appeals in 1996 called it the “Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act.” But here again the wish and the reality differ.

The problem with executing terrorists is their sympathizers. The day of a McVeigh execution becomes a high-intensity stimulus, just as the Waco conflagration was. The number of security staff posted around federal office buildings will go up rather than down on Wednesday, as well as on the anniversaries of this execution. Generating new political martyrs is a high-risk version of terrorist control.

The better argument for executing terrorists is not utilitarian but rather that it would seem unjust to execute convenience store robbers and not also these more dangerous and deserving killers. That is an important point, but it doesn’t make McVeigh’s execution any less dangerous for federal employment. Are we tempting terrorists so that the capital punishment system doesn’t look arbitrary?

But isn’t this lethal injection a necessary act of modern government when terrible crimes are committed? This question should be addressed on the morning of May 17 by asking another: Are we living in a better country because of the government’s conduct the previous day?

An honest answer would tell us why the executioner has disappeared from all other Western democracies, even in this dangerous age.