Death Is His Doing

There is a killer awaiting the needle at a penitentiary in Indiana. We hear his death rattle across the nation. Once again in his misbegotten life, this man with the burr haircut and the expressionless face rises to haunt us.

In these days leading to his last journey, I suspect he will remain true to character and evoke more emotion in us than he will emit from himself.

The vengeful await their eye for an eye, and are ready to say it wasn’t near enough. Survivors and families of victims count down for the justice that many say they want. High-minded moralists wring their hands and pray, their hearts telling them that killing is no answer to killing.

The nature of the Oklahoma City bombing seems to demand that we pause before the mirror. Are we sure of so final an act?

For today, let’s set aside the two most convincing arguments against the death penalty: that it is applied unevenly, and thus unjustly. And, that blind justice can miss the facts and doom the innocent. In the case of the Oklahoma City bomber, there seems to be no question of guilt and no issue of arbitrary judgment.

There is, of course, an even nobler stand: The state should never kill its captives, period. It is the view of absolutists. The extension of this reasoning: Cycles of violence must be broken, and it’s up to good people, not bad, to do it.

A colleague of mine who covered Oklahoma City said he had never seen America so angry as when it watched the dead brought from the wreckage of the federal building. That’s the part of the death penalty that frightens me. The surge of the lynch mob.

So I’ll exempt myself from the cycle of hate that begets hate in-kind. I won’t hate back. A little of my humanity, and yours, will die five days from now on that cross-like table with the burr-headed man.

But will the execution be wrong?

No. This man with his boiling hatreds committed moral suicide when he parked a truck bomb outside the federal building. A larger part of my humanity, and yours, died that day with our public servants and their children.

Where do we break the cycle? At the end, not the middle.

This is not a comfortable thing to say. It puts one in the company of ghouls. Many of the ethicists, theologians and humanists whom I admire not only believe otherwise but think less of me as a result.

But we should not always choose our values by our friends. And it is incorrect to say there is no moral basis to believe that a criminal sacrifices himself the moment he kills. Pope Pius XII put it this way half a century ago:

Even when there is question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already dispossessed himself of his right to life.

The alternative?

Life in prison is still life. It is false idealism to believe that long years in prison are somehow worse than execution. If so, why do so many convicts bargain to live? The absolutists believe--or hope--that the guilty will suffer in their cells with the haunting burden of their crime.

Some may. But they will go on living too. They will read books, make friends, eat meals, write letters, indulge the imagination, play in the sunshine--that is, enjoy some of life while doing life. In the case of the burr-headed man, I believe he would also preach his grim creed, perhaps for 50 years or so--and prisons are petri dishes for the spread of infectious hatreds, are they not? What the burr-headed man attacked was our social order. He struck at it and drew blood. The answer to his crime is the steady, incremental, dispassionate--and lawful--workings of this social order.

So far, this is what he has received. And it appears this will be his destiny. The social order holds that the lives of 169 people were dispossessed that day--168 in the federal building, and one more now. When the needle pierces the vein and the poison flows, it will be his doing, not ours.

Mercy? May it be granted to us.