May 16:
Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to die by lethal
injection in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana for the murder
of 168 people. As of the beginning of May, 28 people had been
executed in the United States in the year 2001; a total of 711 men
and women have been executed since the death penalty was
reinstituted in 1976.
In his “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Albert
Camus provided anti–death penalty adherents their strongest
argument against the idea that capital punishment is a deterrent to
crime: An act of premeditated, administrative murder, the death
penalty is carried out in cloaked isolation, by a society which
really doesn’t believe in the sanction’s supposedly exemplary
value.
Historically, the statistics on the persistence of
capital offenses prove him right, and what society harbors behind
the facade of intimidation, Camus noted, is simply revenge.
Timothy McVeigh’s scheduled execution for the
Oklahoma City bombing is but the latest consequence of a long trail
of senseless violence pinioning viewers nightly in front of their
TVs. Politicians have deftly utilized the fear born of four decades
of uniquely modern carnage, and the retaliatory inclination for the
death penalty, favored by two-thirds of the nation, has assumed a
peculiarly American fervor — one whose possibilities invite
consideration.
Imagine televising death penalty proponents
assembled in a bar at halftime of Monday Night Football games, the
way visiting teams’ fans are often shown. TV monitors along the
walls display, in split-screen, the barroom and the inside of a
prison death chamber. Those in attendance are a select group,
publicly representing a national audience, gathered to witness an
execution — carried out not by the state but by the family of a
murder victim.
What occasions such a possible scenario is an idea
that has been obscured by the larger debate over the right or wrong
of capital punishment, and one we are obliged to examine: The
possibility that, perhaps, as a consequence of one of these
monstrous murders, the only way the family of a victim can
ever regain psychological equilibrium is to see the perpetrator
executed. And that the state, for the sake of argument acknowledging
that deterrence is a sham, would permanently turn over to
next-of-kin the ability to salve their grief. Revenge thus reclaims,
if you will, integrity by becoming personal.
Attorney General Ashcroft’s announcement that
Timothy McVeigh’s execution will be broadcast on closed-circuit to
the relatives and survivors is, in effect, the state’s de facto
admission that retribution rather than deterrence is at the root of
capital punishment. As constituted, however, such a limited
broadcast and the retention of government’s ultimate hand in the
matter will do little to advance families’ already-elusive quest
for “closure” in capital cases.
McVeigh is typical of recent killers who exhibit
pathological disdain for their victims, the justice system, and
their own fates. Families and survivors are rendered even more
powerless in these instances. A blink, a momentary grimace of terror
from the killer at the prospect of his imminent demise, some sort of
gallows tic that might be revelatory of a hint of humanity — in
the absence of contrition, these substitutes that the families hope
might approximate justice and ease their pain are denied them under
the present procedures for executions. Ashcroft’s half-measures
only make matters worse. Were McVeigh instead forced to face the
nation as it watched him, and if he knew that the families in the
chamber observation room had their own hands on the button, he would
be without the apparatus of the state to finally blame. Emotionally,
that would afford the families at least a glimpse of a level playing
field.
Whether the condemned will in fact die would be
the decision of each family, and its alone; no one will know until
the appointed moment. In a situation with many victims such as
Oklahoma City, a representative delegation of all the families could
be chosen. A determinate date for the execution at six months after
imposition of sentencing could be established, time enough for the
family or delegate group to fully comprehend the nature of its
ordeal and options, a process in many ways analogous to that of the
counterpart with whom it is bound in symbiotic embrace. (Under these
circumstances, one could theoretically envision last-minute,
locked-eyed occurrences of repentance and forgiveness.)
The barroom witnesses should certainly include
children, and they should be encouraged to ask questions of their
parents about the proceedings. The witnesses will view the unhooded
face of the condemned on one half of the monitor’s screen, and
view themselves on the screen’s other half. The nationwide
audience will be afforded a similar perspective, and the condemned
will be able to see the crowd on a chamber monitor.
A populace overwhelmingly disposed to retribution
is thus enabled to view itself celebrating its solidarity for what
it also believes is a just and equivalent act. It watches itself
instructing its children, in real time on Monday nights, on the
efficacy of capital punishment. The aura of secrecy and darkness
associated with the state-as-executioner is replaced by open
national camaraderie and demonstrable family values tutelage.
Would such an ongoing spectacle exacerbate our
sadistic instincts or induce revulsion? Would an aggrieved family
who might ultimately decline to deliver reprisal then suffer the
displaced and instantly visible rage of a nation which expected its
notion of justice to be honored? Or would we eventually come to
glimpse ourselves as codependent participants in the equivalent of a
snuff reality show?
Clearly, here, we’re afforded an opportunity to learn much
about who we are, as distinct from who we think we are. At the very
least, transferring the privilege to execute from the domain of
bureaucrats to the victim’s family deprives the act of its
abstract status. It is no longer merely something the state does in
our name. It is ours, finally and truly, to deal with, and the
debate and our character as a people can only be clarified as a
consequence.
John Hutchison. An earlier version of this piece appeared in
the San
Francisco Flier.
An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from
the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It
adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future
victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings
more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most
premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however
calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the
death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his
victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him
and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for
months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
— Albert Camus
