Holding the Needle

So, what about that Supreme Court decision about how the death penalty is too extreme a punishment for the rape of a child? I have a hard time thinking about it separately from my stance on the death penalty, which I'm against. However, if there is any crime for which I'd like to see someone deprived of their life, it's for harming a child.

Yet, even as I wrote that last sentence, I cringed because I don't really want to witness anyone's violent death. That's why, at bottom, I'm against the death penalty. It's not so much the principle of the thing--that it's wrong for the state to kill somebody, though I do think that--but that for the state to do so sanitizes the process for the rest of us, thereby rendering killing a living person more bearable. When the state executes somebody, all the rest of us have become hired assassins and I'm not comfortable with that role.

I believe that taking someone's life necessarily changes the person involved. I don't know this from personal experience but I can't imagine it would be any other way. In war time soldiers are able to take what comfort they can from a sense of duty and patriotism that might help them rationalize the brutalities they're forced to commit and forced to witness, and even so the trauma lingers for many veterans after they've returned home. It's no accident that so many homeless people are veterans.

Those in the Corrections industry might also feel protected from guilt or trauma by their sense of justice, that the executed criminal "got what he deserved." I sympathize with that feeling, but it seems to me that there must be ramifications to the soul and spirit of the Corrections Officer who participates in the violent death of a prisoner. I imagine a sense of callousness developing, at the very least. I'm against the death penalty primarily because of what I think it must do to those involved in the practice, both those in Corrections and the rest of us who think we will benefit from the criminal's death: desensitize us to violence and desacralize life.

Surely, many people who support the death people feel that same sense of justice. Emotions of anger and vengeance are natural reactions to harm--and I would feel murderously angry if anyone hurt my child--and I could see how it might feel just to want to see harm come to the person who harmed me, my child, or some other loved one. I'm not sure, however, that the principle of an eye for an eye is the the most helpful standard to apply, however temporarily satisfying it might be.

Perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing but standards like, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "Thou shalt not kill," come readily to my mind. I don't think those principles have caveats, like, "Love thy neighbor except when he pisses you off, " or "Thou shalt not kill--unless they started it." Since killing people is generally regarded as criminal and morally wrong--and oddly part of the rationale for the death penalty--I think it's not something a society should therefore voluntarily collude in.

Rather than the death penalty, I think public mourning rituals should be held, where once a year everyone in cities and towns descend upon prisons and those who have lost someone to violent crime rend their garments and tear their hair and wail their grief--with the rest of us bearing witness and offering comfort--in the presence of the person who took that life.

We would read a litany of names of those who had passed and those who still mourn them, sing sacred songs, listen to sacred music, cry and hug and affirm that life is valuable, even for those who have sunk so low as to take another's life. I'm not saying they should be forgiven; I'm saying they should be forced to bear witness to how unbearable it is to lose someone you love to violence. I'm saying we should also bear witness and offer comfort to the violent losses the prisoners have sustained; I suspect they are many, of people, of pets, of hope, of joy, of trust.

While killing someone who killed someone else has a certain emotional symmetry, I don't think it helps in the long run to make us better people or a better society.

What would help is if together we all affirm that with the death of each person, something precious has been lost to all of us, which is why we will not, as a society, kill even those who have caused us such harm. Crimes against another person are also crimes against the rest of us, which is why the state prosecutes, rather than the family of the raped child taking the rapist out back and shooting him with a handgun. Taking a life is wrong, whether perpetrated by a man with a handgun or by the state with a lethal injection. Anytime that happens, we all should mourn.