6/9/97

KUFM / KGPR

T.M. Power

Fighting Violence with Violence: The Death Penalty

The penalty phase of the Oklahoma City bombing trial has thus far emphasized the need for vengeance and the Old Testament version of justice: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Of course, that rule is hard to implement when 170 people were killed and we only have one person to hold accountable. That, no doubt, is why torture and mutilation was used by previous generations. Death was too easy. When a crime was particularly despicable, we wanted to inflict something worse than mere death. In medieval Europe, people were hung by the neck until almost dead, then cut down and, while still conscious, gutted and sexually mutilated very carefully so as not to damage vital organs but allow the criminal and the public to see the intestines and genitals spill out onto the ground. Finally, each limb was attached to one of four workhorses and the criminal was pulled in four directions, slowly, so that each joint could be carefully broken while the criminal could still feel it. Finally, the horses were made to gallop off, tearing the body into four pieces and dragging the remnants about so that the public could see the dismembered body and contribute to its further mutilation.

Clearly our ancestors were better at punishment, vengeance, and Old Testament justice than we are today. They knew how to impose a penalty worse than mere death. Since most of us seem to still support Old Testament justice and the death penalty, it is curious that we do not support more creative, slow, and painful deaths in which we all could participate at least as observers if not as active participants they way that lynch mobs used to get into the act. We certainly have the organizational skills, technology, and creativity do much better than the hidden, sanitized, lethal injection chamber. We also appear to have the requisite hatred and fury.

I learned about the many creative ways in which the state could put someone to death at my father’s knee. He was a first generation Irish-American who strongly supported the Irish Republican Army. He hated the British and wanted to make sure his children did too. So he would tell us the stories passed on to him of all of the atrocities the British government carried out against the Irish. The point of this was very straight-forward: He wanted us to understand why Irish gorilla warfare against the British, what the British called Irish terrorism, was legitimate, even holy.

I learned why bombing hotels, trains, and public squares was legitimate behavior for the oppressed. I learned about Irish heroes, all, ultimately, put to death by the British. There was a mystique and glory in century after century of justified violence. The more horrible the punishment meted out by the British, the more horrible was the legitimate response.

This childhood indoctrination had its intended effect. I not only understood why it was legitimate for the IRA to be randomly bombing targets across the British Isles but also why it was all right for any downtrodden people to engage in similar acts of violence: the Algerians struggling to gain independence from France; the Palestinians seeking to gain back their homelands from Israel; American underground movements trying to stop the war in Vietnam.

But the lessons of the late twentieth century have changed my mind. The totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe fell without hardly a bullet being fired. The military and police charged with defending the state as well as the politicians who could have ordered the state forces of organized violence to defend the status quo chose not to do so. In South Africa a beleaguered white minority that could have escalated its campaign of violence against those seeking black majority rule also chose not to do so and peacefully accepted majority rule. Even in Israel a sputtering peace process is underway after years of relying primarily upon organized violence.

The optimist would say that humanity does periodically make moral progress. We did end slavery. Open state sponsored torture has been abandoned (or at least hidden). And intentionally painful public executions have been abandoned. In fact, a good part of the world has abandoned the death sentence altogether.

That is what makes the spectacle of the federal government’s efforts to inflame the Oklahoma City bombing jury’s emotions in order to win a death sentence so depressing. Killing Timothy McVeigh will serve no function at all. From a practical point of view, as political terrorists around the world will attest, a death sentence turns the solitary soldier into a martyr and hero and glorifies his accomplishments to others. It has about as much of a deterrent effect as a potential death sentence has on a suicide bomber. Letting him rot silently in jail with strictly limited communication with the outside world would be a far more effective punishment.

But it is not effectiveness that is really at issue here. It is whether we as a people want to be drawn into the moral world of Timothy McVeigh where vengeance and violence are the currency. That is what the death sentence and these proceedings seek to do, inflame our rage and encourage us to want to do to him what he did to his victims, tear him violently limb from limb. This is the atavistic call of our past when human minds puzzled consciously over escalating the atrocities we could commit against those who opposed us. We know we are capable of that. Moral progress consists of stepping away from those primitive urges and refusing to join the criminally insane in their descent into that hell. Hopefully there will be at least one member of the McVeigh jury who will refuse to walk down that ancient bloody path.