Feb. 15
USA:
The death penalty reconsidered
The recent execution of Crips co-founder and murderer Stanley "Tookie"
Williams reminded me of a drizzly Friday night last winter in Corpus
Christi, Texas, when Sister Helen Prejean addressed a modest crowd at a
local church about her opposition to the death penalty.
For 2 hours, Prejean described her path from a protected childhood to a
quiet life of prayer to her role as one of the country's most active
opponents of capital punishment. Eventually she wrote "Dead Man
Walking,"the book that inspired the movie.
We assumed that she would be preaching to the choir, and for the most
part, she was. It wasn't hard to sense sympathy for her story among the
sort of people who would show up at a church on an inclement winter
evening to hear a lecture on capital punishment.
But as soon as she finished speaking and invited questions, a young woman
sitting in the row directly behind us stood up and faced the audience. She
displayed a framed photograph of another young woman, her sister, she
said, who had been one of at least 5 victims of a serial killer in Baton
Rouge.
She described the murder in extensive and gruesome detail, a slow death
that included torture and inexplicable brutality. The killer is still on
death row, but he continues to threaten and intimidate the victims'
families, she said, and she will never feel safe until he is dead. When
she finished, her hands were shaking, but her voice was steady.
Her stunning testimony was an uncomfortable jolt to the convictions
against the death penalty that many in the audience had undoubtedly been
developing or reinforcing over the past 2 hours.
Of course, Prejean's arguments are good ones: the death penalty doesn't
deter crime, we've never found a way to administer it without regard to
race or social class, and it's inevitable that we'll occasionally execute
innocent people. But in the face of the story told by the victim's sister
even the most avid opponent of capital punishment must sometimes wonder:
Don't some people just deserve to die? Probably. Occasionally my students
will write about the death penalty, and many of them aren't shy about
invoking the Old Testament's "an eye for an eye."
They argue that those who rape, torture, and murder deserve not only to
die, but also to suffer the same sort of brutal tortures that they
committed against their victims.
They have a point. Fortunately, one of the great triumphs of our
Constitution is that it outlaws the cruel punishments that were common in
the 18th century. We take the enlightened view that extreme punishments
like drawing and quartering or burning at the stake, however well deserved
they may be, have dehumanizing effects that violate our sense of what a
civilized society should be. Therefore, we remain frustrated in our
attempt to set things truly right again after brutal murders like the one
we heard described. But it's the price we pay to be who we are.
So if we take the emotion and Old Testament justice out of the picture,
Prejean's arguments are reasonably convincing. But if we don't execute
someone like Williams, what do we do with him? To oppose the death penalty
isn't necessarily to be soft on crime. Many prisoners in our penal system
should never be released, either because they are still dangerous or
because they haven't been punished sufficiently. Williams was a bad man,
and he probably deserved never to be free again.
On the other hand, buried somewhere in our penology is the notion of
rehabilitation. Ordinarily we're more successful with punishment, but
rehabilitation is still a reasonable secondary goal. If we were better at
rehabilitation, prisoners - even the lifers like Williams - would be
easier to control and could serve as excellent examples for other
prisoners of the idea that lives can be turned from crime to productivity,
whether on the inside or outside. And successfully rehabilitated prisoners
might serve as role models who help prevent youngsters from pursuing a
life of crime.
Now that I think of it, Williams was probably an excellent example of a
rare successful rehabilitation, someone who appears to have worked hard to
dissuade teenagers from following his misguided path. In fact, we could
probably point to Williams with considerable pride as a fine example of
what successful penal rehabilitation could look like.
But now, of course, he's dead.
(source: Scripps Howard News Service - John M. Crisp is a professor in the
English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.)
