The thirst for revenge:
Callahan, Sidney
OF SEVERAL MINDS Sidney Callahan THE THIRST FOR REVENGE TRYING TO UNDERSTAND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT How can people be in favor of capital punish- ment? Good question. Those of us who are thor-oughly...
...Forget the rowdies who drink and raucously celebrate executions outside the prison walls...
...I'm motivated by the Machiavellian desire to persuade and change attitudes...
...It's not so much an eye for an eye, as it is that certain criminal atrocities against the innocent demand the symbolic blood offering of the criminal's life...
...Huge crowds, including children, attended public executions...
...You sign a petition, but you also send in a notarized statement: If you're murdered, you don't want the law to seek the death penalty in your case...
...As for ridding the world of the impure and morally guilty who violate human norms, this impulse of moral disgust should be suppressed...
...Within living memory we have seen semipublic firing squads, hangings, and guillotinings...
...or stoned, burned, or buried alive...
...Each criminal is born of woman...
...many murderers have come to suffer grievously over the cruelty of their violence and wrongdoing...
...Certainly, bloodshed offered in reparation appears to perform a ritual function for some families of victims...
...I don't know if I' d go so far as to run focus groups, but it does seem important to understand what guides and fuels the convictions of one's opponents...
...Or torn into four parts...
...Could it be that your sympathy with criminals and rebels is related to your rebellion against your authoritarian father, teacher, priest...
...In order to understand what's going on here, I've taken to some hard listening to death-penalty advocates...
...If nothing else, life imprisonment gives hope of a criminal' s repentance...
...Always and everywhere, killing encourages killing...
...More to the point, advocates of capital punishment will admit that some innocent persons have been, and will continue to be, wrongly executed, and yes, black defendants in certain states will be condemned to die in greater numbers than white defendants...
...Choose life...
...Alas, most Catholics, brush off the teachings of the pope and their bishops, and favor the death penalty...
...Sure, some pathetic souls don't know what they do when they commit crimes, but many persons are fully aware and freely choose evil...
...Those in favor of the death penalty aren't moved by arguments that capital punishment actually costs the state more money than life imprisonment, or by the findings that indicate that it doesn't deter murder or violent crime...
...I agree wholeheartedly, but find it difficult to defend the moral intuition fueling this conviction...
...Human compassion for all, even for those twisted evildoers with little empathy, models the kind of behavior we need in order to flourish in human solidarity...
...Those of us who are thor-oughly convinced that capital punishment is morally wrong, find it difficult to understand how we can differ from the majority of our fellow Americans...
...But those criminals who ask to be executed should not be allowed to pursue their death trajectory, any more than those choosing homicide, suicide, euthanasia, or abortion should be allowed to kill at will...
...Not only do such impulses tend to get out of control (usually in a racist direction), but in reality we all do share a common membership in our all-too-fallible species...
...And just how many of these public memorials and executions have taken place in our collective history...
...These facts are considered unfortunate, unavoidable flaws in the system, but still an acceptable price to pay...
...Moreover, the horror of mistakenly executing an innocent person looms as too perilous a moral risk...
...A century or two before that, condemned persons were hung and disemboweled while still conscious...
...Either you feel its fire or you don't...
...Life sentences without parole should protect the community and fully affirm free will and moral responsibility for an agent's actions...
...But to probe motivations in the death-penalty debate opens your own position to the same treatment...
...The signing of a restored death penalty bill in New York was celebrated by Governor George Pataki with parents whose policeman son had been murdered...
...I don't want a person strapped into an electric chair for electrocution or held down for a lethal injection as my memorial...
...Perhaps, too, collectively killing the transgressor makes a community feel less anxious and more in control of the uncertain dangers of fate...
...The difference between the worst of us and the best of us is enormous, but may not be a completely unbridgeable chasm for those with imagination and compassion...
...Admittedly, I'm not pursuing a disinterested intellectual inquiry...
...they and others like them will turn up at any exhibition or blood sport without any inkling of what they're about...
...They've forfeited their rights...
...Listen to the rhetoric of disgust...
...To smash and destroy impurity is an ancient impulse...
...The act of execution, however cruel, gives symbolic witness both to the importance of the victim's life that is lost and to the community's absolute rejection of crime...
...I want to penetrate this different moral universe...
...You imitate the murderer and thereby let his dedication to violence, cruelty, hopelessness, and death's final solution win the day...
...Maybe, but it's unlikely to be the main point of a protest against capital punishment...
...the world will be far better off without them...
...hunt heretics, pull down pagan altars, pulverize idols, or even, a la Cromwell, shatter stained glass windows-let no polluting presence abide in the land...
...Another symbolic undercurrent to be reckoned with in the thirst for the death penalty is the need for purification of the corporate body...
...Surely it can strengthen solidarity-even if in a perverse way...
...Do you have a problem with advocating moral accountability...
...Instead, the debate over the death penalty appears to be a conflict of deep-seated, emotionally saturated moral principles in which utilitarian considerations play a minor role...
...So what kind of people do we want to be...
...For that matter, those against the death penalty don't hold to their convictions because it's financially cheaper or an ineffective deterrent...
...The speeches claimed that making the death penalty legal again was a fitting public memorial to all those unjustly slain...
...or impaled, flogged to death, or thrown into boiling oil...
...or hung up in chains (or on crosses) to rot in torment...
...And can't we make the case for others that it is far better to affirm a victim's life by an affirmative act: to refuse to take a life in retribution, to give another a future...
...In order to help break these cycles, the Mercy Sisters of Brooklyn have mounted a unique campaign against the death penalty...
...I think the basic appeal of the death penalty is that its advocates believe that only by taking a murderer's life can true justice be served...
...By enacting a state-mandated, cold-blooded destruction of a human life you've lost the moral struggle and witness against murder...
...To get what...
...I think the moral force of the position against the death penalty comes from the conviction that it is logically and morally contradictory to kill in order to punish killing...
...These criminals are vile animals, inhuman scum who don't deserve to live...
...Or perhaps your congenital temperamental timidity-read cowardice-makes you unwilling to face the fact that justice must wield a terrible swift sword...
...They should be punished...
...I've concluded that few people decide their position on capital punishment by calculating which rational arguments produce the better case...
...As my father always said (who could be pretty authoritarian at times), "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person be punished...
Vol. 122 • June 1995 • No. 12
