PROTECTING THE GUILTY John Salvi III, a killer, still deserved better than he got
Pope, Stephen J
PROTECTING THE GUILTY Did John Salvi deserve his fate? Stephen J. Pope On December 30, 1994, John Salvi III went on a murderous rampage at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics that left...
...After his incarceration he was seen only once by a psychiatrist whose examination was described as "brief and unsatisfactory...
...Second, the ethic of reciprocity-do to others as they do to you-can have serious disintegrative social effects...
...It is why, for instance, we give drug dealers the right to a fair trial even if they have no respect for justice...
...For one thing, it is based on a misunderstanding of "good will" as "sympathetic" or "approving of...
...We do not admire, approve, or esteem Salvi's actions, attitudes, or beliefs, but even he was our brother...
...If this is true, there is a way in which Salvi's mental status-an issue which loomed large during his trial-ought to have been irrelevant to our good will...
...On March 18,1996, he was convicted of the murders and given two life sentences...
...This is obviously the case for people who are mentally incompetent...
...How can nontreatment be justified on the basis of a self-assessment by a man whom state psychiatrists had previously and publicly described as mentally ill...
...Furthermore, corrections officials attempted to avoid responsibility for not referring him to Bridgewater on the grounds that Salvi himself denied that he was mentally ill...
...We believe that human beings are made in the image of God (Gen...
...But does the concern and respect that we owe to others ultimately depend upon their personal moral goodness...
...The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich...
...Prison officials "failed to notice that Salvi's mental state was deteriorating, communicate among each other about his condition, or accept an offer from his lawyers that they consult with private psychiatrists who were aware of his problems" (Boston Globe, February 13,1997...
...We can see in our society an increasingly harsh and "get tough" attitude to crime that includes the return of chain gangs, the adoption of stun belts, and an increase in capital punishment...
...In this view, Salvi's horrendous murder of Lowney and Nichols should be responded to in kind...
...A grimmer scene would be hard to imagine...
...Opposed to this view is the fundamental Christian belief that we are saved by gratuitous divine love...
...This structure of legal protections reveals an underlying sense of obligation to the criminal as a human being...
...Good will for Salvi thus need not be confused with some kind of softhearted unconditional love that ignores the evil that he had done...
...Through its penal institutions, society continues to express a moral will toward even its most dangerous aggressors...
...Corrections officials say that Salvi's family never told them he was in danger of suicide (this claim seems to be disputed), but the officials themselves, not Salvi's family, have the training, expertise, and authority to make this determination...
...Third, we have to think more carefully about the grounds of good will: Are we to care about others because they have earned it or simply because they are human beings...
...Good will is fundamentally a unilateral attitude of respect for others in virtue of their humanity...
...We also affirm that this love holds steady regardless of our ignorance and sin...
...Because what is willed has to be shaped in accordance with what is right, good will for the criminal cannot obstruct justice for his victims and society...
...we would all say, "no," of course not...
...Such practices "result in a hardening of criminal offenders"-their increased corruption and deformation, not their correction and reformation...
...Contempt generates ever more contempt, degradation of one leads to degradation of another, violence by one person inspires violence in the victim...
...Some thought he should get the death penalty...
...We can "respect" them in the sense that we can and must honor the humanity of those who act inhumanely...
...This "unilateral" feature of morality is solidly established in our moral practices...
...1:26) and that, not only does God love all people, "God is love" (1 John 4:16...
...Our first response to this question might be to say that we ought to respect his human rights, the basic claims of justice granted even to those who properly lose their civil rights due to incarceration...
...and levels of funding for mental-health services for prisoners (estimates are that 10 to 25 percent of the prison population suffer from some form of serious mental illness...
...A good will desires that the criminal comes to a realization of the terrible evil he has done, seeks a conversion of heart, establishes a more authentic humanity, learns to care for others, and understands the need for forgiveness and reparation (if it can be attained...
...His body lay under the bunk, a cotton gag stuffed in his mouth, a plastic trash-can liner tied around his head with his shoelaces, and his hands and feet bound by crude slipknots...
...Perhaps this is why describing Salvi as a paranoid schizophrenic carries so much weight-if so, perhaps it elevates the level of moral claim he had on us...
...Policy matters in this domain ultimately refer to the worth of persons, and how we affirm the worth of persons is the litmus test for the decency of our society...
...Though this ethic of reciprocity has many defenders, there are sound reasons to question the channeling of good will in this way...
...This vicious cycle was captured succinctly in Gandhi's terse warning that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind...
...Moving in the shadows of the extreme fringe of the anti-abortion movement, Salvi's actions were anything but "prolife...
...It's natural to have a special concern for the well-being of those who are especially good...
...Public servants like corrections officials must represent the best moral lights of our society, not the worst...
...Gratuitous injuries are not condoned, physical security should be provided, punishment may not be "cruel and unusual...
...The twenty-four-year-old apprentice hair stylist had paranoid delusions involving an international Masonic conspiracy against the Catholic church...
...Theologian Karl Rahner once noted that many Catholics are in practice semi-Pelagians...
...The reciprocity ethic is summed up in Sigmund Freud's modified golden rule: "Love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee"-treat other people as they treat us...
...Others have been quietly satisfied with the state's failure to protect his life: an eye for an eye counts, even if Salvi was his own executioner...
...This is the key question and it concerns us all...
...We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother...
...The original "golden rule" requires us to treat others as we would like to be treated...
...Great moral authorities of our own time have expressed this common principle in a wide diversity of settings...
...If we want to live in a decent society where human dignity is respected, we have to respect the dignity of everyone, including people like Salvi...
...We oppose euthanasia because we believe that human beings deserve respect whether or not they are productive members of society...
...Ruling out foul play, the report by the chief medical examiner's office determined that Salvi took his own life by means of asphyxiation...
...I cannot withdraw at least the respect that belongs to him in his quality as a man, even though by his deeds he makes himself unworthy of it...
...Good will in another sense is "unilateral," and simply means willing what is good, proper, right for another...
...But are we supposed to treat morally those who have treated others so immorally, like the killer of Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols...
...By this I mean that even if Salvi was "faking" mental illness (and psychiatrists testifying for the state at the trial acknowledged his mental illness, though the jurors did not acquit by reason of insanity), and even if he knowingly and voluntarily killed his victims in cold blood, he nevertheless ought to have remained the object of our moral concern...
...and why we don't condone Bosnian Muslim atrocities on the grounds that the Bosnian Serbians have done the same or worse...
...We recoil in horror at the Nazi designation of "life unworthy of life...
...Christians, of course, have an even more profound motive for exercising the kind of unilateral good will that is understood by humanistic ethics...
...Is being good, or at least decent, a necessary condition for human concern...
...Salvi's treatment also raises an important moral question about our society at large: What did we as a society owe Salvi the convicted murderer...
...the treatment of the mentally ill within the criminal justice system...
...I would say "no," and for the same reason, that it doesn't depend on achievement or productivity...
...A final review, produced by the University of Massachusetts at the request of the state, concluded that Salvi should have received more attention from Department of Corrections' mental-health professionals...
...John Paul II, reflecting in Evangelium vitae on God's treatment of Cain after the murder of his brother, observed that "not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this...
...Salvi's fate has prompted a barrage of questions...
...Many would say that Salvi deserved nothing but contempt, and certainly not good will...
...Stephen J. Pope is an associate professor in the department of theology at Boston College...
...Stephen J. Pope On December 30, 1994, John Salvi III went on a murderous rampage at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics that left five people wounded and two women-Lee Ann Nichols, thirty-eight, and Shannon Lowney, twenty-five-dead...
...this is why, for example, the world attends to word of Mother Teresa's medical condition...
...Holding people accountable for the evil they have done-when indeed they are genuinely answerable for their conduct-is a way of honoring their humanity, their freedom, their capacity for reasonable action and moral responsibility...
...Christians, then, have the strongest of reasons to extend compassion even to the murderer...
...Far from being at odds, retributive justice, properly exacted, serves the good of the criminal as well as that of his victims and society at large...
...Public institutions, whether we like it or not, are expressions of the will of society...
...Should we, then, respect people who have no respect for the lives of others...
...Immanuel Kant argued in the Metaphysics of Morals: "1 cannot deny all respect even to a vicious man as a man...
...These and other questions lead to broader concerns about procedures for assessing potential suicides (it was the sixth suicide of the year within the Massachusetts prison system...
...Salvi had served eight months of his sentence when on November 19,1996, he was found dead in his cell at the maximum security state prison at Walpole, Massachusetts...
...Some concern particulars: Why was he permitted to have implements that could be used for suicide in a cell where he was isolated twenty-three hours a day...
...I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine...
...Governor William F. Weld's order to expand the investigation into the Salvi case was a step in the right direction, but it was only a remedial effort to address the effects of unconscionable neglect...
...Bilateral" good will means being favorably disposed toward another-as when a saleswoman generates "good will" in her customers...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke in a similar vein about the dignity of the poor: "All life is interrelated...
...why we don't publicly humiliate or execute our prisoners of war even if our enemies do...
...For one thing, good will is usually reciprocal and Salvi's will was anything but good...
...the betterment of the poor enriches the rich...
...You do not have to qualify for this golden rule and it is not abandoned when it is not reciprocated...
...It may run against the grain of human nature to say this, but our fundamental respect for others as human beings should be negated neither by their wickedness nor by their madness...
...Corrections officials pled ignorance, but sometimes ignorance is voluntary and is used to excuse what, in fact, is gross negligence...
...If asked the question: "Does the concern and respect that we owe to others ultimately depend on their accomplishments, their status in society, their productivity...
...Good will is thus not to be confused with mistakenly taking the perpetrator for a victim...
...It needs to be said, of course, that the content of what we will for others might very much depend on what they have done or not done...
...Thus we can have "good will" toward the murderer while at the same time being horrified by his heinous acts...
...We assume that we freely take the first step toward God and that in some sense we earn God's saving love by our good works...
...In his 1990 New Year's address, Vaclav Havel challenged his country to overcome the disintegrative legacy of totalitarianism by embracing the fundamental principle that "every human suffering concerns every other human being...
...Under the Weld administration, state spending for mental-health services at Bridgewater has been cut significantly while funding for prison construction has escalated...
...Looking the other way," especially when it comes to vulnerable people (and people who are aggressive in one context can be highly vulnerable in another), can be a form of complicity...
...This semi-Pelagianism carries with it the dangerous ethical implication that one must earn the right to be a recipient of love, concern, and even respect...
...These methods of deterrence can backfire, however, as the 20,000-member American Correction Association has argued before Congree (see, New York Times, March 11...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 7
