Capital Punishment And Warden Duffy
Sachs, David
88 MEN AND 2 WOMEN, by Clinton T. Duffy with Al Hirshberg. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962. "If I could have my last wish," Said the prisoner one day As they led him from the...
...In any case, Darrow did not realize, nor does Duffy, that even if it were known in some cases that individuals deserved to die, institutions of capital punishment would still be far from justified...
...What is more, imagine that moral clarity was achieved of such a kind that a reasonable basis was provided for concluding that if some crimHOLY OF HOLIES " 'Taxmanship—The Fine Art of Filing Income Taxes Without Really Cheating' is the title of the sermon on which Rabbi H. Joseph Simckes will preach at Temple Beth Am, Randolph " — Boston Globe, March 14...
...To mention only two of several problems that would remain: first, who is to do the killing...
...After holding administrative jobs at the prison, he became Warden in 1940...
...very often they are Negroes...
...the mindlessness of the book must, however, be Duffy's fault...
...Perhaps because of his rearing and character, Warden Duffy has been unwilling to disgorge the violence and depth of his half-century intimacy with the state's use of rope and cyanide...
...those whom they slay are especially likely to be poor, young, and male...
...Its author—a jailer who has won wide respect and even love—tells of numerous instances of hanging and gassing at San Quentin in the last several decades...
...A man of conventional and even parochial outlook, he is extraordinary for possessing the courage of his humanity...
...Among the arguments against capital punishment itself that he starts but does not develop, there are three on which I want to comment...
...Those killed by states, the offences for which states kill them, the ways in which they kill them and the time they take about killing them—in every one of these regards, and indeed in every conceivably relevant regard, capital punishment is inequitable...
...Suppose, however, that rational certainty that some criminals deserve to die could be attained...
...Even then, capital punishment would not have been justified...
...over the fact that each year some twelve or fourteen persons —who, quite frankly, both for their own sake and that of the public, are probably better put out of this world —have been hanged...
...Those lines are as close to—and as far from— gallows humor as anything in the book...
...he said that "Intense emotion has been displayed...
...One word more: Science and technology have, at last, made it possible for all men to live in circumstances that are not economically miserable...
...Among other remarkable aspects of these words, there is the ignorance they reveal of an elementary moral fact: that a question of the life or death of any one person suffices for moral seriousness and urgency...
...The joking, pathetic doggerel quoted at the beginning of this review was handed to Duffy by a young convict just before he inhaled the fumes California had allotted him...
...If I could have my last wish," Said the prisoner one day As they led him from the death cell To the chair not far away, "Please grant me this request, sir, Ere you tighten up the strap, Just tell the Warden I would love To hold him on my lap...
...Darrow's remark—that no human being ever knows what another deserves —is absurd, particularly in view of its utter generality...
...From all accounts, the compassion and fearlessness Warden Duffy has shown cannot be exaggerated...
...Since he chose —or was persuaded—to avoid writing the brutally honest history of legal slaying which he, better than any other living American, could have written, it is disappointing that he did not present so much as one sustained argument against capital punishment...
...In 1956, in England, during the House of Lords' debate on hanging, Earl Winterton deplored "the intense illogicality of British moral reasoning...
...Of course it is consistent with upholding capital punishment to regret sincerely its many inequities and even to work toward eliminating them...
...In regard to the conclusion from statistics: Thorstein Sellin and many other authorities have testified that statistics have not yet shown either that capital punishment deters or that it fails to deter...
...inals received their just deserts, they would not merely die, they would be put to death...
...he married a guard's daughter...
...Indeed, this consideration alone should be enough to persuade all those who are now sure that some criminals deserve to be put to death, that institutions of capital punishment are unjustifiable...
...there are moments when the burden and suffering are rendered cutely...
...In this universal crisis of promise and terror, when finally war is no longer the health of the state, should there be continued, agitated concern for the tiny fraction of human victims of capital punishment...
...Thirdly, Duffy rightly stresses the possibility—it is known to have actually occurred a number of times this cen tury—of judicial killing of the wrong man...
...For years he has been California's leading advocate of the abolition of judicial slaying...
...Secondly, he approvingly cites a remark of Clarence Darrow's to the effect that no one can ever know what someone else deserves...
...in the case of capital punishment, irrevocable error, never to be compensated...
...88 Men and 2 Women is a journal...
...Warden Duffy's book gives a rough but adequate picture of the inequities involved in capital punishment...
...he was raised and educated there...
...Secondly, there is always—always—the possibility of judicial error...
...Could we require of anyone that he perform the state's judicial killing...
...This would be so even if no inequities whatever attached to them...
...Warden Duffy's book, and this is probably its chief merit, conveys a sense of the difficulty of answering this question...
...istic chronicle of the execution chambers of the sovereign state of California...
...at most, statistical studies strongly suggest that capital punishment is not a powerful deterrent...
...Paradoxically, if such an effort were to succeed, the consequence—especially of furnishing equal resources to all defendants and of achieving non-discrimination in verdicts—would be that no one or next to no one would ever be judicially killed...
...First, Duffy alleges that statistics have established that capital punishment is not a successful deterrent...
...Notably missing from the large literature on capital punishment—and no ethical philosopher has begun to cope with the task—is a careful examination of the moral intuitions of civilized, disinterested and humane persons about what people who commit grievous crimes deserve...
...88 Men and 2 Women—the persons whose killings Duffy himself administered— often reads like a travesty on Duffy's abiding decency in the midst of the institutional hideousness he supervised...
...The extent to which Warden Duffy was betrayed by his collaborator into merely gossiping about judicial killing is uncertain...
...they have also made it a real possibility that most, if not all, of acquiescent mankind will be killed by its nation-states...
...Should we allow anyone to do it...
...42 states in the Union legally slay...
...he finally left San Quentin in 1952, resigning to accept a post with a correctional authority...
...A prison guard's son, Duffy was born at San Quentin in 1898...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
