The execution of tyrants and abolition of the death penalty
Walzer, Michael
IS IT POSSIBLE to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants? That is, I think, my own position, but the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, which looked more like savage...
...he cannot simply be killed...
...a tyrant is not an ordinary criminal...
...Here is a ruler fully empowered and actively engaged, right now, in the oppression of his subjects: his prisons are crowded, his torturers are at work, his death squads roam the country, his tax collectors are extortionate...
...In one sense, of course, the trial is a show trial...
...So here is an easier position than the one that I began with: I want to abolish the death penalty, but I don't want to mark the abolition by saving a tyrant...
...I think that the trial makes a crucial difference: his victims never had their day in court...
...Still, the tyrant speaks to the court and to the nation, justifying his conduct in any way he wants to, and his lawyers have an opportunity, at least, to confront and challenge the evidence against him...
...Assassinating a tyrant poses no moral problems...
...But kings were killed because ordinary criminals were also, routinely, being killed...
...He is at war with his subjects—actually, not metaphorically —and killing him is a legitimate act of war...
...Tyrannicide is an honorable killing, and the killers are commonly honored...
...But when we kill this brutal and cruel ruler, aren't we imitating his behavior...
...But now imagine the same tyrant overthrown: he is a prisoner of war...
...And that seems to me a strong argument for both the trial and the execution...
...I don't think that question will ever arise, because tyrants-as-weknowthem have never ruled without the death penalty...
...He is powerless now, locked up, in prison garb—why should we treat him differently than we believe all prisoners should be treated...
...its first commitment is to the preservation of life...
...In France, the Jacobins wanted to kill Louis without a trial on the grounds that he was not a French citizen but rather "an enemy of the people," who continued to be a threat to the people even from his prison...
...If that is right, then the execution of a tyrant should be the last execution...
...He claimed to be physically untouchable...
...The leaders of the Gironde, whom we might think of as the center-left of the French Revolution, insisted that Louis was "citoyen Louis Capet," charged with the crimes of tyranny and treason, who should be brought to trial like any other accused criminal and, if convicted of treason, executed like any other traitor...
...A tyrannical state is always in the killing business, so perhaps a state that is out of the killing business cannot be tyrannical...
...Still, they seem to me contradictory but not incompatible...
...the verdict is known in advance (because the facts of the case are not in dispute...
...The death penalty already existed, and since the point of the trial, in Girondin eyes, was to prove that Louis was indeed a citizen, in no way above the other citizens, it made no sense to exempt him from the penalty...
...But a tyrant has committed crimes not simply against individuals but against the solidarity of the citizens, against the commonwealth, against the very idea of a political community...
...Let the first person saved by abolition be someone like you and me, who has never been all-powerful, who has never been a brutal and cruel ruler of millions...
...he would be brought before a human court...
...I don't believe that the state should kill people convicted of crimes against other people, even of terrible crimes...
...That is, I think, my own position, but the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, which looked more like savage revenge than impartial justice, made it much harder to hold on to both those views...
...Shouldn't he be brought to trial for his crimes and, if convicted, punished in a just and huDISSENT / Spring 2007 7 mane way...
...Kings came back after the defeat of the revolution, despite Louis's execution, as they came back after Charles's execution, despite Cromwell's vow "to cut off the king's head with the crown on it...
...I first wrote about this question with regard to kings like Charles I and Louis XVI, overthrown in the course of a revolution and then brought to trial by their revolutionary opponents...
...In Iraq, Saddam was killed because the death penalty was legally established and widely accepted...
...he would be judged by his peers...
...Would the exile of an unwilling and unrepentant king have ended the monarchy...
...Perhaps not, but killing him also didn't do that...
...Only execution provides the closure that the political community needs...
...And then, after he has been convicted, he is executed, because only execution makes for the definitive end of tyrannical rule...
...That sounds like a perfect ending to the story, but only if Louis accepted it and did not plot his return to the throne and only if his subjects could watch him (or read about him) actually repairing watches...
...Still, kingship-as-they-had-known-it did not come back...
...The execution of the king was the end of divine right monarchy, as exile might not have been (kings had been exiled before...
...8 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...Tom Paine, the itinerant revolutionary who was then a member of the French National Assembly and who opposed the death penalty, proposed that, after his trial, Louis should be exiled to the United States, where he could live the rest of his life as a watchmaker in republican Philadelphia...
...And that seems to raise the stakes...
...Except when it is resisting military attack or helping others who are under attack, the state should not be in the killing business...
...He claimed to be legally inviolable...
...MICHAEL WALZER, co-editor of Dissent, is the author of many books and editor of Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (Cambridge University Press, 1974...
...he would be killed by the state executioner...
...Louis claimed to rule by divine right...
...But now imagine that the death penalty were already abolished: would I still favor the execution of a tyrant...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
