Fair Game

...In the absence of the ideal State, clearly, it is best for the death sentence, that ultimate weapon, not to be in the hand of any institution...

...God knows, we have had enough of that...

...In contrast to an execution, it is an affirmation of the individual's control of his fate...

...The persons in question are in custody, and they have already been caught and convicted and given a stiff sentence and pose no threat...

...What of the cruelty of forcing Gilmore to live all these months on death row while his fate was being swung hither and thither by jurists with grander matters on their minds than one person's body and soul...

...they are motivated by recognition of the lamentable truth that representatives of the State cannot be trusted to restrain themselves...

...Limits are insisted on not simply out of compassion...

...But there's nothing all that unusual, alas, about a hanging or a firing squad or an electric chair or even, may the Evil Eye not spot one, a gas chamber...

...Beyond correction by a prison system that has proved more skilled at corrupting its guards than at correcting its charges...

...A reluctance to fight against Hitler can be construed as acquiescence to murder...

...Every aotion done on the public stage is an example to the public, and murder, even by the State and its assorted representatives in the trappings of law, is really not the sort of example that our society needs...

...We do not need lessons in hurting our fellows...

...Most people will agree that given the needs of society and the frailties of mankind, the State has to be entrusted with the power to inflict severe punishments upon its subjects—but that some punishments should never be imposed...

...I do not wish to oversimplify the matter...

...But what of war...

...The main caution here is to make certain zealous prison administrators do not impose the pills upon inmates who may not desire them that much...

...This addition, however, does no great service for the prisoners around the land now waiting to learn whether death is sufficiently cruel so that they may be spared it under the law...

...Suicide can be a more positive act than clinging to life...

...the State Although opponents of capital punishment must contort the meaning of words in order to suit the language of the law, their more honest objection to this punishment, I am sure, arises out of a deep-lying mistrust of authority when the stakes are life and death, and I am wholeheartedly with them...

...no State has a good record when it comes to killing...

...Here, the State may reply, as it has for so many centuries, that if the cause be "just," then refusal to kill for it may be the more destructive action...

...Gilmore vs...

...At the same time, to try to force life upon someone who is determined to die is a form of despotism, as well as impractical...

...Camus phrased it this way in his "Reflections on the Guillotine": ". . . our society must now defend herself not so much against the individual as against the State . . . Justice and expediency command the law to protect the individual against a State given over to the follies of sectarianism and of pride...

...No, as Camus knew, an execution is a form of retribution...

...Why should the State be permitted to condemn its citizens to death at the hands of others...

...It is a pity he did not succeed, for our sake as well as his own peace of mind...

...I wish their cause well, yet it does seem to me presumptuous to contend that death will not come as a belated kindness to Gilmore?not to mention all those more repressed murderers who, the psychoanalysts tell us, are in their subtle ways asking to be killed...

...And if, like Gilmore, they crave death and do not appear to be maniacs, let them be provided with the pills to do the job...

...Suppose that Gilmore were a deeply religious fellow, his prayers directed at salvation in the hereafter, might it not be an infringement of his constitutional rights as well as a touch blasphemous to reject his plea to join his Maker...

...In the ongoing debate, however, that too is an aside...

...It simply cannot be healthy for the citizenry, under the sanction of law and via the arm of authority, to become parties to murder...

...It was in an effort to narrow our notions of cruel that the Founders, in Article VIII of the Bill of Rights, added the word "unusual...

...Society vs...

...and those who refuse to go out and kill or be killed, or even to participate indirectly in periodic slaughter, can make a powerful case...

...God's earthquakes are mere tremors compared to nuclear explosions...

...Nor has it ever been satisfactorily demonstrated that shooting electricity through one murderer deters others with similar inclinations...

...Gary Gilmore is a special case...

...no State can be trusted to kill only the right sort of people for the right sort of reasons...

...Where flogging is permitted, men will be flogged...

...Shedding blood, even vicariously, can only breed sinister tastes...

...But this kind of argument is not available to the State when the issue is capital punishment...

...Where is the State that has exercised its trust so faithfully that it has earned the right to infliot the final punishment...

...If Gilmore were to be garrotted or skinned alive or boiled in oil or quartered, well that would be unusual these days in this place, and may have seemed so even in the days of the Founders...

...If any convicted murderer has earned execution, it is Gary Gil-more, and by asking for it he has complicated matters for those who would like to see capital punishment abolished...

...Even if it were not an invitation to irreparable injustice, the death penalty would still be a claim to the most terrible and pernicious power, the State taking on the role of God Almighty...

...They do not impinge directly on capital punishment...

...As long as we insist on executing Gary Gilmore, those folks who volunteered to serve on his firing squad must be rated useful citizens and commended—yet are they the models we want for our children...

...No State has a good character...

...And it is something more as well...

...Let them be locked up for their natural lives if that is the only way to keep them from harming others...

...It hardens the spiritual arteries of all who accept it...

...It should be left exclusively to the individual who is to die...

...But for our purposes here we may skirt the disagreeable alternatives posed by the imponderables of when life begins and when it can be said to have ended...

...Most of the people I know consider being called to jury duty an excruciating experience...

...But pride and sectarianism are what create and sustain States and raise them to greatness in the grand international game...

...Not at all...

...In exploring the connections among life, death and the State, we may easily find ourselves in endless, inconclusive disputes over euthanasia, over the stage at which a fetus must be considered a human being and the stage at which an organism kept pumping by machines should cease being so considered...

...Society Do not take this as a mercy plea for murderers...

...It is to Gary Gilmore's credit that he tried to kill himself, and not make us take his blood on our hands...

...In the essay Camus appeared to be suggesting that the contemporary State, particularly the French variety, was somehow worse than States past when it came to the treatment of citizens...

...No, as cruelty and unusualness go in the world, there is nothing specially cruel or unusual about executing a convicted murderer, even one who is not pleading for execution...

...Who, in an honest moment, would really contend that the death sentence, as it has in recent decades been carried out by our states, is "unusual...

...Well, such mullings may be enjoyable, but they cannot bear one any distance...

...It is a form of spiritual instruction...

...As for Gary Gilmore's reiterated desire to end his own life, no doubt an argument can be advanced that no one who chooses death can be said to be in a mind right enough for the choice to be taken seriously...

...If cruelty were generally to be defined through the body of the subject rather than the eye of the beholder, what punishment could be devised that would meet the Constitution's test...

...On so fundamental an issue, isn't it an affrontery to refuse to take a man at his word...

...Working through the courts as they must, these good citizens have perforce found themselves obliged not only to argue that the death penalty is "cruel," but to treat Gilmore like a child: "No, dear, you can't have death because it isn't good for you...

...that if the State were not sectarian and not proud, it would be a fit executioner...

...And, by the accepted if eccentric criteria of our courts, sane...

...Let the State begin and abolish the death penalty' ought to be our rallying cry today...