Megan McArdle at The Atlantic points out the macabre reaction of the governor of Florida to the Supreme Court decision allowing resumption of the use of lethal injections for death-penalty executions. (Florida Governor Charlie Crist said he was “grateful that the Supreme Court rendered the decision that they did,” according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.)

McArdle quotes at length from Camu’s The Plague, in a passage that has Tarrou relating his memories of seeing his father prosecute a capital case; focusing on the pathetic humanity of the criminal and the cold-blooded thirst for vengeance his father showed:

…his mouth spewed out long, turgid phrases like an endless stream of snakes. I realized he was clamoring for the prisoner’s death, telling the jury that they owed it to society to find him guilty; he went so far as to demand that the man should have his head cut off. Not exactly in those words, I admit. ‘He must pay the supreme penalty,’ was the formula. But the difference, really, was slight, and the result the same. He had the head he asked for. Only of course it wasn’t he who did the actual job.

“Whether you are for or against the death penalty, an execution is a dire act. It seems odd to express gratitude that you can get back to it as quickly as possible,” McArdle writes.

The Supreme Court case dealt with the possibility that those executed with lethal injections might suffer serious pain immediately prior to their exit from this world (a majority of the judges felt the risk of intense suffering by the condemned was too small to justify keeping them from their graves). The reasoning behind the challenge was that it is wrong to subject convicted killers to an “inhumane” death. Which is understandable, but I think misguided.

If you’re against the death penalty, then be against the death penalty and fight to end it (as we have in Canada). But if there is to be a death penalty, I don’t think anyone’s interests are served by devising more palatable methods of distancing ourselves from what it is. A more humane death delivered quietly and painlessly is no win-win compromise for opponents and advocates of state-sponsored revenge. It is instead the introduction of banality into what is and should be a brutal process, which by now we should all know is bad.

People worry that we’re becoming desensitized to violence, but I often worry about the opposite. We conduct wars in which the classes making the decisions often know no one who has volunteered to fight, and those wars take place in distant countries and appear as nifty graphics and grainy video footage on TV screens. At least part of the explanation for the tremendous shock of September 11th has to be that it was the situation of war coming to North America for the first time in a very long time, and the reality of what explosions and mass death feel like when they happen suddenly at the end of your street rather than at the other end of the world created a scar in the North American psyche that has yet to heal even seven years on. Whereas tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, while lamented and regretted in most quarters, don’t have the same urgent psychological power.

Distance makes the horrific into the ho-hum, and so does a decision tree that removes the person dictating the action from the consequences of that action. This is all there in Marxism (as I think Mailer noted in the essay I’ll get into in a moment): alienation stems from separating action from consequence by, for example, removing a worker from the product of his (or her) labours.

This is what we do with capital punishment. Any sensible person knows that it is useless as a deterrent, since murderers don’t plan to get caught. Capital punishment is about retribution, plain and simple, and that’s the undercurrent of the talk of delivering justice to the victims that surrounds Crist’s reception to this Supreme Court decision and the subtext of the tough-on-crime rhetoric that leads to the enstatement of the death penalty in the first place. So why do we give a crap if the murderer who deserves to be killed has a comfortable time of it?

The chain that leads to the death of a convicted criminal goes something like this: some plurality of voters elect candidates who, among unrelated policies on economics, foreign affairs, education and a number of other things, support eye-for-an-eye justice in some cases. Those elected politicians enact legislation allowing the courts to execute criminals under certain proscribed conditions. A prosecutor, suspecting that the crime a suspect is accused of matches up with that legal framework, puts forward a case. A jury hears evidence and delivers a verdict of guilt or innocence. A judge (or the same jury) looks at the facts of the case to see what punishment the law calls for and issues a sentence. A whole army of corrections officials hold a convict until his ultimate sentence can be delivered. A civil servant whose job it is to carry out orders from judges and juries administers an injection. Death ensues, as quietly as we can arrange. It appears sterile and medical and humane. And at no point along the way does anyone responsible for making a decision have to carry out its consequences.

I can’t put my hands on my copy of Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers, but in it he outlines what I think is a sensible (if harsh sounding) position on execution. It’s been a long, long time since I read Mailer’s take, but the version that has evolved into my own cocktail party variation over the years goes something like this: I’m generally opposed to the death penalty, but could be convinced to support it on the condition that a) the foreman of the jury that convicts would need to administer the punishment personally, b) the method of execution would be strangulation with the executioner’s bare hands, c) the executioner would be required to stare directly into the eyes of the condemned as they administered the punishment, and d) the identity of the executioner would be public information, and their photo and contact information would be made available to the press.

This is brutal, and it’s meant to be, but it isn’t really a devil’s advocate position. Provided that a jury could always opt for life in prison as an alternative punishment, I’d be comfortable knowing that prisoners might be put to death if the randomly selected, disinterested member of the jury pool who assessed their crimes and decided execution was an appropriate punishment would literally be required to live with blood on their hands and the vision of the life draining from another human being’s body seared into their memory.

People always say, “then we’d never have any executions,” which may be precisely the point. But I’m not so sure. I think I could send Paul Bernardo or Osama Bin Laden or Joseph Fritzl to the great beyond with my bare hands and still sleep comfortably tonight. I don’t know how much it would haunt me, of course, because I’ve never killed anyone. But if I think they deserve to die (and I think I do, in those cases) I think I ought to be prepared to do the killing. And anyone who couldn’t live with that on his or her conscience really has no business supporting capital punishment. Hiring a professional killer to do your work for you does nothing to relieve you of guilt. Nor does making the process quieter and more technical. Nor collectivizing the responsibility.

We’d look at Governor Crist differently if his gratitude at the opportunity to start signing death warrants were expressed as an impatience to start strangling motherfuckers. People would, I think, suspect his motives and find his thirst for blood unsettling even more than McArdle already does. But I might respect him more for it, if only because I’d believe he’d feel accountable for the actions he’s authorizing.

(What does this have to do with acting like a man? my wife asks. This: any definition of being a man has to include facing the consequences of your actions and accepting responsibility for your decisions whether you’d like to make them or not. Most of the loudest, crankiest voices trying to justify they death penalty are male, and they generally do so in some strutting, macho way that implies those opposed to state-sanctioned revenge killings are soft wimps (a certain hanging governor or two come to mind). Plus then you have the whole Mailer thing, so, you know.)

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Posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 10:56 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.