DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: By executing Timoth McVeigh, society is dragged down to his murderous level.
The machinery of death continues to creak along.
Despite evidence that capital punishment has been unfairly administered, that it does not work as a deterrent and the public’s wavering support, we continue to press ahead, using the tools of the state to take lives.
It’s a troubling trend, justified with the kind of verbal gymnastics politicians employ when logic and evidence fail.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, for instance, told The Washington Post this week that capital punishment was "a way to demonstrate the value of life." He said the death penalty keeps victims from taking the law into their own hands and provides closure for victims of heinous crimes.
This, of course, remains in dispute. A quick review of the literature of the death penalty turns up dozens of articles, memoirs and studies that both prove and contradict the attorney general’s claims for closure.
So the list of people on death row across the nation grows. There are 12 people slated to die this month and a total of 3,500 on death row across the country (17 in New Jersey).
Among those on tap is Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to die May 16 by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. McVeigh, who was convicted of killing 168 adults and children in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, will be the first federal prisoner executed since Victor Feguer was hanged for kidnapping in Iowa in 1963.
McVeigh’s case seems simple. He has admitted his guilt and the scope of his crime is so large that it boggles the mind. And so many are willing to set aside their questions about the death penalty, about why more minorities are on death rows than whites, about the innocent men and women who have been convicted and sentenced and some executed because the machinery in question cannot be tuned finely enough to ensure fairness.
"Timothy McVeigh is probably the clearest example you can find," Attorney General Ashcroft told the Post. "I see no reason why you shouldn’t impose the death penalty on Mr. McVeigh because there might be some debate about the penalty generally."
Attorney General Ashcroft minces no words. He does not support a moratorium on the death penalty, as called for by U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). After all, he does work for a president who, as governor of Texas, oversaw more than 150 executions.
"We’ll remain open to arguments and information and make sure that our justice system is fair"" he said. "But when we have people who have committed heinous crimes, and there’s no question about their guilt, I don’t know any reason to suspend the imposition of an appropriate penalty."
But who is to determine when there is "no question"? It is a standard that is impossible to meet and, therefore, guaranteed to exacerbate the system’s current problems.
As Christopher Hitchens points out in The Nation, McVeigh’s admitted guilt does not raise him above the debate.
"It is not possible to be in favor of the death penalty a la carte," he writes. "The state either claims the right to impose this doom or it does not."
He goes on to say that "Subjective considerations about atrocity and wickedness are what the judicial system exists to prevent, or at the very least to contain."
Capital punishment is essentially nothing more than premeditated murder, a revenge killing dressed up as a noble, cleansing act. Simply put, when the state engages in capital punishment, when it sets the date and takes a life, it is engaging in premeditated murder.
French philosopher Albert Camus said in "Reflection on the Guillotine" that the death penalty "adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death." He said that the death penalty is "the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."
To hand the state the gun and ask it to pull the trigger may make us feel safer, may create the illusion that we are sending a message that heinous, vicious acts will not be tolerated.
But in doing so, we, as a society, are dragged down to the level of the Timothy McVeighs of the world.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press, both Packet Publications.