Vonnegut was no Christian, preferring to describe himself as a “Christ-worshipping agnostic,” but he dreamed of a world in which the long “chain of death and destruction” is broken. That is why he opposed the death penalty and one of the reasons he despaired of America.
Coming days after the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, for a crime committed when she was a teenager, it is reasonable to ask: Why do we still execute people?
About 20 years ago, the legal scholar Terry Aladjem staged a debate on the death penalty for an undergraduate class at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Expecting to have to work hard to convince students of its merits, Aladjem was shocked to discover that nearly all of them were in favor of capital punishment. The “class erupted,” he recalled. “Those who supported the death penalty vastly outnumbered their opponents. America was not what I thought it was.”
Vengeance was becoming the air we breathe, he observed. Talk shows, television justice, and politics seemed to be concerned with little else. Where liberal thought had banished the criterion of revenge from all considerations of justice, a politics of purity had brought it back. The result was “something absolutist, something profoundly undemocratic,” wrote Aladjem. The president who wants to hunt down terrorists, “dead or alive,” and the angry talk show host “who entertains the views of others only to reinforce his own” were peas in a pod. For Aladjem, the death penalty is at once deeply problematic on its own and a symptom of a wider malaise. He fears that the glee we might feel in the death of a “bad person” will come for us in the end.
“Although no Western nation has completely dispelled the absolutist spirit of the crusades and the religious wars, some have been more successful than others,” he noted. The core of the democratic idea, going back to the critique of the divine right of kings, was “the element of doubt as to the ability of any man or any movement to perceive ultimate truth.” But “the Puritan way of thinking” injected an absolutist strand into American thought: a ferocious moralism eager to send sinners to hell. Fulbright’s essay recalls much of what the founders wrote about the danger of regression to a psychology of vengeance, and the notion that tyranny exists wherever violence is praised.
To shed blood with little or no emotion, to treat a criminal like a sheep or a dog, was to demonstrate how little we have understood about liberty as a principle of life and republicanism as its protection. “An execution in a republic,” he argued, “is like a human sacrifice in religion.” It was a return to a world that should have been left behind.
When the state takes up the sword of vengeance, Beccaria suggests, it forgets its very purpose in life. It falls into the absurdity of trying to prevent murder by committing murder itself. No one could deny that malice and cruelty stalk the gallows. The solemnities of the ritual cannot hide the fact that we are trying to erase a terrible evil with more of the same. And no wonder it fails, observed the Italian. The effect is to cheapen human life and to breed contempt for the law—because it’s hard to love a government that acts in the spirit of “the assassin.”
Advocates of the death penalty speak of justice, closure, and peace for the victims. But by Jefferson’s lights, a public execution is an education in brutality and a reopening of wounds. The legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow argued similarly that to punish murder with death is to “make less serious” the original offense. It is to baptize violence as the way of the world, and to say that what goes around comes around.
Yet Darrow, believed to be the most brilliant and hard-headed attorney of his time, would be dismissed as a snowflake in ours. His language of clemency and kindness would likely be laughed at in an age when a Marine Corps veteran can kill a homeless passenger on the New York subway and walk free of all charges—and even be lauded as a model of civic virtue.
What stems the tide? While Secretary of State Marco Rubio scolds Europe for building “downwards” and sacrificing the greatness of the Western tradition “to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre,” it is worth noting that every European nation except Belarus has abolished capital punishment, and that the nations with whom America shares the practice are those we have been taught to despise for their “cult of death.” We sit behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen among the countries with the highest number of executions per annum.
“We used to think that having a vengeful death penalty sentence is going to be what gave us justice,” Jess Nichol, stepsister of Polly Klass, who was murdered in 1993, told The New York Times. “We’ve discovered that it doesn’t.”
This, I would argue, has to be the future.
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