Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought, wrote the novelist and humorist Kurt Vonnegut. One was that “energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff.” That was Einstein. The other was that “revenge is a bad idea.” That was Jesus. We are so wired for vengeance, so trained to retaliate, mused Vonnegut, Jesus must be classed among the revolutionaries.
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.
News that the execution of former Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 U.S. soldiers in 2009, will not be livestreamed in December has been well received, but reports that a narrow majority of Americans approve of both the sentence and the method of death-by-firing-squad have excited little comment.
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?
Pope Leo has protested the cruelty of a practice that denies “the possibility of redemption,” but this is a political as well as a religious question. A culture of vengeance tears at the fabric of democracy.
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.”
Aladjem went on to write a book about vengeance and how our appetite for violent punishment throws us back into a state of nature, fanning the dangerous passions that are supposed to be cooled and contained by the social contract.
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.
J. William Fulbright, the Senator for Arkansas and a longtime critic of the Vietnam War, made the same point in an essay on “The American Character” after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Fulbright was appalled by the widespread expressions of sympathy for Jack Ruby, the man who shot Kennedy’s alleged assassin live on television, thus depriving Lee Harvey Oswald of one of the basic rights of a civilized society: “the right to a fair trial under established procedures of law.” This hunger for vengeance could not be dismissed as a normal feature of a healthy society. It spoke to an intolerance and bloodlust that was one part Salem, hanging witches on the strength of gossip, and one part frontier, hanging horse-thieves from trees. It was the Puritan spirit, immortalized in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, that most troubled Fulbright.
“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.
Raised on an 18th-century version of the Puritanism that distressed Fulbright, Benjamin Rush had an epiphany one day in 1787, when he chatted with a group of convicts cleaning the streets in Philadelphia. With their shaven heads and degrading uniforms, the men made a sorry spectacle as they begged him for a penny. Offering them a draught of beer instead, Rush was stunned by their humor and humanity as he listened to their stories. The strange thought began to dawn that criminals were humans, after all, and that no heart is “wholly corrupted.” To terminate such a life, or confine it to perpetual misery, was a crime against human nature, Rush wrote. America had won its independence from Britain, but true freedom—freedom from cruelty and arbitrary violence—was still distant, as long as Americans persisted in brutal punishments.
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.
Rush was not alone. Integral to early American patriotism was the notion of a rational people, liberated from the “bloody code” of medieval law. A critical influence on Rush, Jefferson, and several of their contemporaries was the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, whose Essay on Crimes and Punishments codified this notion of the death penalty as sanctified barbarism. It had taken centuries for societies to evolve from blood feuds and trial by combat to a system of tangible laws, in which the state serves as “the cool moderator of the passions of individuals.”
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.”
This was the idea that inspired Jefferson, as he set about reforming Virginia’s penal code, confining capital punishment to murder and treason, and drastically reducing the number of physical punishments on the books. “Let mercy be the character of the law-giver,” he wrote. But let the law be as certain as gravity. Jefferson denied that in disputing “the sanguinary hue of our penal laws” he was being soft on crime or naïvely optimistic about human nature. For laws to be effective, they had to be reasonable, proportionate, and mild. One of his models was William Penn, who showed that the “principles of peace, of reason and right” can hold their own in the realm of government. Although it’s unfortunate that he did not practice what he preached, Jefferson’s remarks on the corrosive effects of slavery reflected his notion that violence is a contagion and the law must limit its spread. “[F]or man is an imitative animal,” he wrote, and imitation is the seed of all education. When the child sees the parent lashing out, he “catches the lineaments of wrath.” Thus “nursed” and trained in tyranny, a tyrant is what he becomes.
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.
Like Vonnegut, Darrow saw the death penalty as institutionalized vengeance, and he pleaded for an attitude of “mercy” to break the spell. “If our state is not kinder, more human, more considerate, more intelligent than the mad act of these two sick boys,” he said, as he attempted to spare two teenage killers a sentence of death in 1924, “then I’m sorry that I’ve lived so long.” But “I know the future is on my side.”
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.
We all share the disease. President Bill Clinton’s decision to interrupt his presidential campaign to deny clemency for a brain-damaged black man on death row, in 1992, captures the true story of the past 30 years: convergence. “The real Bill Clinton is not for capital punishment,” said Illinois congressman Abner Mikva. He just thought it was “a political necessity.” Mikva saw the same dynamic playing out with handguns, lamenting a shift, in his lifetime, from serious talk of prohibition to the modern politician’s terror of uttering a word against the deadly weapons.
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.
My hope is that more states will follow California’s lead in declaring state-sanctioned killing incompatible with “justice and human decency,” as Governor Gavin Newsom wrote last week, when he commuted the sentences of the state’s 548 death row inmates. Although some of the relatives of the victims expressed their fury at Newsom’s decision, one welcomed it in terms that would have pleased Benjamin Rush.
“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.”
Having at first thought that the killer deserved death, Ms. Nichol came to believe that healing required a degree of mercy. “I want to live in a world where I am well, and not haunted by the hungry ghost of vengeance,” she said.
This, I would argue, has to be the future.
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