At Doublethink, Sonny Bunch cites the horrifying murders committed by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky in Cheshire, CT in 2007, and concludes:
As far as I am concerned, those two have made their lives forfeit. I want the state to take vengeance upon them for the evil that they have done. If they were to be drawn and quartered and their remains were scattered to the four corners of the continental United States, you wouldn’t hear peep out of me.
Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty ... I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line.
Left unexamined is the irony that Bunch borrowed his description of the murders in question from a New Yorker article with a clear anti-death-penalty slant--indeed, one that suggests that America's high murder rate and high execution rate are opposite sides of the same coin. ("If the history of murder contains a lesson, [Cesare] Beccaria believed, it was this: 'The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.'")
Bunch does suggest several reasonable caveats about limiting the death penalty to crimes that are the most egregious and where guilt is the most certain, though I fear they are politically impractical: This is one case where the slope appears to be slippery.
But what struck me most is the way Bunch uses his moral intuition that Hayes and Komisarjevsky deserve death as a basis for policymaking (i.e., the death penalty), and then immediately cuts the legs out from under his own argument by suggesting that same moral intuition would be unperturbed if the (alleged) murderers were drawn and quartered--a law enforcement policy I think it's safe to assume he does not support.
Bunch adds, "I want the state to wreak vengeance upon [Hayes and Komisarjevsky]. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens." Here, again, he is offering an emotional remedy that I don't think he would actually want to become law. The purpose of the death penalty is not, after all, to cause suffering--quite the contrary, as our gradual shift from hanging to the electric chair to lethal injection attests. Does Bunch think that the state should be empowered to inflict deliberate pain--by torture or beating or less humane forms of execution--in the name of vengeance? Again, I sincerely doubt it.
For what it's worth, I--and, I suspect, many--share Bunch's gut-level response to a considerable degree. Hayes and Komisarjevsky are such monsters that they seem to merit not merely death but something more: a punishment of brutality commensurate to their crimes rather than a quiet, pain-free lethal injection. But believing that these two men deserve a terrible fate and empowering the state to inflict it upon them are two very different things.
Whatever punishment is meted out to Hayes and Komisarjevsky will speak not merely to their characters, but to our own--as the New Yorker article that initially got Bunch's attention suggested. Which is why, however surely the two men deserve death, I don't believe it is our place to grant it to them.
COMMENTS (3)
I remember an opinion piece that I cited for an anti-death-penalty paper I wrote in college. In '88, Dukakis was asked if he'd be opposed to the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, and he meekly repeated that he didn't believe it was a deterrent.
The writer of the piece I cited wrote a what-if of what Dukakis should have said, that being: "Of course I would. Of course I'd want him dead. I'd want to tear the guy apart with my bare hands. But that's the point-the law shouldn't act like an enraged husband."
Bunch clearly didn't write his article with the benefit of any kind of judicial dispassion in mind at all. Or an editor.
I remember an opinion piece that I cited for an anti-death-penalty paper I wrote in college. In '88, Dukakis was asked if he'd be opposed to the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, and he meekly repeated that he didn't believe it was a deterrent.
The writer of the piece I cited wrote a what-if of what Dukakis should have said, that being: "Of course I would. Of course I'd want him dead. I'd want to tear the guy apart with my bare hands. But that's the point-the law shouldn't act like an enraged husband."
Bunch clearly didn't write his article with the benefit of any kind of judicial dispassion in mind at all. Or an editor.
"But believing that these two men deserve a terrible fate and empowering the state to inflict it upon them are two very different things."
I would go one step further. I can see no rational reason that some crimes should not be considered so heinous that the perpetrator by his or her acts delivers their life into the hands of the state, for disposition as the state sees fit.
But then, I would say, in all or very nearly all cases, the state ought to decline to take that person's life, and stay instead to significant or permanent incarceration. We ought to do that, as a state, for at least two good reasons: first, because the institutions of the law are fallible, and execution is irreversible, ... view full comment
"But believing that these two men deserve a terrible fate and empowering the state to inflict it upon them are two very different things."
I would go one step further. I can see no rational reason that some crimes should not be considered so heinous that the perpetrator by his or her acts delivers their life into the hands of the state, for disposition as the state sees fit.
But then, I would say, in all or very nearly all cases, the state ought to decline to take that person's life, and stay instead to significant or permanent incarceration. We ought to do that, as a state, for at least two good reasons: first, because the institutions of the law are fallible, and execution is irreversible, a decent humility demands that we acting as the state, decline the prerogative of execution; and second, because the state having had a convict's life placed in its hands is in a position to grant reasonable mercy, and there are good reasons to believe society, acting through the state, would benefit from the explicit exercise of that mercy.
And I mean this literally. I would have a criminal acknowledge that the life of a person convicted of a heinous crime is JUSTLY forfeit to the state, and beg the mercy of the state, and I would have the judge acknowledge the fallibility of the state, and the benefits of mercy, in staying the hand of the state.
We can do no better than act as humans in these matters, in all our fallibility, and in our capacity for mercy.
Why can't issues like capital punishment and abortion be as facile as the moral convictions of those who reduce them down to Good and Evil? Why do things always have to get so complicated? Why do messy aggravating and mitigating circumstances always have to rear their ugly heads? Why does rational human thought get blindsided over and again by passionaite and unruly emotional and psychological reactions?
The world would just be so much easier to negociate if we didn't have to negociate about things like this at all.
Either/Or.
What could possibly be simpler?
george
Why can't issues like capital punishment and abortion be as facile as the moral convictions of those who reduce them down to Good and Evil? Why do things always have to get so complicated? Why do messy aggravating and mitigating circumstances always have to rear their ugly heads? Why does rational human thought get blindsided over and again by passionaite and unruly emotional and psychological reactions?
The world would just be so much easier to negociate if we didn't have to negociate about things like this at all.
Either/Or.
What could possibly be simpler?
george