From The Right - A Capital Case
I read a story on the New York Post website the other day that first broke my heart and then filled me with rage.
The story was about the funeral of a three year old boy named Kyle Smith who was beaten, tortured and killed by his guardians. What was done to this poor child was so horrible that I cannot even bring myself to describe it.
Every time I read one of these stories, I have the same reaction. Not only do I want the perpetrators of these atrocities to die, I want them to die slowly and painfully. In fact, during these fantasies of righteous vengeance, my greatest wish is to be the one allowed to brutally send these disgusting killers off into hell.
My experience has been that most people feel the same way as I do.
What is different for me is that I have never been able to reconcile this desire for vengeance with my lifelong intellectual opposition to the death penalty.
Since I am Catholic and pro-life, liberals generally tend to respond to my conflicted position on the death penalty with some form of the inanity, “Well, at least you’re consistent.” It is ridiculous to compare the innocent life of a child to an adult who has committed terrible evil. Those who do, take the ignorance of moral relativism to a new low.
Nor does my religion require me to oppose the death penalty, despite what many may think. The canon law of the Catholic Church allows Catholics to support the imposition of the death penalty in the case of heinous crimes. So, while the U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops and even our Holy Father may oppose the death penalty, it is left to each individual Catholic to decide, within specific guidelines, whether or not to support the death penalty.
Catholicism has always made a moral distinction between the destruction of innocent life - which is always wrong, and the death penalty, which St. Thomas Aquinas referred to as an “excision of a member, because it became putrid or infectious to the other members.”
No, it is not my faith that it is the source of my doubt, although I cannot deny the influence of Catholic self-examination in my thinking, but an essay I read thirty years ago written in 1957 by Albert Camus entitled “Reflections on the Guillotine.”
In “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Camus makes the argument that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, and Western Civilization is, by its actions if not its rhetoric, ashamed of its use.
The essay illustrates the failure of deterrence by citing “when pickpockets were hung in England, other pickpockets exercised their talents in the crowd surrounding the scaffold where their colleague was being hanged.”
That the death penalty does not deter murder seems to me self-evident and a matter of common sense. Who, but someone who wants to be caught and punished, would commit such vile deeds if they expected to get caught and executed? Criminals don’t think they’ll get caught and their compulsions to evil are so strong that they cannot even think their actions through to their logical consequence and subsequent punishment.
Life in prison, without the possibility of parole, deters anyone who can be deterred.
If we truly believed in the deterrent power of the death penalty, then we would demand that all executions be televised and that all of our children watch. For if deterrence is to be wholly believed, we would be well on our way to eliminating murder.
But, we don’t do that. We hide our executions behind prison walls and leave it to a faceless nameless bureaucracy to kill for us with no cameras allowed. Like dirty pictures hidden in a drawer, we hide our executions from our children because on some level we know that they represent one thing and one thing only - vengeance.
Add to these arguments, the modern realization that after DNA analysis, hundreds of death row inmates were innocent, and you have a compelling argument against the death penalty.
I am not trying to convince anyone to be either for or against the death penalty.
My entire purpose in writing this column is to explore the issue and admit my own doubt.
If I were a politician, I could not write this column. In modern American politics, to admit doubt about any issue is to invite attack from both the left and the right, and our country is the poorer for our lack of real debate on the major issues of our time.
The burden for conservatives is that our ideology demands we place reason above emotion. What works is supposed to be more important than what feels good.
So, as a conservative, if I cannot refute the arguments in “Reflections on The Guillotine,” even after thirty years of trying, then I must acknowledge their validity.
I have very little empathy for liberals who promote failed policies because they “feel good,” but what little empathy I do have comes from my conflicted death penalty stance.
For thirty years, I have placed the arguments against the death penalty - arguments whose validity I cannot deny - on a forgotten shelf in the back of my mind and passively supported the death penalty.
It is not within me to forswear vengeance when confronted with the reality of a tortured and murdered child, and I don’t know whether that makes me a strong man or a weak one. I do know that when I experience the thirst for vengeance, I am as far away from God as I have ever been.
The day I read that horrible story, I prayed for the soul of three year old Kyle Smith, then, I got up, went into the room where my nine year old son was playing, hugged him tightly to me and told him I loved him.
I didn’t know what else to do -- and maybe I never will.
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