As I discovered when I started writing my novel about a death row inmate, it’s not possible to write an apolitical story that involves capital punishment. Either my character was destined to remain unsympathetic, or I was going to make my readers sympathize with a murderer. I chose the latter and in making my protagonist sympathetic, I found I’d inadvertently crafted an argument against the death penalty. Perhaps there are people who can simultaneously sympathize with a person and nod approvingly at his execution, but I’m not one of them. Yes, he’s crass and mostly without remorse and willing to kill again if it suits his purposes, but he is still human. Painfully human. Capable of being hurt. Capable of being healed. He’s not a monster, as inconvenient as that is. Many death penalty supporters would like to believe that all murderers are monsters. That would make killing them easier. It would relieve us of our ambivalence and our uncertainty.
Having written that failed-to-be-apolitical novel, I find that the topic of the death penalty catches my eye in the news in a way it never did before. The same is true for my friends and critique group members who read the early drafts. I receive all kinds of emailed links on death penalty stories.
Associated Press photo of Andre Thomas
At the Polunsky Unit in Texas, one of the most notorious death rows in America, an inmate plucked out his right eye and ate it. Under ordinary circumstances, I might cite this story as an example of the degradation of mental health that frequently occurs among segregated death row inmates. One small detail of this news item forces me to file it under another heading: the frequency with which the mentally ill are convicted of capital crimes. You see, this isn’t the first time Andre Thomas has done something like this. In 2004, shortly after he was arrested for killing his wife, his son, and his wife’s infant daughter, he pulled out his other eye, but he did not eat it. At the time, he was declared to be mentally competent to stand trial. Now that he’s blinded himself and eaten his own eye, the Texas DOC is reconsidering its stance on whether he’s sane.
While the US is only fifth in the world for number of executions, Texas leads the pack at home, with 26 in 2007. The other 49 states account for a mere 16 in the same time period. For a while, it seemed like more states were backing away from the death penalty, but in December, after nearly half a century of rational, sane judicial rulings, New Hampshire has its first death row inmate.
Similarly, in little St. Kitts, they’ve performed their first execution–a hanging–in a decade.
Jamaica, which has had a 20-year hiatus from executions, is currently trying to clear the way to begin performing them again. More importantly, they are trying to overthrow the Privy Council’s requirement that anyone convicted in a capital case be executed within five years or have their sentences commuted to life. Essentially, Jamaica would like to go to the double punishment system currently at work in the US.
It doesn’t surprise me. We are in the midst of a global recession, and for myriad reasons, as people run short of cash they also tend to run short of compassion. People in poverty can’t afford mercy and as tycoons and swindlers make off with ill-gotten gains, the little people are desperate for even an ephemeral proof of justice.
Bryn Greenwood 
The jails are clogged with people incarcerated whose parents didn’t love them, whose childhoods had difficulties, who just never learned right from wrong. How then do we decide who is competent and who is not? Should there be a mandatory set of evaluations compelted on each prisoner? Assessing their particular penchant for crime and looking at the possibilities for successful rehabilitation?
The death penalty was put into place and has never really worked. How can it when the court system that is supposed to support it has faltered so? The whole system is broke and failing miserably. Where are the human rights activists in getting the system to work properly? Where are the people upset over rights violations? Oh, right. They are all watching the latest episodes of Big Love and eating chips in front of the TV…
Sigh…
I agree, the whole system is broken – all the more reason for the death penalty to go the way of drowning witches to see if they’ll float. I can’t see how the response to a barbaric crime like murder should be state-sanctioned murder.
I’ve come to think of it as analogous to a plumbing problem. If you’ve got water pouring out from under your sink, turn off the water lines FIRST, then figure out where the problem is. Until we can figure out how to fix a busted system, we need to stop the killing.
I agree with all of this on a purely rational level. My problem comes when I think of how I’d feel if someone killed someone I love (and I knew 100 percent they’d done it). I would want them dead..but I’d want to do it myself. What that says about me I guess I’d rather not examine right now.
I’ve just never been able to get behind the death penalty thing– mostly because how can you always– or even ever– be that sure. Taking someone else’s life sure. You can’t. And then you only have to screw that one up once to see just how screwed up it is to kill people because you think they’ve killed people. Not to mention that it isn’t exactly setting a good example. Don’t kill people! If you do, I’ll have to kill you!
And, of course, there is the issue of it not being effective in any way other than as symbolic revenge. States with the death penalty have higher murder rates, for the most part, than those that don’t, so obviously it isn’t a deterent. It’s expensive (it costs more to process the appeals than it does to house a prisoner for life)… so I guess it’s all about revenge. Of course, we’re in a rather small club of states that execute people… Us. China. Burma. Saudi Arabia….
On Dana’s note, is the death penalty even the right penalty? Is it bad enough, too bad, just right? Who is really to say. Why does one crime warrant it and another doesn’t? Again, the system is broken and needs not only a sink repair, but a whole new set of pipes installed.
I totally get what Dana says – which is why when someone takes revenge into their own hands, I agree that punishment is appropriate, but I’d sure take that under consideration when sentencing.
I think studies who have looked at relatives of murder victims show that the people who recover best from it are not those who see the murderers put to death. For whatever reason, this makes it even harder for them to come to any kind of healing, rather than easier.
I don’t think there’s anything unnatural or wrong with feeling what you do, Dana. It seems to me, though, that part of society’s job is to create systems that don’t adhere to humanity’s baser natures. Which the death penalty sort of fails to do…