Post by CCADP on Aug 31, 2005 5:17:01 GMT -5
Letting death die slowly
Many centuries after the pagan Romans administered capital punishment to a radical named Jesus Christ and two common criminals, enlightened Americans were still hanging thieves and executing subversives.
Until recent times, we dispatched rapists, winners of bar fights, people with childlike IQs and people who were children.
In my lifetime, a black man could be sent to his maker by an all-white jury relying on the word of a white accuser.
That was then, this is now. While treason (the Rosenbergs' undoing) remains a capital offense on paper, anything short of homicide followed by extensive adjudication is unlikely to send a convict to the gallows, chair, gurney or firing squad.
But we still put them to death, and we still refuse to recognize that today's justification very likely won't be around tomorrow.
Now that the rest of the industrialized world has pretty much moved on from state killing, we continue to lop off categories of those who've got it coming, as if you can phase out the snuffing out of human life.
In the wake of Arthur Baird's sentence commutation Monday by Gov. Mitch Daniels, even conservatives were entertaining an exemption from capital punishment for those who suffer from mental illness, as the once-condemned man evidently does.
Not yet a bar to execution, as mental retardation is, mental illness is an issue that is "quickly evolving," said Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma.
In those precincts where Bosma -- and capital punishment -- are popular, evolution is not so, at least in its biological and geological meanings. But if survival of the fittest isn't acceptable, there's room for survival of the least fit.
A person acts as a beast, or is accused of it. But he is too slow, or too young, or too poor or too different to have been responsible or to have been fairly prosecuted. So lock him up and keep him alive lest we regret what we cannot undo.
Though Daniels did not base his decision on Baird's mental condition, the case has catalyzed debate over insanity on Death Row and surely has brought closer the day when we wouldn't dream of executing someone who's not in his right mind.
After that, there'll be another off-limits classification. How about a Jim Lowery, executed in 2001, whose murderous personality was formed in part by the state itself when it stuck him in a mental hospital with adult sexual deviants as a 15-year-old garden-variety delinquent?
We'll feel more and more virtuous as we kill fewer and fewer kinds of convicts. When will it dawn on us that this is not about them but about us?
Capital punishment is not necessary for the protection of society, cannot possibly balance out the evil done by the prisoner and is not justifiable as "closure." It is an anachronistic ritual whereby impotent public officials try to give some measure of satisfaction to those constituents who feel, often for religious reasons, that some people are just too bad for the Earth. We keep recalibrating how bad they must be, as if you can make a science out of playing God.
Three years after Timothy McVeigh was put to death, the FBI revealed new information about possible co-conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombings. When I asked the prosecutor whether it might have been handy to have McVeigh around to ask about that, he replied that there was no doubt about McVeigh's guilt. That's capital punishment reasoning, and it strikes me as crazy.
Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or dan.carpenter@indystar.com.
Many centuries after the pagan Romans administered capital punishment to a radical named Jesus Christ and two common criminals, enlightened Americans were still hanging thieves and executing subversives.
Until recent times, we dispatched rapists, winners of bar fights, people with childlike IQs and people who were children.
In my lifetime, a black man could be sent to his maker by an all-white jury relying on the word of a white accuser.
That was then, this is now. While treason (the Rosenbergs' undoing) remains a capital offense on paper, anything short of homicide followed by extensive adjudication is unlikely to send a convict to the gallows, chair, gurney or firing squad.
But we still put them to death, and we still refuse to recognize that today's justification very likely won't be around tomorrow.
Now that the rest of the industrialized world has pretty much moved on from state killing, we continue to lop off categories of those who've got it coming, as if you can phase out the snuffing out of human life.
In the wake of Arthur Baird's sentence commutation Monday by Gov. Mitch Daniels, even conservatives were entertaining an exemption from capital punishment for those who suffer from mental illness, as the once-condemned man evidently does.
Not yet a bar to execution, as mental retardation is, mental illness is an issue that is "quickly evolving," said Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma.
In those precincts where Bosma -- and capital punishment -- are popular, evolution is not so, at least in its biological and geological meanings. But if survival of the fittest isn't acceptable, there's room for survival of the least fit.
A person acts as a beast, or is accused of it. But he is too slow, or too young, or too poor or too different to have been responsible or to have been fairly prosecuted. So lock him up and keep him alive lest we regret what we cannot undo.
Though Daniels did not base his decision on Baird's mental condition, the case has catalyzed debate over insanity on Death Row and surely has brought closer the day when we wouldn't dream of executing someone who's not in his right mind.
After that, there'll be another off-limits classification. How about a Jim Lowery, executed in 2001, whose murderous personality was formed in part by the state itself when it stuck him in a mental hospital with adult sexual deviants as a 15-year-old garden-variety delinquent?
We'll feel more and more virtuous as we kill fewer and fewer kinds of convicts. When will it dawn on us that this is not about them but about us?
Capital punishment is not necessary for the protection of society, cannot possibly balance out the evil done by the prisoner and is not justifiable as "closure." It is an anachronistic ritual whereby impotent public officials try to give some measure of satisfaction to those constituents who feel, often for religious reasons, that some people are just too bad for the Earth. We keep recalibrating how bad they must be, as if you can make a science out of playing God.
Three years after Timothy McVeigh was put to death, the FBI revealed new information about possible co-conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombings. When I asked the prosecutor whether it might have been handy to have McVeigh around to ask about that, he replied that there was no doubt about McVeigh's guilt. That's capital punishment reasoning, and it strikes me as crazy.
Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or dan.carpenter@indystar.com.