'If a tree falls on a philosopher in the forest and nobody hears, is the philosopher really dead?" So runs the caption of a New Yorker cartoon on the door of a colleague who teaches philosophy. The accompanying drawing leaves no doubt as to the answer. Timothy McVeigh is no philosopher, and his lethal injection will kill him more surely than the largest tree. Still Americans seem anxious about it. In a grisly application of the principle that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done, Attorney-General John Ashcroft has decreed that McVeigh's execution will be televised. Only on a specialty channel, to be sure, one limited to surviving victims of his bombing and relatives of those who died. Even so, Mr. Ashcroft should have decided against this spectacle.
"Spectacle" might seem an exaggeration. A lethal injection, after all, is nothing like the climax of Gladiator. It is not only the most "humane" method of homicide, but for that very reason the one that offers the least to spectators. There is no death agony to watch. The murderer's descent to hell is painless (at least at this end). Returning to Gladiator, try to imagine the monstrous Commodus being so dispatched, at the hands not of the noble soldier Maximus but an anonymous team of white coats who had studied killing at community college. Box office receipts would have tumbled. The peculiar horror of this kind of exit lies in its clinical character. It is reminiscent of Nazi medicine; execution conducted as euthanasia.
Just as McVeigh will be killed humanely, so Mr. Ashcroft's reasons for authorizing its broadcast are humanitarian ones. Victims are people too; they too have "needs" to which society must cater. Victims' rights are the rage in the United States just now; what the victim wants, the victim gets. He or she gets to make a statement at the sentencing phase of the trial to incite the jury against the offender, and now the victims of Timothy McVeigh will all get to see him die. Mr. Ashcroft's solicitude toward them is "compassionate conservatism" at its best. It's also quite misplaced.
"It just pleases me no end," victim Dan McKinney has been quoted as saying. "I'm very thankful. I don't know what we would have done if we didn't get to see it." Mr. McKinney's wife died in the blast; his vengefulness is surely understandable. Still, there is an answer to the question of what he would have done if he hadn't gotten to view the execution. He would have heard about it on television and read about it in the newspaper. He would have trusted the pronouncement of the doctor on the scene that McVeigh was dead once and for all. And, heeding the advice of the brigade of grief counsellors assigned to his case, he would have achieved "closure" and "moved on."
The survivors who favour this grim telecast are reported to welcome it as an occasion for a reunion where they will demonstrate their support for one another. Well, isn't that special! Everyone else has a support group, so we shouldn't begrudge these poor people one, but can't they please meet like the others in a room at the Oklahoma City Y?
Homer described vengeance as "sweetest of all things, sweeter than honey." As usual, he was absolutely right. But that's not a reason for inviting the victims to the execution. It's a reason for excluding them. Justice supersedes vengeance only and precisely at the point where punishment is taken out of the hands of the injured. From then on it's the offence against society that's punished, not the offence against victims or survivors. It is because so many victims feel that the offender has not gotten what he deserved that there has been such a groundswell in favour of victims' "impact statements" at the sentencing phases of trials. The presumption is that the judge or jury must be reminded of just what the victim or the bereaved have suffered at the hands of the criminal, as if the punishment should be proportionate to the suffering claimed. The more eloquent the victim, the stiffer the punishment for the offender.
This makes for bad justice. If it's true that sentences are often too light, this isn't the remedy. The state owes it to the victims to prosecute the case; it doesn't owe them their shot at inflaming the jury. Not before the verdict, and not after it either. Prosecutors do just fine at that, thank you.
Similarly, it's not in the name of the victims but in that of the greater society that the state executes those to whom no lesser penalty will suffice. Modern societies, those few that still inflict the death penalty, have long since stopped treating execution as a public spectacle. Neither should they follow Mr. Ashcroft in treating it as a private one. Those opponents of capital punishment who condemn it as vengeance thinly disguised will thank Mr. Ashcroft for leaving that disguise a little more threadbare.
Clifford Orwin is professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
Copyright © 2001 National Post Online
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