Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. — Romans 12:19 (KJV)
On May 15, 1916, a 17-year-old black farmhand named Jesse Washington went on trial in Waco, Texas, for the murder of his employer’s wife seven days earlier. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a kangaroo trial, lasting about an hour, that was typical of that time and place. Then he was seized by a mob, dragged from the courthouse, stripped naked, beaten and mutilated, and dangled from a chain over a fire for about two hours while he slowly burned to death. A crowd of 15,000 witnessed this spectacle, some of whom took home body parts as souvenirs. A commercial photographer recorded the event for posterity and picture postcards were sold. But the “Waco Horror,” as it came to be known, marked a turning point. It received nationwide publicity and spurred the fledgling NAACP to launch an anti-lynching campaign. Although lynchings would go on for another half-century, the veneer of acceptability had been stripped away from them and public opinion began to turn against the practice.
It’s hard to say whether Jesse Washington was guilty or innocent. No evidence or transcripts survived; history only preserved a few sketchy second-hand accounts. It was said that he confessed, but if he did, that doesn’t mean much. In those days, confessions were coerced; and like other southern blacks of the time, he was illiterate, so couldn’t have read whatever his accusers wrote down and told him to sign by marking an “X.” It’s possible he was Mrs. Fryer’s killer; in any event, that was the verdict, so if he hadn’t been lynched, he would have been hanged, thus he was as good as dead anyway. But those points tend to get submerged by the medieval brutality of his death. Even Osama bin Laden got a more civilized lynching.
I bring up the subject of lynching to introduce readers to a discussion of the death penalty because lynching clearly is revenge-taking. Lynch mobs typically aren’t fastidiousness about guilt or innocence, because they’re settling a blood debt, and it really doesn’t matter very much whose blood is used to pay the debt. (This seems to be the logic behind World War I, too.) In the Deep South, during the 100 years between Civil War and Civil Rights, crimes against whites provided a convenient pretext for terrorizing black people to keep them in line, and guilt was a trivial detail. Lynching was a form of social control that had nothing to do with justice.
On June 7, 1998, a 49-year-old black man named James Byrd Jr. accepted a ride from three white men, one of whom Byrd knew from seeing him around town in Jasper, Texas. The other two were alumni of a white supremacist prison gang. Instead of taking Byrd home, they drove to an isolated country road, where they beat him, urinated on him, then chained him to their truck and dragged him on pavement until a culvert tore his head off his body. After dumping his bloody torso at an African-American church, they went to a barbecue. They were caught, tried, and convicted. The driver got a life sentence; the white supremacists got death sentences. On September 21, 2011, Lawrence Brewer was executed in a state prison by lethal injection. John King remains on death row pending appeals.
The Byrd family were split on the death penalty. His son and daughter publicly spoke out against executing their father’s killers, but his sisters attended Brewer’s execution, and afterwards one of them told reporters she had “no qualms” about the death penalty and called Brewer’s execution “a step in the right direction” toward ending racial prejudice and hate crimes.
Was Brewer’s death revenge or justice? Whichever, the state killed him on behalf of all Texas citizens, and clearly ignored the wishes of Byrd’s children. The killing of Lawrence Brewer was a governmental action, as was the legislation that authorized the death penalty, and the judicial process that imposed and upheld it. Brewer was killed by the government in the name of law and order. We call that “justice,” even though in his case it feels an awful lot like revenge.
The standard arguments in favor of the death penalty have all been convincingly debunked. Executing people doesn’t deter crime, isn’t less expensive than life imprisonment, and doesn’t bring real “closure” to the victims’ families. There are many things wrong with it: Unfairness (you’re more likely to be executed if you’re minority or poor), arbitrariness (many death sentences are never carried out, and who gets executed is a random crapshoot), the risk of executing innocent persons, and so on. Nearly half of the states have formally abolished the death penalty or have moratoriums in effect; a handful of states account for most U.S. executions. Why do those states continue to execute people?
You can find articulate arguments, pro and con, on the internet and elsewhere. For example, you can find an interesting discussion of the morality aspect of the question, viewed from both sides, here: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/timkowal/2012/01/the-best-argument-in-favor-of-capital-punishment/ But all of these arguments, it seems to me, miss the key point. The decision to have, or not have, a death penalty is everywhere and always a political decision made in a political process. Therefore, to understand that decision you must delve into how the thought processes of voters and legislators work in the real world.
I’ve been involved in politics for 50 years, and over that time, I’ve learned that emotion, not rationality, drives political behavior. People tend to gravitate to the political views of their families, friends, and associates. Most people know little about issues, don’t want to hear your opinions, and make snap judgments and knee-jerk reactions on political questions. If you ask them why they support the death penalty, you’re likely to get an answer like this: “I haven’t really thought about it.” If the conversation continues from there, you may hear phrases like “eye for an eye” and “bleeding hearts.” In other words, not much thought goes into it; what you get is a gut reaction, from people who trust their gut, which tells them it’s just common sense to kill bad people who have killed good people, so they can’t kill any more of us. Some of these same people will tell you, in all seriousness, that we should nuke the Russians before they do it to us. That makes good sense to them, too, because they haven’t thought it all the way through.
Other than keeping those people far away from the nuclear football, I’m not concerned with what they think, or maybe I should say lack of thinking. I’m concerned with what you think, because you’re reading this article, and therefore presumably are interested in what I have to say about all this. Let’s focus now on the charade that occurs when a perp is frog-marched into a death chamber and the witnesses are seated into the viewing room. After being strapped to the gurney, the condemned man is asked if he wants to make a statement. He’s supposed to say he’s sorry, ask forgiveness, and thank his lawyers and spiritual adviser and supporters. Occasionally you get one who flips off the witnesses instead; why not, I mean, what can they do to him? The witnesses are supposed to sit there stone-faced while the guy who tore their lives apart peacefully goes to sleep; afterward, they’re trundled outside, where the press vultures are waiting, and they’re supposed to either pretend they’re too upset to say anything at all, or if they do speak, they’re expected to keep it brief and throw out phrases like “justice has been done” and “we finally have closure.” I don’t recall any witness ever saying, “Frankly, I enjoyed watching that little snake squirm as the drugs poured into him, and I regret that he didn’t suffer more,” maybe because they’re afraid if they do, they won’t get invited to the next one. But I don’t doubt that some of them are thinking it.
Ask the average Joe how he’d feel if some creep abducted, raped, and strangled his little girl and he’ll almost certainly say, “He’d better hope the cops find him before I do,” and “I’d throw the switch on him myself if they’d let me.” He probably would, too. And the prison staff most likely would be more than happy to turn the job over to him. It’s not something they enjoy. So why don’t we? We could still operate our criminal justice system, with fair trials and all that, and conduct executions in state correctional institutions, but at no expense and with only minor changes to the procedures we could let a family member of the victim or an eager volunteer from the public flip the switch that turns off the condemned man’s lights for good. No doubt there are plenty of people who would love to do it. So why not?
Because that turns it into revenge, which we don’t want, because that would further taint a process we’re trying to sanitize as much as possible because we’re already very uncomfortable with it. Revenge is base, banal, disreputable, and we want nothing to do with it. When we look at a photo of Jesse Washington’s charred corpse, we see what revenge has wrought, and we’re horrified by it. Revenge frightens us, because it has no boundaries, and can get out of control. By comparison, a prison execution chamber is clean, brightly lighted, antiseptic, and what happens there isn’t gory at all, just a person going to sleep, and this plus slapping a “justice” label on it makes it more acceptable to our gut. But are we just fooling ourselves?
We’ve tried to ban revenge from our social order, but our hypocrisy is palpable. It really is about revenge, not individually focused revenge, but a more amorphous collective revenge-taking. The state executes in the name of the people, not in the name of the victims, and this form of revenge-taking is large and ponderous. It comes at you like a truck and you are the bug splattering on its windshield. There is no person on earth who feels as powerless as a death row inmate being escorted from the holding cell to the execution chamber by a bevy of guards. He is a bug about to meet a windshield, and it’s designed that to feel that way to every participant from the warden to the guard who pushes the button to the witnesses sitting in stony-faced silence trying to pretend this isn’t about revenge, as if calling it “justice” or “closure” can turn it into something else.
So, what’s my position on this whole hypocritical charade? The answer is complicated. I’m basically an intellectual who tries to apply rationality to solve problems. But I have a gut, too, and my gut says if someone abducted, raped, and strangled my daughter, he’d better hope the cops find him before I do, and if the state would let me, I’d push the button myself to terminate the slimeball’s useless miserable life. It’s probably just as well they won’t, because this could spin out of control if it ever got off the ground. My intellectual answer is that I think we should keep the death penalty on the books, but not use it very often, and only for a damned good reason, or we will run the risk of becoming like the people in the mob in the photo. What finally matters is not what happens to heartless killers — who the hell cares about them — but what we do to ourselves.