summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu
-Code of Hammurabi-
If a man has destroyed the sight of another man's son, they shall poke out his eye.
It's no secret that I think the execution of criminals is not a power that should be given a government. Reenacting a murder, repeating the act of violence whether quietly with a needle or loudly with a squad of rifles serves no purpose other than to dignify anger, hatred and blood lust.
The State of Missouri killed serial killer and white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin yesterday, in a little room and in front of witnesses. It took the mechanism of institutional homicide over 30 years to exhaust all appeals and procedures and last minute delays before strapping him to a table and running phenobarbital into his veins.
Franklin has been convicted of 8 racially motivated murders and has confessed to a dozen more. He is thought to have committed over 20 in Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Ohio. He has confessed to shooting publisher Larry Flynt, paralyzing him permanently and to wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Using a 'deer rifle' he killed two young cousins Dante Brown and Darrell Lane in Cincinnati because they were African American and fully 18 years later was given a life sentence for it, but of course that was moot since he had already been given a death sentence for the similar sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977. He fired 5 shots into a group of Jewish worshipers, killing Gordon and wounding two others. God gave him this mission, he said.
So I'm not in mourning for Franklin. Given the chance to stop his 'divine' calling to kill Blacks and Jews, I would not have hesitated to use lethal force, nor chastised anyone else for doing so, but of course his mission was long over when they killed him. Larry Flynt will never walk again nor will those killed be restored to life. The lives diminished by grief will not likely be restored to happiness.
"I hate him for destroying my life, for taking away something precious to me, a life that I brought into this world,"
said Abbie Evans Clark, Dante Brown's mother. I hate him too and it wasn't my son he killed. She will likely always hate him.
"It's devastating. It's a void. You never get over it."
I'm sure she's right. She feels no forgiveness, she says, and although she knows it won't bring the two boys back,
"It lets you know that justice will be done for the senseless murders of two innocent boys."
Justice. One has to ask: what is justice if it's not the undoing of wrong? What is justice if it changes nothing, restores nothing?
If a man dieth -- doth he revive?
-Job 14:14-
What is justice if it's inspired by hate and why then is it called justice if hate itself is not justice? Children are not fungible, not property that can be replaced, like money that can be repaid, like debits and credits on a balance sheet. The death of a murderer does not repay a mother for the loss of her son nor can his life be restored to him. Even El could not restore Job's murdered family to him but only a substitute. Those he once loved are gone forever.
Lex Talionis is what we often call reciprocal punishment. In it's favor, we can say that it determines the limits of punishment -- only one eye for one eye. We talk about repayment, but some crimes cannot be payed back nor is the victim's sight restored when someone else's is taken away. Indeed can we talk about justice at all when we admit we want someone dead or worse that God wants someone dead and we need to fulfill his divine will?
I'm glad Joseph Paul Franklin is dead. I hate him down to the bottom of my soul, but I do not love my hatred. I do not ennoble it. I do not justify it or try to reconcile it with my reverence for life. I feel no better and am no better now that he's dead. I don't think we are safer. I don't think we are any closer to fulfilling that longing for harmony in all things we've likely had since our beginning. I don't think we reach it in our various faiths -- neither in the laws of Missouri or the law codes of Ur-Nammu or Hammurabi or edicts of Telepinu or the Hebrew Halacha.
Some things cannot be made right nor losses recovered and when we act out of hate, when we justify hatred, perhaps only hate itself is served or preserved.
Revenge is not justice. Law, is to take us away from our barbaric practices of the past. A death penalty by the State, helps no one and cheapens a just society. Some think killing by deadly injection is more humane than a beheading. It is a difference without distinction. We (the people) just killed in the name of our so called more moral society. Religion is vindictive as hell, and loves its blood letting.
ReplyDeleteI could go on at great length about the value of human life and Western religion, but I wouldn't be saying anything you don't know. There is no factual support for the idea that executions prevent murder and to me, retribution is a barbaric, if emotionally satisfying practice. Moreover, evidence seems to show that we often convict innocent people and it does show that we decide whether to kill or not to kill according to our biases.
DeleteYour post reminded me of a horrific murder that took place in the 1990s in Boston. A young married couple returning home from a child-birth class was attacked. The pregnant woman was shot and killed, her husband severely wounded. The baby, delivered 2-,onths premature, died 17 days later. This is the infamousCharles Stuart murder case.
ReplyDeleteStuart had planned the whole crime and then blamed the shootings on a "black man." One man from a high-crime neighborhood in Boston, Mission Hill, was taken into custody, and was even pointed out in the police line-up by the husband. After Stuart's brother confessed to abetting the crime and the police closed in on Stuart, he jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death.
Nothing was made right nor the terrible losses of mother and child recovered, but here's what Carol DiMaiti Stuart's family did:
A memorial scholarship and a plea bargain
Because Charles falsely accused a black man, exacerbating racial tensions in the city of Boston, Carol's family established the Carol DiMaiti Stuart Foundation, to provide scholarship aid to Mission Hill residents.
Out of a terrible tragedy, a family found their way though it and gave us all a stunning lesson in human decency. I'll never forget it.
A man, or woman who has no respect for the life of another, and through an act of pre meditated violence extinguishes their life forfeits the right to their life.
ReplyDeleteYou just certified that a life is owned by the State.
DeleteReally? Does the state create killers, mutilaters of life, rapists who end up killing? Spare me your pablum an BS anon.
DeleteIf the State can decide who can live, or die, they own you.
DeleteYou agree the State can decide who can live, or die.
I didn't know emotional insults were allowed on this site, but I will not reciprocate. I'll leave that gutter approach to you.
Let's try not to be insulting, please. As I said, I'm uncomfortable with allowing the Justice system -- a group of fallible, emotional, prejudiced and sometimes unethical people to kill people in cold blood. A week doesn't go by that we don't read of some poor bastard being found innocent after ten, twenty, thirty years in jail and I do believe they are only a fraction of the victims of our system. I just don't have faith in the courts and certainly not to the extent that I support killing people.
DeleteIt doesn't matter to me who or what creates criminals, the argument for killing them boils down to " I hate him so it's OK to kill him" and I find no justification religious or secular for that. I find no justification for the attitude that killing someone prevents others from killing others and while I do support the right to self defense as well as national defense, Killing when you aren't forced to is murder whether it's done by one or by twelve.
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DeleteMy apology Anon.
DeleteCourts impose sentences, the people convict don't they?
I get the point on fallibility Capt. and people are fallible as you say. I guess I just get stuck on the idea a person who has zero right to take the life of an innocent person gets away with living out their life on the taxpayers dime.
Now, if they were sentenced to life in solitary confinement, eating heart attack causing food, and forced to listen to Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz 24/7 the remainder of their miserable life I guess I could live with that. :-)
PERIOD!
ReplyDeleteWe forfeit our ' inalienable' right to life to whom? Does the state of Missouri own it, that it can repossess and destroy that right? Revoking someone's freedom is one thing, but to say that the rusty and often dishonest and irrational mechanism of the courts owns our life makes this Libertarian more than a bit uneasy.
DeleteIf killing someone could restore someone elses life, it would be one thing, but it can't.
Capital punishment stats from Wiki:
ReplyDeleteThe Americas
Of the 35 independent states in the Americas that are UN members:
15 (43%) have abolished it.
4 (11%) retain it for crimes committed in exceptional circumstances (such as in time of war).
12 (34%) permit its use for ordinary crimes, but have not used it for at least 10 years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions, or it is under a moratorium.
2 (6%) maintain the death penalty in both law and practice.
The information above is accurate as of 2013 when Cuba became a de facto abolitionist state by not having carried out an execution for ten years.
The United States was the only country in the Americas to carry out executions in 2011. The United States carries out more executions than any other liberal democracy (as defined by Freedom House) in the world. The only other country in the Americas which practices capital punishment is St. Kitts & Nevis.
Executions in the Americas in 2011: United States, the only source of executions in the G8 countries or Western Hemisphere.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
4. United States
The US, the only country in the Americas to execute people in the past few years, executed 46 people in 2010, down from the 2009 total of 52 but still a notable increase from the 2008 total of 37. The US has executed a total of 177 since 2007.
Texas, Alabama, Ohio, Virginia, and Oklahoma are the states with the most executions since since 2007
The top 5 capital punishment countries are: 5) Pakistan, 4) USA, 3) Iraq, 2) Iran, and 1) China.
What great company we keep.
Why are we still using capital punishment while other civilized nations have ended it?
For all our obsessive references to our singular "freedom" we still lock people up for long, hard sentences for things that other, peaceful and free countries do not. We persist not only in doing so, but in clamoring for more punishment, harder punishment, longer punishment. I have to ask myself how we can believe in the efficacy of punishment when we do not believe that when a sentence is served, some alleged "price" has been paid in the first place?
DeleteRational conversations can be difficult. We can look at crime free countries without our anger based rationalizations and not see the hypocrisy, or seeing it we yell and scream to hide it. The fact is that killing convicted criminals does not and never has been a deterrent and the evidence is clear. We kill not because we need to, but because we want to and every time I have to listen to some jingo jive about how the world looks up to us as a bastion of "freedom" I want to puke.
Doing more and more of what always fails is,l in my opinion, the defining characteristic of our country, but my primary opposition to poisoning perpetrators is the obvious fact that determining guilt is a lottery and sentencing is a rigged lottery. Get caught with crack when you're a Congressman and you get to repent and seek treatment and pretend you're still a good guy. What happens when you're black and have no money? You're a convict for life and it may be a short life. We refuse to trust the government with supervising health care, but we're willing to let it kill us at will?
Freedom my ass.