The B.S. of A. by Brian Sack

Author:Brian Sack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE DEATH PENALTY

Capital punishment is a quandary factory, a grim enterprise that sets us apart from our European colleagues with whom we share so much and lumps us in with the less friendly, not-so-human-rights-oriented, not-so-convinced-life-is-valuable nations such as Iran, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Aspiring constitutional scholars can debate this issue to death (ha!). After all, if the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, is killing someone not cruel? Is it not unusual? Hard to say, apparently, because the Supreme Court can’t seem to agree. And this issue has bounced back and forth for a couple of centuries now. For the record, Founding Father lovers, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a big fan of it but his opposition efforts in Virginia were killed (ha, again!).

On one hand, dispatching a horrible villain would seem to appeal to our visceral desire for revenge, the pursuit of ultimate justice for the worst of our society. Did Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh not deserve to be terminated for his awful crime? Do two men who raped, strangled and torched a wife and her two young daughters belong on our planet? There’s a case for letting people rot in prison for their entire lives. But it’s also tempting to deny monsters their right to future sunsets. If they can see sunsets from their prison. Actually, if they can see sunsets from their prison I’d be pretty mad because they’d have a better view than I do.

But one can’t help but feel some pangs of remorse, that sense that putting another human to death is a wee bit more sinister and less civilized than we’d like it to be. The long wait, the last day, the last meal, the last words and the desperate hope the governor will phone in with a last-minute reprieve—unless you’re in Texas, in which case you know that’s not happening. We try to make it better—devising more comfortable methods with which we can send the bad guys on their way, and indeed putting a criminal to sleep with a needle is far more “humane” than the shooting, stabbing and strangling that landed him in this predicament in the first place. But at the end of the day, it’s the state-ordered killing of a human being, and you have to admit that feels a little weird. Not as weird as China’s mobile execution vans, or Iran hanging people from construction cranes before morning prayers, but weird nonetheless. Like it or not, it’s got some taint to it.

And there are the unknowns. What if the doomed man is the wrong guy? We know that prisoners on death row have been exonerated with new DNA evidence. The idea someone might be killed for something he didn’t do is a horrible one and an uncorrectable injustice. What if the condemned finds himself there because of the malfeasance of a corrupt prosecutor? We know bad prosecutors happen all the time—remember the Duke Lacrosse scandal? What if the odds he’s on death row were markedly increased because of the color of his skin? Uncomfortable questions.

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