Repost: The Death Penalty

There is no easy answer. There's not supposed to be.

I oppose the death penalty almost all of the time, but there have been a few men (it's almost always men) who I might have made an entirely emotion-based exception for, despite firm convictions that it's not a deterrent, that it's an abuse of the power of the state.  Typically, those crimes are crimes of mass murder, like Timothy McVeigh, when one person took the lives of so many others that it's impossible not to think he deserves something terrible to balance out what he did.

But the problem is that there's no balancing a crime of the scope that crosses the threshold for me. Once you've killed enough people that I think you might not deserve to live, your death would never be enough to balance the scales. There's no justice and no reparations.

So watching Rick Perry talk about the death penalty in Texas, and hearing the crowd at the Reagan library cheer his dubious record as the killingest-governor of modern times, I felt cold. Chilled. A little disgusted by my fellow citizens. I don't believe that Christians, as the audience would surely identify themselves (though to be fair I do not claim Christianity), are to rejoice at the death of another person.

I've been thinking a lot about this clip from the West Wing episode "Take this Sabbath Day."  In it, the President meets with his boyhood priest on the evening of the first federal execution to take place while he's been in office. The President, a Catholic, didn't believe in the death penalty, but politically there was no real cover for staying the execution. This scene was the last time Karl Malden would appear on film, and it's so powerful. I learned recently that it's based on the first execution that Ronald Reagan presided over, as governor of California.

The contrast is telling, to me. I imagine Ronald Reagan, kneeling with a minister in the governor's office, seeking guidance or forgiveness. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the modern Republican party, was ambivalent about the death penalty, but now the people who profess to admire him would likely kick him out of the party for this view and others.

It's not supposed to be easy, though.  Whatever else I believe, I know it's not ever supposed to be easy to end the life of another person.

ETA:  This family leaves me speechless with their grace and their compassion.

First posted to a previous blog, 9/14/2011.