Let's Stop Pretending, Shall we?

Let’s Stop Pretending, Shall We?

Further (Angry) Reflections on Capital Punishment

Elsewhere on this blog you will find rather measured and rational reflections on the death penalty from the perspective of Christianity and from the perspective of the law. I urge you to find and read those posts. They have important things to say. What follows here isn’t measured, although I don’t think it’s irrational. It is angry. If Paul could get angry at the Judaizers in his letter to the Galatians (and he most certainly did), I can get mad about capital punishment here. I am mad about capital punishment. I am mad about the way we react to it too, especially when it doesn’t go the way we want it to go. So here goes, an angry rant about capital punishment.

Recently a great hue and cry has gone up because it took a couple of condemned men hours not minutes to die from the lethal cocktail our public servants pumped into their veins. It’s inhumane!, we cry. We don’t want to see suffering even in those whose lives we’re taking from them! We’re civilized people! We just can’t have this suffering in those we are killing! And I just want to shout Stop it! Shut up! You are such hypocrites with your great wailing over the suffering of a man your law and its agents are killing! You think killing can and should be humane. You don’t want to feel bad about killing someone. You want capital punishment to be euthanasia not the brutal act of violence against another human being that it really is, and it really ticks me off.

Stop it! You and your representatives passed a law that says some people deserve death. You and your representatives passed a law that says that we as a society will kill people as punishment for their crimes. Kill people. Not ease them out of this vale of tears into a better place. Not end their suffering when only death will end it. Kill them. Kill them when they are utterly defenseless and totally at our mercy. You and your representatives hired people from police to jailers to attorneys to judges to prison wardens to the executioners themselves to put your law into effect. You hired them to kill people. Stop pretending that you didn’t! Stop pretending that what you’re doing is humane. It isn’t. It’s brutal. It’s savage. It’s barbaric. You can’t make it not be those things by insisting that it be done humanely. Killing a person in the circumstances of capital punishment isn’t humane. It isn’t supposed to be humane. It is supposed to be the most extreme punishment possible. It is supposed to end a human life, to stop a human heart, to still a human brain, all as punishment of one in the grasp of a massive web of institutions that render that one totally helpless and defenseless. None of that is humane. None of that can possibly be humane. So stop it! You said kill. Stop being outraged when the killing isn’t pleasant.

Do you want to treat convicted criminals humanely? Fine. Repeal your laws that create capital punishment. True, life in prison isn’t exactly the most humane kind of life; but at least it is life. At least it leaves open the possibility of redemption. At least it leaves open the possibility of exoneration. Capital punishment ends life, and it cuts off all possibility of redemption (on earth at least) or exoneration. I’m not saying that most of the people we condemn to death haven’t committed horrible, despicable, sinful acts of violence against another person or persons. Most have (although certainly not all, as learn again and again). Most of us would find most of them to be repellent at best. That’s true, but it’s not the point! The point is that capital punishment is murder. State enacted, state enforced, state executed murder. That the one executed was a murderer doesn't justify it. Nothing we do in performing it can make it humane.

So you who support it, stop pretending. Stop pretending that you care about humaneness. Admit that you support something that is and necessarily must be ugly, brutal, and inhumane. If you can’t live with that reality, get your legislators to repeal the capital punishment law. If you can live with that reality, examine your souls. You've got a lot of work to do there.