I'm against the death penalty, although I'm sympathetic to the desire to mete out punishment, to protect righteousness. Still, the evidence indicates that it is an expensive way to punish and that it doesn't prevent murders. It is an act of vengeance that people have, and some people need. I'm agnostic about its worth and value, and prefer to err on the side of mercy. In part because I'm a Christian.
I have a view objections to the death penalty. Is it not possible that the curtaiing of freedom and hope is worse than death? If so, then life without parole is the more just punishment. Death is too good for some people.
Second, for a Christian true repentance is always an option. This may not result in freedom. But it may result in living one's life with spiritual liberty.
Third, the state demonstrates its inherent cruelty by providing the clearest example of premeditated murder. But more closely, however, the death penalty is religious activity. The death penalty is ritual sacrifice. It is the ultimate conflation of paganism and civil authority. The Lord says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice...."
Christopher Caldwell writes, however a very measured response to his killing:
But in one respect, the protesters had a point. More than any other execution in recent memory, this one appeared absurd. The absurdity was not a matter of judicial principle but of gut instinct. For only by concentrating strenuously could one convince oneself that the man who was executed was the same man who had committed the crime. Williams had founded the Crips as a hot-blooded 17-year-old during the Nixon administration, and terrorised Los Angeles as a 300lb gym-built bully not long after. His brief killing spree took place when Carter, Callaghan and Brezhnev were in power, a month after the Shah fled Iran. The man who was executed last week was an avuncular, bespectacled, white-bearded man in his 50s.
The society meting out justice had changed, too. Nineteen seventy-nine was among the worst years in US history for violent crime, which has since fallen dramatically. Maybe today’s society has the same priorities as the despairing one that felt Williams must pay for his murders with his life. But maybe it does not.
Meanwhile, the media that feed the outrage of people as far away as Italy over the execution of Williams also spread new ideas about identity. Far more than in 1979, people today embrace the idea that identities change. You can go from being a priest to a man-about-town, or from an Austrian bodybuilder to an American governor. The idea of a permanent criminal class is as out of fashion as the idea of a permanent working class. Whether or not this idea of “serial identities” reflects something real, people live by it. And it upsets them to see anyone executed for a crime committed under a previous identity.
In this Tookie Williams’s case resembles that of Carla Faye Tucker, the Texas woman whose execution George W. Bush authorised during the 2000 presidential campaign. In prison Tucker became a born-again Christian, having conquered (or at least evaded) the drug addiction under the influence of which she had killed. The upsetting thing about both executions, to those who opposed them, is that the state seemed to be taking not just a (guilty) life but also an (innocent) identity.
Western societies have generally felt that some kind of redemption is possible for killers. But the idea of redemption present in, say, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is based on addressing one’s past deeds. It is sometimes compatible with capital punishment. But contemporary westerners focus less on redemption than on transformation. What the state of California did last Tuesday was to hold someone accountable for things he did as the person he used to be. This is perfectly consistent with our traditional conceptions of law and justice. But for many westerners, including most Europeans and those gathered outside San Quentin last week, it confounds the logic of our culture.
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