By Edwin Cooney
At
approximately 3:30 pm last Friday, May 15th, 2015, an American Federal jury
sent the following “message” from a Boston courtroom to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and
to all criminals and terrorists around the world:
“Respect
the lives of humanity or pay with your own life!”
Hence,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is on notice that he has forfeited whatever value he has had
for his own existence by his act of depriving three innocent 2013 Boston
Marathon spectators, the youngest an eight-year-old boy named Martin, of their
lives. Additionally, he has painfully
and permanently altered the lives of some 200 other people who were in
attendance at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
To describe his actions as outrageous is to understate the case. His act of revenge for the fate of innocent
Muslim minorities in the Balkans, if that is what it was, is woefully
misplaced. After all, America went to
war in the Balkans in 1999 to redress the legitimate Islamic grievances against
Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Since
becoming convinced that capital punishment is ineffective as a deterrent to
murder, I have come to be very dubious as to the wisdom of the law. Although justice requires the code of law for
stability, law requires justice for absolutely nothing. Somewhere I’ve heard it observed that very
often there’s little or no justice in a court of law.
As
for the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, justice demands that it be as severe as
possible! His victims deserve our
sympathy and our support just as the victims of natural disasters or Amtrak
accidents deserve our sympathetic support.
However, sympathy and support for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s victims does not,
in my view, require application of the death penalty.
The
problem, with the death penalty is at least threefold. First, it is clearly
class punishment. Those who can afford
good legal representation don’t receive legal death. Try this analogy on for
size! Had John Hinckley actually murdered
-- rather than merely wounded -- President Ronald Reagan back on Monday, March
30th, 1981, it is possible that the Hinckley money wouldn’t have been enough to
spare young John’s life. However, if an eight-year-old boy from Boston had been
Hinckley’s only victim, the family money would probably have done the trick
quite nicely, thank you very much! Ask
yourself, “what does that say about our value of human life?” Was President Reagan’s right to life more
precious than that of an eight-year-old boy’s? After all, Mr. Reagan was
President of the United States. I
certainly hope not and I’m sure that even President Reagan himself would concur
with that conclusion!
Second,
capital punishment flies in the face of the contention that all life is
sacred. There are those who will argue
that only all innocent life is sacred.
The legitimate response to that is to ask, “who’s innocent and what are
they innocent of?” The answer to that question
depends on who’s running the society that sets the standards of and therefore
judges the presence of innocence. Ought
they be the leaders of an enlightened republic or the leaders of ISIS?
The
third problem with capital punishment is that it stultifies one of life’s most
powerful natural punishments, namely, the rigors of life itself! Life brings about feelings and sensations
we’ve all experienced. Few people exist
who can painlessly cope with the inevitable onset of regret and mental anguish fostered
by a lifetime of enforced confinement in a maximum-security prison.
Here’s the bottom line for me. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s fears, regrets,
forebodings and, to a limited degree, his agony are totally beyond my concern. He deserves punishment and society deserves
to be rid of him! His execution,
however, neither undoes his act nor returns lost loved ones.
More
to the point, Tsarnaev’s execution fosters a deadly illusion on our part. By executing Tsarnaev, we’re convinced, as he
was when he helped his older brother do their deadly deed, that we’re
redressing a redressable grievance.
Tsarnaev’s grievance is too deep to be redressed. It’s beyond remorse and immune from
correction. Likewise, the past
injustices the Tsarnaev brothers sought to redress were beyond their
capacity. Hence, they wasted their lives
and the agonies of their fates are legitimately beyond our capacity for
sympathy.
The
act of murder is fundamentally a selfish act.
As such, its motives are obviously exceedingly compelling in comparison
to the threat of death. These motives,
money, revenge, a sense of power and superiority, are the clarion calls of
life. Brave men and women risk all for
these motives. Statesmen appeal to these
motives as they raise armies they expect to be death defying in victory.
Keep
in mind that every human being has one thing in common. That commonality is not love or hate,
perfection or imperfection, politics or religion. Our single commonality is that we’ve never
experienced death. That’s why the threat of death in comparison to the
delicious promises and rewards offered by life too often go unheeded even at
the expense of life itself!
Fame,
wealth, power, opportunity for professional and social advancement, and the
favors of romance are the prizes or, if you prefer, the rich treasures of
life. The nothingness of death never
beckons because it’s is a barren vessel beyond our ken.
What’s
stunningly tragic to me when I think about it is how hard we seek to use to our
advantage a state of being we know almost nothing about. We too often seek to use it as a weapon or as
a wall of protection to preserve that which we value most. Hence, we fill the void of death with our
fondest hopes and fears, with the soldiers we’ve created to protect us, as well
as with our enemies whom we hate. Even
more incredible, at the same time we fill the void of death with our hope for
spiritual salvation!
Last
Friday, twelve civic-minded, solid American citizens used the vessel of death
to express their legitimate anger over Dzhokhar’s dastardly deed. Like young Tsarnaev, we too often confuse
murder with problem solving. We, the freest, most prosperous, most powerful and
secure people on earth, too often use the empty vessel of death, rather than
life, as our most alluring calling card!
How
can we expect to ever know peace of mind as long as we use Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s
method of expressing our pain?
RESPECTFULLY
SUBMITTED,
EDWIN
COONEY
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