By Edwin Cooney
Many years have passed since I favored capital punishment! Back in the 1960s, when I favored it, it appeared to be going out of favor with the public. Then came the 1970s and the Supreme Court’s ruling that capital punishment laws in most states lacked both consistency and precision and thus, between 1972 and 1977, there were no executions in the United States.
Capital punishment’s hiatus meant that the killers of Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate, and Dr. Martin Luther King — among others — escaped the permanent solution humankind has ever discovered for its many woes, namely, legal murder. We’ve found workable remedies (varied though they may be) for financial distress, some remedies for combating starvation (namely food distribution), and we’ve got somewhat of a handle on war (although it’s discouragingly illusive), but we’ve yet to master our capacity to control two fundamentally vital human weaknesses: anger and revenge. Thus legal murder has become almost an institution in the land of plenty and liberty.
What fuels this commentary is the news that Governor Asa Hutchinson of the State of Arkansas, a moderately conservative Republican, recently announced that eight death row inmates will be executed between April 17th and 27th. The reason for that is that the effectiveness of Arkansas’s supply of the drug midazolam, part of the lethal injection process, will be out of date on April 30th. Almost as significant, the Arkansas Department of Corrections has yet to refill its supply of potassium chloride, the final and fatal drug issued to inmates, although Governor Hutchinson is confident that drug will be available by the time the eight men are executed. According to the New York Times, the eight inmates scheduled for execution in April are absolutely out of appeals. There are 34 men on Arkansas’s death row, but apparently the remaining 24 inmates still have a sufficient number of legitimate appeals to make them immediately ineligible for Arkansas’s “big sleep” program.
Before offering my objections to capital punishment, I must dispel a deliberately misleading myth which is too often boldly asserted by pro capital punishment advocates. My opposition has nothing whatsoever to do with sympathy for killers. Killers are, in general, self-possessed and absorbed individuals largely incapable of rising above their own emotional pain or sense of victimhood. They are further incapable of receiving or responding to someone's sense of anguish or urgency. I have little empathy, let alone sympathy, for them. They deserve ongoing punishment. It’s their challenge, to the extent they’re capable, to make peace with God and humankind! Second, I regard it as both insensitive and almost abusive to the victims of crime to encourage or take political advantage of their anguish and pain. Some victims of crime become committers of crime in their outraged victimhood. Even more tragic in the assumption that the deaths of crime doers sufficiently eases the pain of the victims of crime lies in the reality that often those who commit mass murders or terrorism plan their own destruction at the same time. Hence the idea that there resides ease in someone else's downfall or tragedy is absurd.
Capital punishment is nothing more than legal murder. There is a difference between legality and morality. Even more, the assumption that the pain of victims of crime is significantly, let alone immediately, alleviated by the death of the doer of crime demonstrates a lack of comprehension of permanent or chronic anguish, pain and struggle.
The root defect of capital punishment is our inability to master our righteous anger. We’re right to be outraged by injustice. We’re right to want to give ourselves maximum protection from those who would destroy us! However, that natural right of protection requires our utilization of mind over matter.
Nor am I advocating absolute passivity or nonviolence. The only time a life should be taken is in the immediate emergency of preserving an endangered innocent life. Preservation of an immediately innocent and endangered life, as I see it, is not murder. In fact, it is the highest occasion of courageous bravery. The fact of the matter however is that few of us are trained and even fewer of us possess the ability and the skill to protect ourselves from the wily marauder.
The older I get, the more I realize how little we really understand each other —especially the roots of one another’s pain and struggle. Even worse, it often seems that we have deliberately decided not to comprehend what matters to others! Beyond that, the more secure we are in our own sense of values, the less regard we have for the values and priorities of others.
Fear and anger are at the root of most of our social and moral dysfunction which defines for this observer capital punishment. So long as death is our solution to even our legitimate anger and fear, the more death is surely our fate!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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