Death Penalty

I remember the exact moment I became opposed to the death penalty.

It was June 12, 2001, the day after Timothy McVeigh’s execution. They innovated a sort of “closed-captioning execution viewing” thing because of the sheer number of victims and the difficulty of getting them all in the execution chamber. And I rememmber sitting and listening to the coverage of it on NPR, and the interviews with the OKC victims’ families, and I can still just vividly feel the bloodcurdlling rage directed at McVeigh from all of the victims.

And their rage is of course, justified. I would feel the same in their position. And McVeigh is as close to a perfect case for the death penalty as ever has and ever will exist. Fuck, he was the hearald for all the shit we’re living through today.

But here is the thing. Watching the aftermath of that execution, it was pretty clear that this was not an act of “seeking justice”, or “an impartial government coming to a fair conclusion”, though neither of those things are necessarily logically incompatible with the death penalty.

This was a simple ceremonial act of revenge or retribution. It was the town square getting together and throwing rocks at someone. The fact that McVeigh deserved it didn’t change the debasement to everyone that participated in the thing. What I saw was an invitation to wallow in rage and anger and hate far more than it was any attempt at closure, or even “an eye for an eye”. And this was the best-fucking case scenario for the death penalty.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about exonerations from the innocence project, about disparate racial outcomes from jury trials, the cruelty of botched executions, and the effects on executioners from administering executions, but the core thing is, I don’t think the state should be sponsoring hate rallies, even against the worst of us. Even when the evidence is clear and impartially delivered.

I know that this is a moral argument that is not delivered in the spirit of a Rawlsian public reason, but it is kind of the heart of how I feel. And maybe it comes from viscerally feeling unjustified blind hate directed at me, I don’t know