I understand the urge to avenge.
I believe there is a part of me that's capable of doing almost anything out of anger or despair. I can be cruel. I can be violent. I can rationalize away almost any inconvenient qualm. Murder is within my ken. I don't believe I am finer than anyone else. I have frightening capacities.
But I have good reasons not to give in to any vicious impulses. I have a stake in society--a home, a job, a family, a vague sense of purpose, a prospect for joy. A cynical person might say that it is more these things than any innate sense of morality that keep me from robbing a liquor store or stealing a car.
Christ told us to love one another, but we now know that's impossible. That commandment has no place on the monument they're planning to erect on the Capitol lawn. "Thou shalt not kill" will be inscribed on that cenotaph, should the inevitable lawsuits challenging its constitutional appropriateness fail. Yet while it seems clear enough, there are plenty of long-thinking doctors of divinity who will parse the line and decree it not so watertight as it appears. They will say the original intent was merely to prohibit "murder," which is a sort of killing narrowly defined by law. Therefore any killing which man's law holds exempt--the killing of an enemy in wartime or the execution of a convict by the state--does not violate God's will.
And so we are free to sentence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.
I have no idea whether that will happen, and have no brief for the young man. He deserves whatever happens to him, I suppose, and I'm not sure that the prospect of a long bland life of isolation and obscurity isn't a harsher punishment than a relatively quick extinction. Regardless of his fate, his example will inspire some people to violence, for he dared to act. People will spit his name and call him coward, but the truth is a case can and will be made that he is a hero to those who hate us. He justified his killing of innocents as an act of holy war. I don't suppose he is any more or less sincere in his belief than any of those who claim to know the mind of God.
I don't know that he's less certain of his own righteousness than anyone else who presumes to kill in His name.
I'm not naive. I know we have to do what we have to do, and that the gears of the world are greased by the blood and pain of people who we cannot afford to think about. We are, more than we are willing to admit, a tribal species. We care more for those we consider our kind than we do those we consider Other; we might weep for the children of Palestine or Somalia but our priorities remain our priorities. We would not care to pay more tax, or to forgo our accustomed luxuries, so we permit the world to bleed and tell ourselves we could not make a difference if we tried.
And we could not. Atrocities will still be committed in the name of justice, in the name of the Lord. Infidels will still be beheaded, babies will still starve, the old will still instruct the young on the proper ways to make war on the insufficiently pious. No matter what you do, bombs will still explode, genocidal fantasies will still bloom in the dry hearts of mullahs and patriots. We might as well kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
I understand the urge.
Yet I would not kill Tsarnaev, or anyone else. Not exactly because I believe to do so offends God--if it does, God can take His own revenge, in His own time--but because I believe that we damage ourselves by giving in to the urge to avenge. In doing so we acknowledge our collective viciousness, the limits of our mercy, and certify the absolute power of the state. There is something obscene about an allegedly civil society indulging in cathartic blood ritual. I think we should take every opportunity to extend mercy, to be gentle whenever we can afford to do so. It's not a question of what murderers and terrorists deserve, but of how we wish to conduct ourselves. Maybe it is not possible to live in the world without condoning slaughter, maybe the demands of survival require us to conform to nature's imperative to kill or be killed, but we can at least be mindful of the damage we do ourselves whenever we act callously.
In the larger scheme, an execution solves nothing. We can argue about whether there is a deterrent effect, but we cannot argue about the irrevocability of the punishment. Or about the fallible nature of our justice system. We might be confident that Tsarnaev committed the crimes he's accused of committing, but we know mistakes have been made in the past and will continue to be made in the future. It seems that hardly a month goes by without the exoneration of some death row inmate.
Mistakes happen not because prosecutors and police are corrupt (though some are) but because a trial isn't so much a search for justice as a contest between adversaries where advocates battle within certain rules. In order to convict, the state has to overcome the presumption of innocence and convince, beyond a reasonable doubt, a jury or judge of a defendant's guilt. While this is a large burden, often the state generally has far greater resources at its disposal than any defendant.
And while we all have the right to be heard in a court of law in front of a neutral judge and an impartial jury, there's no right to equal representation. People with more money can buy better lawyers and better experts to combat the resources of the states. They can get a fairer trial. That's just the truth. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty ... I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial."
If prosecutors were not, by and large, political creatures beholden to voters, it might be possible to make trials less about winning and losing and more about a search for justice. Short of that, we should understand that even when we do our best, we are limited beings and our knowledge is imperfectible. While Donald Rumsfeld was widely mocked for saying it aloud, we ought to acknowledge there are always things we do not know we do not know.
We ought to always remember we could be wrong. And so we should be careful whenever we decide that we are justified in taking any human life, even when we are convinced of the criminal's guilt and that our Bible tells us it's OK. We ought to be less concerned with punishing the convicted and more with making the world a tiny bit kinder. We can do better, and so we should.
But that seems about as likely as our subordinating the 10 Old Testament commandments to Jesus' prime directive.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 04/12/2015