The StuSie

The Executioner Sings

So, I’m sitting at this round table eating crab with chopsticks, waiting for the rice to arrive and the other ‘native English speakers’ are all talking about how if it happened to someone in their family, they’d want the guy to fry too. Yet most executions in the U.S. are carried out via lethal injection (apart from in Nebraska where they still favour ‘the chair’). I think we got onto the topic because I was ‘putting out feelers’ on their political persuasions and dropped in a tid-bit about China’s favoured method of executing their citizens, executions sometimes carried out in the public square. Our Chinese assistant remained mute throughout our debate maybe out of a fear of criticising the government, maybe though because she agreed with the political line on serious crimes, or maybe simply because the topic of death was considered to be taboo in Chinese society. I mean, the number 4 is considered extremely bad luck because when written, it resembles the Chinese word for death and in a predominantly atheist country where the afterlife is simply not an option I can understand the mortifying terror that talk of death induces.

So there I was, sitting with my fellow ‘high-income, pro-democratic-process country’ compatriots (one American, two Aussies and a Northern-Irelander) feeling alienated, any residue of camaraderie between us due to our common ‘background’ and our correspondingly common vision of a perfect society painfully exposed as misplaced, ill-founded and simply untrue. I knew that 70% of British people supported capital punishment but I for some reason did not. Maybe I had ‘gone European’ after spending years on the continent but then again, I too had been brought up in the U.K. so maybe this wasn’t about cultural background. I hurled my best arguments against capital punishment out onto the rice laden table, waving my chopsticks indignantly at their abrupt dismissal of anything I had to offer, their closed-mindedness like a wall off which my persuasive arguments bounced and fell limply to the floor flapping there like suffocating fish. So I put myself in their ‘hypothetical’ situation to try and understand how such vicious, compassionless attitudes could possibly be defended by seemingly intelligent, ‘civilised’ men (one of them was a Doctor, originally from India, another was a Masters student, the others also university educated).

So my mother is raped, garrotted, drawn, quartered and then eaten by a vicious subhuman ‘criminal’ who is sent to prison but after 15 years is released on good behaviour. What would you do to the culprit?

Interesting quandary. Well, the conviction would have been ‘closure’ enough for me and I would hope that while in prison the ‘homicidal maniac’ would reflect on his actions and hopefully in some meaningful sense come to realise his wrongdoing after which he would repent and spend the rest of his life being tortured by his own conscience, being furthermore a pariah from society unable to ever have a real job, always a suspect, plagued by thoughts of his hideous crime. If this did not happen and he (or she – you never know with women these days – ) did not repent then I would try at least to forgive him and try to understand how our paradisial, hedonistic, fun-loving consumer society could lead someone to commit such hideous crimes. This is not to say that the murderer is a victim – everyone should be responsible for their own actions – but I see a society built on contrition and forgiveness as more utopian than a society built on revenge and hatred which demonises its murderers instead of trying to understand them in order to prevent such events happening again.

Wait, I hear you say, the best way to prevent people from murdering is to provide them with a real deterrent: well, if that was the case then when Canada abolished the death penalty there should have been a marked increase in the number of murders occurring there: there wasn’t. Nor was there in the U.K. when the death penalty was abolished there (incidentally, the last person to be ‘hanged’ in the U.K. was disabled and has since been absolved of the murder to which he was ‘accomplice’).

Which brings us to the U.S. After the milestone 1000^th execution in America (over 150 of which occurred in Texas during George W’s term as governor there) last month since the reintroduction of the death penalty questions were again raised about the ‘effectiveness’ of capital punishment. Furthermore it costs more to execute a criminal than to keep him in jail his whole life so the ‘expediency’ argument is out the window. Moreover, 80% of all those executed were black. To all you racists out there this no doubt proves that blacks are sub-human which therefore, paradoxically, justifies further extermination of this bestial race.

Which brings us to the convicted murderer Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams. If only he had been convicted in one of those 12 states where the death penalty is outlawed then he would still be with us. Of course being nominated for both the literature and peace Nobel Prizes shouldn’t get you off the hook, but 6 years in solitary confinement is surely suffering enough on top of all those years incarcerated. I mean it’s not like in China where the legal process is far swifter. In America the ‘suffering’ of the ‘victim’ is prolonged needlessly for a quarter of a century. In China at least they give you a bullet in the neck and it’s over instantly but in California it takes at least 10 minutes for the heart attack to be induced ‘by lethal injection.’ To me the guillotine seems to be one of the best methods of disposing of the dregs of society and it’s what the Enlightenment was built on so you can’t argue with that. I’m sure if you feel a burning rage deep down in your soul which can only be assuaged by the blood of another then you will at least agree that this blood should be let swiftly and relatively painlessly.

The Chinese though had no Enlightenment and also have no religion so there is therefore no moral law forbidding the death penalty which helps to explain why 90% of all executions in the world take place in China (but then again, one fifth of the world’s population is Chinese). America however is a supposedly Christian country founded on high ideals and the morality of the Holy Book. Or maybe not. ‘In God we trust’ obviously does not mean ‘we trust in God’ as this would mean that surely only God can give life and take it away, or maybe I misread the Decalogue. Or is there a parentheses after ‘Thou shalt not kill’ which states ‘except in the following cases…’? How can the U.S.A. be a bastion of Freedom, if the most basic human right – the right to live – can be taken away? Maybe this is all about interpretation: I obviously misread the 8^th amendment or maybe I simply don’t have a good enough ‘handle’ on American history and the way of life there to criticise this aspect of it so vociferously.

Well, no doubt I am in the minority on this issue (65% of Americans support the death penalty so the executions are not ‘undemocratic’ at least) and I’m all argued out so enough of these idle words, an end to this rant.

Power surge, lights dimming momentarily. Blackout.

posted by pfarrad @ 14:22