The recent execution of Kevin Johnson by lethal injection conjures Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot where the story’s protagonist describes how he would paint a picture of a guillotine execution that he witnessed in France, which still proves apt today:
“……the convict’s face as white as paper; the priest holding up the cross, the man greedily putting forward his blue lips (to kiss the cross) and looking—aware of everything. The cross and the head, that’s the picture. The priest’s face and the executioner’s, his attendants and a few heads and eyes below might be painted in the background, in half light.”
The contrast between Christianity and an eye-for-an-eye retribution perhaps explains our equivocation over the morality and the efficacy of the death penalty. But no matter how one tries to justify it, the entire process taints all involved beginning with legislators who enact the laws that legalize the death penalty; the prosecutors who pursue it; the jurors who approve it; the appellate judges whose conviction to uphold law affirm it; to our Governor who washed his hands when he declined to commute Johnson’s death sentence to life imprisonment, and instead released this terse statement:
“The violent murder of any citizen, let alone a Missouri law enforcement officer, should be met only with the fullest punishment state law allows. Through Mr. Johnson’s own heinous actions, he stole the life of Sergeant McEntee and left a family grieving, a wife widowed, and children fatherless. Clemency will not be granted.”
No one doubted Kevin Johnson’s guilty, and that his crime—ambushing the police officer, then assassinating him with a bullet to the back of the head of a helpless, wounded man—defined heinous. All that remained in that awful aftermath centered squarely on societal punishment of life imprisonment or the death penalty. The State chose death, and killed Johnson this past Tuesday..
The Greeks wrote that revenge is a dish best served cold. But revenge visa vie execution of Johnson 17 years after his heinous crime cannot assuage the horrible suffering and permanent sense of loss endured by McEntee’s loved ones. Society’s vengeful act in kind accomplishes nothing for the victim’s family.
The specious argument that the death penalty deters crime remains wishful thinking that we would all live in a safer world if the killers would be killed. But research long ago established that criminals do not weigh a life sentence in jail versus the death penalty when contemplating murder.
The overall financial expense of the pursuit of the death penalty with the expenditures for prosecutors and public defenders, the drain on judicial resources during repeated appeals to state and federal appellate courts, and the employment of death row guards and executioners, undercut the contention that the death penalty somehow saves the State money compared to a life sentence. Debatable savings of the State’s lucre seems a perverse way to define society’s mores.
It remains ‘easy’ to be for the death penalty without being personally involved in the gruesome details involved in state sanctioned killing, which runs afoul of both legal and Judeo-Christian law. Murder in both the first or second degree involves the premeditated killing of a person with malice aforethought—which by definition describes the death penalty where the State premeditates and painstakingly establishes the means to kill the killer. Tacking on an exemption for murder for the State makes no legal or moral sense.
Death vengeance retribution neither makes us safer, nor brings back the dead. Instead, state sanctioned executions makes us coldly indifferent to those individuals in the criminal justice system who act as our proxies in jobs that involve strapping a condemned man down, his arms outstretched to form a cross, and injecting him with lethal poison.
Missouri should practice what we preach by abolishing the death penalty. Incarcerate heinous criminals for life without a chance for parole where they can spend their lives in the living hell of a maximum-security prison awaiting final judgment in the hereafter.
[published KC Star, 12/11/22; Post-Dispatch, 12/23/22}
2 replies on “Extinguish the Death Penalty”
A very thought provoking piece Paul. In principle I agree completely. There can be no doubt that the death penalty has been and still is applied unevenly. Class and race, too many times, are determining factors in sentencing, not to mention the finality and inability to overturn incorrect verdicts, once the sentence is carried out. My head says we should abolish the death penalty. But then there are such heinous crimes, by truly evil monsters, that I fall back on the sentiment of leaving the judging to God, but wanting to expedite the meeting.
My feelings against were galvanized after watching the movie, The Green Mile. The movie itself was too supernatural for my taste, but the scenes of government employees killing people in a deliberate and premeditated manner felt all wrong.