Now that Timothy McVeigh has been executed, I suppose we’re all supposed to stop talking about it–to “enjoy closure,” a bit like the election.
But McVeigh’s execution was troubling on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. It was alarming to watch the procedural impatience, the official “just get it over with” mentality, despite defense lawyers’ not having had a chance to go through more than 4,000 pages of FBI documents that no one disputes ought to have been turned over before McVeigh’s trial.
It was distressing to hear the semantic shiftiness of our President as he described the event. To us individualists at home, he said that it was McVeigh who “chose” this method of reckoning; to a European audience it was “the will of the people in the United States.” Like some libertarian Pontius Pilate, Bush washed his hands of any responsibility, skillfully uncoupling the role of the executive from execution. It’s bad enough to have a death penalty; it is positively chilling when the chief poohbah shrugs it off as though helpless, assigning federally engineered death to forces beyond him.
It was incredible to see anti-death penalty commentators apologizing constantly, always having to blither “of course no one condones his actions”–as though arguing for life imprisonment made one the squishiest, most bleeding-heart of moral equivocators. As a New York Times commentary observed, “Experts said it was the wrong case to debate–many people who do not approve of the death penalty wanted Mr. McVeigh to die.”
Yet if one really wants to test the commitment of a civilization to its expressed principles of justice, the McVeigh case is exactly the right case to debate. There was little question as to his guilt (even if the question of conspiracy remains an open one in some quarters), his crime was inexpressibly reprehensible and he maintained a demeanor of controlled, remorseless calculation to the end. In other words, it is precisely the dimension of his evil that presses us to consider most seriously the limits of state force. The question is whether we want to license our government to kill, rather than just restrain by imprisoning, the very worst among us.
Much recent debate about capital punishment has focused on probabilities: the repeated demonstration that “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a matter of considerable uncertainty and outright error. I have recommended before Actual Innocence by Jim Dwyer, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, and I do so here again. These lawyers’ work with the Innocence Project has led to dozens of releases from death row and to calls for moratoriums in states where pro-death penalty sentiment once ran high.
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There is also the question of disparate impact, particularly upon minorities and the poor. “There are no racial overtones in [McVeigh’s] conviction,” wrote the New York Times in an editorial. Perhaps that’s true if considered in a vacuum, but certainly not with regard to its procedural legacy. If the FBI couldn’t get right the most important and supposedly most careful investigation in its history–and still no stay was granted–then there is no hope in any other case. McVeigh’s “nonracial” fate, moreover, will surely be invoked highhandedly in all those more routine, less highly scrutinized cases. The fact that of the remaining federal death row inmates only two are white is, according to John Ashcroft, merely “normal.” For more on this aspect of the debate, I recommend reading Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future, by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and The Nation‘s own Bruce Shapiro. Forthcoming from The New Press, it is an eloquent argument against the inequity of the death penalty’s administration and makes a compelling case against its violent irreversibility, its unredeemable finality as pursued by prosecutors, judges and juries who are, after all, far from all-knowing or divine.
One of the saddest parts of the McVeigh saga was listening to the endlessly amplified testimonials of those survivors and family members whose sentiments were premised on vengeance being “mine” rather than the Lord’s. One woman wished the electric chair had been used, because it would have been more painful. Another said, “I think bombs should be strapped on him, and then he can walk around the room forever until they went off and he wouldn’t know when it would happen.”
Such traumatized expectations led to predictable disappointment. “I really wanted him to say something,” said one witness. “I wanted him to see me,” said another. “I thought I would feel something more satisfying, but I don’t,” said a victim’s son. “For him just to have gone asleep seems unfair.” This sort of desire for “more” leaves us poised on the edge of an appetite for re-enacted violence and voyeurism. Given the horrific losses McVeigh’s crime incurred, this primal hunger can be almost seductive–a howl of mourning very hard to resist, never mind debate. But it is dangerous if it allows us to lose sight of the fact that the debate we must have is, again, about the limits of state force, not about devising the perfect mirror of each victim’s suffering.
But the bottomlessness of that individual trauma is not something we can afford to ignore either. For a wise and extremely moving reflection on this dimension, I recommend Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, forthcoming from Princeton. Brison, a Dartmouth College philosophy professor who was raped, strangled and left for dead, analyzes the post-traumatic stress syndrome that still colors her life and reflects on the resilience needed to carry on. “Trauma,” she writes, “destroys the illusion of control over one’s life. It fractures the chronology of a life’s narrative–not in the way a stopped watch makes time look like it’s standing still, but like the thirteenth chime of a crazy clock that throws everything that came before into question.”
“9:03” reads an inscription on the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Would that we could undo that awful moment in Oklahoma City by sacrificing McVeigh’s one life for all the others, but the difficult paradox of healing is having to live on and through that wilderness of grief with no illusion of control.
