A few new wrinkles in the death-penalty debate.
I suppose I have a position on the death penalty, but just barely: I think capital punishment should probably be illegal -- but if we aren't going to outlaw it, we should probably use it way more often. Statistics have consistently shown that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent for murderers, but I suspect it would serve as a major deterrent for teenage shoplifters. When I enter the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race against Lynn Swann, this will be a key plank in my platform. Nobody will ever accuse Chuck Klosterman of being soft on (non-drug-related) crime.
Like most present-day problems, the debate over capital punishment amounts to a loose confederation of ethical quandaries that are well-known to any adult who's ever considered a problem more complex than how to beat the Legend of Zelda. Should society punish people by replicating the same act as the criminal? Is it irresponsible to inflict an irreversible penalty? Is vengeance sometimes a justifiable motivation? Et cetera. Whenever people discuss capital punishment, these are the points they argue. But I've recently been thinking about a specific facet of the larger debate. My question is this: Can someone be too old to die?
Clarence Ray Allen was executed by the state of California on January 17, minutes after his seventy-sixth birthday. His lawyers fought hard for a stay of execution, and not just because their client claimed he was innocent. (Allen was originally given a life term for killing his son's girlfriend in 1974 but was later sentenced to death for orchestrating at least three more murders from his prison cell.) Allen's paradoxical argument for clemency was that he was too old and sick to be executed. He was blind and half deaf, he suffered from diabetes, and he was consigned to a wheelchair. Part of his contention was that the California death chamber wasn't wheelchair-accessible. In essence, Allen felt he shouldn't be killed by the state because the execution would probably kill him.
In September of 2005, Allen was resuscitated by prison medics after he suffered a heart attack. This is the most intriguing twist to the story: The state of California saved Allen's life so that it would be able to kill him later. This is like having sex with someone you despise just so you can break up with her on Valentine's Day. "The 'People of California' are in a morbid race with God to see who can kill Clarence Ray Allen first," wrote Michael Kroll in the January 10 issue of New America Media, and that's a flashy little sentence. However, I think Kroll had it backward. The People of California were in a morbid battle against God to keep Clarence Ray Allen alive until they could kill him on their own terms. And I don't know if this makes the People of California merciful, wicked, or insane.
What exactly is the cutoff for this kind of conundrum? Let's pretend I am an executioner for the state of California. (Perhaps I find the work a little depressing, but the benefits are great and the hours are flexible.) I am scheduled to execute an aging serial killer at 12:01 a.m. by means of lethal injection. (This is someone who has killed eight hundred innocent people, and I have no doubt about his guilt.) The inmate is being strapped to the death table, and I am methodically preparing the sodium thiopental (this is a sedative) and the pancuronium bromide (this is the paralyzing agent) and the potassium chloride (this is the toxic agent). But at 11:50, the killer goes into cardiac arrest. What is the protocol? My gut reaction would be to work faster, but I'm certain killing the man early would not be an option; I'd probably lose my job. I could just wait it out and see if he's still alive at 12:01, but that seems beyond medieval; nobody wants to stand around and witness an eleven-minute seizure. What (I assume) would happen is this: The prisoner would be removed from the table, rushed into the infirmary, and saved by medical personnel. The cost of this emergency treatment would be paid by the California taxpayers the murderer didn't get around to murdering. The execution would be postponed until his heart was stronger; he would then be injected with potassium chloride, which would cause cardiac arrest and kill him.
Now, I realize this scenario is wholly hypothetical and (possibly) more interesting than plausible. But it does illustrate a core problem with capital punishment: Even when you accept its existence, it's hard to regulate. As soon as death becomes part of the equation, all the other rules change -- often because they suddenly become irrelevant. For example, inmates on death row are always on suicide watch. They are not allowed to kill themselves. Why? If a jury decides that someone must die on the morning of June 1, why is he obligated to live until May 31? This is akin to someone getting a DUI and having his driver's license revoked for eighteen months while also being prohibited from selling his car. "The defendant's '88 Caprice Classic must remain in his garage with a full tank of gasoline," the judge would decree. "He obviously can't drive it, because that is the penalty. But he can't just decide to quit driving."
I do not know if Clarence Ray Allen deserved to die for his crimes; I do know that he didn't deserve to live simply because he was old. I am also unsure whether Crips founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams deserved to be executed last December for his gang-related past, but I certainly don't think he deserved to be spared because he became a nice guy during the twenty-five years he was in prison; he was sentenced to death for killing people, not for being a jerk. These situations seem to happen a few times every year: We learn of a convicted felon who was condemned to death row many years ago. At long last, the day of reckoning approaches -- but the prisoner is no longer the person we convicted. He (or she, in the case of Karla Faye Tucker) is now sitting in a wheelchair or quoting the Bible or writing poetry about the duality of man, and we all get nervous. Suddenly, it feels fucked up to kill this person. But here is the truth: It's alwaysfucked up to kill people like this, or it's never fucked up to kill people like this. And if thirty-eight U.S. states are willing to align themselves with the latter notion, they need to embrace the totality of that decision, even when it makes them (and us) uncomfortable.
There is a minority of Americans who hate capital punishment, and there is a minority who love it; everyone else is somewhere in the middle. By and large, the country favors it. But I've always suspected there is an unspoken fallacy among those who mildly support the death penalty. Even though they find the idea of killing people semibarbaric, they subconsciously associate capital punishment with the vague elimination of evil (almost as if the world contained a finite amount of invisible malevolence that could be slowly drained through the destruction of especially bad people). This is why cases like Allen's drive people crazy; they see a blind, deaf man who can't walk fifteen feet, and it feels like that evil is already gone.
Which doesn't matter at all.
The death penalty is not the solution to the social problem of evil; it is the social response to a specific kind of evil behavior. And it might be the wrong response. But killing the old and pathetic doesn't make it any worse.
Great article!