Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, by Helen Prejean, C.S.J., Random House 1993, 278 pp, $21.00. Sister Prejean wants to abolish capital punishment. This very personal account of her work in the prisons of Louisiana is an attempt to make the strongest case possible against legal execution. It is an intimate, anguished plea and she gives us many arguments in no particular order. However, the key arguments for and against capital punishment lie in what she does not say, and seems not to understand. The PR for this book has emphasized her dual role as counselor to death-row inmates as well as to the families of their victims. The balance in the book is not quite so even- handed--ten chapters are devoted to her involvement with and legal advocacy for condemned criminals, while only the eleventh describes her work with victims' groups, which she came to after years of labor on Death Row. Most families understandably reject the services of a nun who befriends and attempts to defend the killers of their children and loved ones, but Sister Prejean does admirable work in finding support for grieving families. In the end, she is helpless and ineffectual in the presence of their pain and anger. All of her effective efforts are on behalf of the condemned. The Sister believes that no crime, however heinous, warrants the death of the perpetrator. Executions are murder, worse than murder, because they are always tortuous and premeditated and committed in the name of "civilized" society. We are supposed to be better than that; simply lashing out in vengeance demeans us all. What, then, is the appropriate punishment for acts of inhuman violence? Life imprisonment, she suggests, but later offers that 25 years with compensation to the family might work also. The prisoners have to be paid more, though, if they are to make any serious restitution. How does she determine that this is just the right amount of punishment? What moral calculus does she use? None that she describes; only that these are punishments the public will accept if they are educated to them carefully. Sister Prejean's first contact on Death Row was an apparently endearing young man named Elmo Patrick ("Pat") Sonnier, who, at age 27, with his younger brother Eddie, age 20, kidnapped a teen-aged couple, raped the young woman and murdered both by shooting them in the backs of their heads. By the time she arrived they had been identified by witnesses, had confessed and mutually accused each other, and their guilt was stipulated by all. Eddie was serving a life sentence and Pat was scheduled for the electric chair. The Sister befriends him and spares no effort to keep him from his execution. She becomes a bit unhinged as the day approaches, comparing him to Christ (the "Executed Criminal") and to the Holy Innocents slaughtered by Herod. After his death, on the eve of her next execution, she prays to him to protect the soul of the condemned man, as if Pat were some sort of beneficent saint in Heaven. (No doubt wonderful transformations occur in the afterlife, but we might hesitate to have the ghost of Pat Sonnier directed to us at the time of our death). And die in the electric chair he does, using his last words to blame his brother for the worst part of the crime. The Catholic Church takes charge of the corpse and buries him with a degree of ceremony that causes weeks of outrage in the community. The Sister sees a headline: "Executed Killer Blessed with Burial for the Elite," and the article had said that this executed murderer "received in death what few Catholics ever achieve--a funeral Mass conducted by a bishop and burial within the shadow of graves of other bishops." There is no mistaking the thrust of the article--Pat Sonnier was buried as a hero. She finds this terribly unfair, but the criticism stings and at this point she resolves to try do something for the families of murder victims. Her next condemned prisoner is much less endearing than the first. Robert Willie had committed two murders prior to his eight-day spree in 1980 when he, with Joseph Vaccaro, raped and murdered eighteen-year-old Faith Hathaway, repeatedly raped another teenage girl, tied her boyfriend to a tree and shot and stabbed him, leaving him paralyzed for life. During his trial, Willie blew kisses at the surviving girl and made throat-cutting gestures at the paralyzed boy. Faith Hathaway was stabbed seventeen times. Says her father: "The coroner's report said her vagina was all tore up." She was left to rot, and her uncle, a dentist, later extracted her decaying jawbone from a body bag to make a positive identification from dental records. Yet even the remorseless person who did this to her has a moral code and admits the justice of capital punishment for crimes that he finds heinous. As Robert Willie tells the Sister: I'm gonna be honest with you ma'am, I believe in the death penalty in some instances, like for people who rape and torture little children. Messin' over adults is one thing, but little innocent kids? I'd pull the switch on them myself. She finds this "ironic" and attempts to instruct him: I told him that I think the state shouldn't have the power to kill anybody and that if the state is allowed to kill those who torture children, then why not those who kill old people, the mentally retarded, teenagers (close to home, but he doesn't get it), public officials, policemen? Where would it stop, I ask him, and who would decide? He says he'll think about it, but he doesn't cede the point. Nor must we. The lesson we learn from this exchange is not the one she intended. Missing from Sister Prejean's account is any notion of the justness of the death penalty, of what Robert Nisbet calls "the community of crime and punishment": Consider. A murder is committed in the village or town. The impact goes far beyond the victim; it goes to family and kindred, indeed to the entire village or town. Tensions compounded of fear, dread, pity, anger, desire for revenge mount quickly and steadily among the inhabitants. A life has been foully taken, a sacred value violated. The tensions become higher as the search takes place, still higher when the murderer is captured and found guilty. Only with his just punishment do the tensions of the community subside. The stain upon the group has been washed away by the discovery and pun ishment of the villain. That drama, that pattern or community of elements, is one of the most ancient in the history of human society. It is also one of the most powerful in respect of the development of morality and the preservation of social order. [1] The Sister finds capital punishment so grotesquely immoral that she does not attempt to understand or present arguments in its favor. Walter Berns, George Will and Ernest van den Haag are quoted in a few brief sentences, but she does not bother to refute them. Only ignorance, maliciousness or bureaucratic malfeasance can explain the death penalty. We can assemble her scattered arguments and examine them briefly. First there are a whole set of weak or "non- sequitur" arguments against capital punishment: * It is not a deterrent and statistics prove this. We may rightly question what social science research can and cannot prove, but must certainly respond that justice, not deterrence, is the chief issue. * All other civilized nations ban it. "If everyone else jumped off of a cliff..." We may simply ask "How were these other nations chosen as exemplars of civilized behavior?" * Life imprisonment is worse punishment. If opponents believed that they would be working against life imprisonment, not capital punishment. * It is too expensive. If it were cheaper, would opponents give up the fight? * Polls show the public will accept life sentences instead of death. (Bogart: "I wouldn't mention Paris if I were you; it's poor salesmanship.") If the polls were otherwise (as they actually already are), would advocates go with the majority? * It is applied in a racially biased fashion. If white people are getting away with murder, this is a call for more scrupulous enforcement and prosecution of the laws. It is not an argument against any specific form of punishment. * Defendants have poor legal representation. If procedural reforms are necessary, propose them. Again, this is not a argument relevant to the moral case. * People really don't understand the facts about capital punishment. (An argument attributed to Thurgood Marshall). The obvious inference is that we should be ruled by judges. * * * Her other arguments deserve greater consideration, although none are as sound as Sister Prejean thinks them to be: * The protracted waiting period before execution is a tortuous experience, making it cruel and unusual punishment. We can accept the premise that we ought not to torture prisoners. But might confinement itself be torture to some people? What should we do with them? The lengthy delays between sentencing and execution are the result of procedural safeguards used to the limit by the condemned and their advocates. We ought to speed up the process, although this is not exactly what opponents want. It is perhaps tragic that fear of death is the most intense emotion that many people feel. The only remedy is faith or philosophy, or at least the sensible recognition that there are fates worse than death. As Russell Kirk writes: For all of us, in the end, death is the ultimate mercy. I do not understand why we should deny that mercy to slayers whose earthly existence is a grave; nor why we should deny a merciful protection to the guiltless whose purpose in this world may be undone by those guilty slayers. [2] * The grisly nature of capital punishment makes it inhumane. The debate is very bloody. Proponents stress the horrific, bestial nature of the crimes, while opponents dwell on the cold-blooded details of legal execution. The debate is reminiscent of abortion protests, where both sides want to display horrors in an attempt to generate moral outrage and revulsion. Many necessary human endeavors are grisly; war and medicine, for example. These things occur because they must, arguments from squeamishness cannot and must not prevent them. Oddly enough, the Sister rages against execution by lethal injection, because it is painless and less grisly and therefore more conscience-salving and hypocritical. * The irrevocable nature of execution makes the chance of mistakes unthinkable. Tragic, yes; unthinkable, no. That we must be immobilized because we are fallible is not a serious argument. No human endeavor is free from error; if we are a just people we will do the best we can. Necessary actions often have tragic consequences: many innocents die in wartime, doctors sometimes kill their patients with drastic treatments. Shall we ban war? Convince the victims of aggression that they should not defend themselves. Shall we ban medicine? * The State does not have the right to kill. It murders when it does so. Not so. We maintain the State as an agent of legitimate coercion. Although we can imagine a society where government does not fill potholes or fund art exhibitions or redistribute wealth, we cannot imagine a society where the State does not enforce a monopoly on premeditated violence. It is the first reason for having government, and the last trait we can take from it. If we do so, we descend to the war of all against all, or more accurately, of warring clans and gangs, of perpetual blood-feuds and vendetta. This is a glaring hole in Sister Prejean's premises. "What is wrong for the individual is wrong for the State. Killing is always murder." She does not discuss cases of self-defense or war, although she says she would have done "anything" to protect Pat Sonnier's victim from him. To a reasonable person "anything" includes deadly force directed against the aggressor, which most people agree is not murder. Similarly, it is a rare conscience that asserts that all soldiers who kill in wartime are murderers. So, we see that killing is not always murder, and that the State may rightly do what individuals may not. The remaining question is whether capital punishment is also an example of legitimate State action. * Only God may rightly determine the time of a person's death. This is a variant of the previous argument, and subject to the same objections. God does not administer human society so closely as to relieve us of life and death decisions. If someone jumps off a cliff, gravity will hurl him to his death. This is a natural consequence of the action and no one protests against the unfairness of the falling man's fate. But there is no _natural_ consequence for someone who murders another person. Only society can supply a consequence. * Capital punishment demeans civilized society. We have advanced beyond it. Some say "Yes, some crimes are so heinous that the offender deserves death, but we must not debase ourselves by killing him." The definition of "civilized" people seems to be "those who do not kill" and most sensible people will add "except for just cause, such as in defense of self or others or in wartime." To which we may ask, why is that the definitive list? Why not shorter, or longer? If a man deserves death, why may we not justly kill him? * The death penalty is incompatible with Christian faith. Sister Prejean asks "Would Jesus pull the switch?" We may doubt that he would, although speaking of the little children, he did say: But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense commeth! This at least demonstrates the difference between being warm-hearted and soft-headed. Most Christians understand that their faith is not one of absolute pacifism. We would like to ask the Sister in return, what would Jesus have done had he been present when Faith Hathaway was raped and murdered, stabbed seventeen times? She says she would have done "anything" to protect the victim. Is that what the Savior would have done? The alternative would seem to be a non-violent intervention, resulting in the death of both the rescuer and the victim--an ineffectual gesture. It is honestly difficult to imagine Jesus in either scenario. * * * When the spurious arguments have been put aside, we are left with the actual problem: supporters of capital punishment believe it is _just_ and abolitionists do not. The gulf between the two camps is not easily bridged. We have what Thomas Sowell calls a "conflict of visions." The opponents hold contrary and irreconcilable premises prior to all possible arguments. This is why advocates on both sides paint the most gruesome pictures: they hope their listeners will be transformed, be shifted from their foundations and finally moved, by outrage or disgust, to adopt a whole new faith. To Sister Prejean, all the reasons and justifications made by those who want to execute her death-row friends are a thin cover for incomprehensible cruelty and evil. We can deduce her premises, not quoting directly now: Deterrence is the only possible argument for capital punishment. It is an illegitimate argument. All pain is equivalent. The suffering of the victim and of the offender are equally evil and have equal demands upon our compassion. Joe kills John, or John kills Joe-- what is the difference? Everyone suffers. We are all guilty, or all innocent. None of us is responsible for what we do--we are products of an unjust society, of poverty and racism. Death is the worst possible fate. The State has no rights which individuals do not. The State has no duty to kill; it murders when it does so. Civilized people never kill. Others, holding other views, understand what Wilmoore Kendall wrote thirty years ago: Who, asks Thomas Aquinas, has the _right_ to turn the other cheek?...Who has the _right_ to submit to unjust aggression? And Aquinas answers, Only the man upon whom no higher responsibility falls; only the man who owes no other duty, in justice or in charity, to a friend or a wife or a child or a society that would be adversely affected by the aggression. Most of us understand the just rewards of heinous crimes. Perhaps, as children, we were never explicitly told "the murderer deserves death," but we intuitively know it to be true; a love and reverence for life demands no less. We attempt justice, tempered with mercy, as best we can. Others, protecting life at all costs, value and respect it less. In one sense Sister Prejean may be right. If Nisbet's "community of crime and punishment" is broken, if people no longer believe that crimes are justly punished they will cease to believe in justice altogether. Then it will no longer matter what happens to murderers: lock them up or let them go. It will be all the same. # # # [1] Robert Nisbet, _Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary_, Harvard University Press, 1982. [2] Russell Kirk, "Criminal Character and Mercy," Modern Age, Fall 1980. [3] Wilmoore Kendall, _The Conservative Affirmation in America_, Gateway Editions 1985. # # # Bill McClain