Taking Life

MANY YEARS AGO a young woman was brutally stabbed to death in the parking lot of a suburban mall on the outskirts of a mid sized midwestern American city. The motive remains a mystery; presumably mental illness. For the benefit of those of less than a certain age, a "mall" was, and on rare occasions still is a large circuitous building within which are housed as many as several dozen retail businesses on both sides of the hallway , connected by a central concourse. Malls were, and some still are, anachronistically, corporeal rather than virtual. The term is "brick and mortar". The murderer was duly convicted, and if memory serves was sentenced to life imprisonment, due to a successful plea of insanity, and spared the death penalty. This was not long after the death penalty had been reinstated, after decades of absence, by the United States supreme Court. The sparing of the life of the murderer for such a senseless and bloody crime was extremely unpopular throughout the community, and caused a considerable public outcry. A socially conscious, politically charged young graduate student at the time, I jumped directly into the fray by writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, which was printed in real time on real paper, not online, being as how personal computers did not yet exist, and would not exist, for several more decades. In my letter I argued that the verdict and sentence constituted an appropriate rendering of justice, because in this instance, and in all instances, the death penalty was contrary to the laws of God and of the United States constitution. My letter was not well received in my politically and religiously conservative community, but was sufficiently well argued that it received no arguments against its reasoning, but only its conclusion, which i thought odd, inconsistent, and intellectually dishonest. As I recall, the essence of my argument was that putting criminals to death does nothing to provide restitution for the victim(s) of the crime, but in fact only compounds the original crime by trying to make a right from two wrongs. Also, I offered the rather unusual rationale that putting a murderer to death is actually not a punishment, but a relief from the punishment for the guilty party, sparing him or her a life of extremely unpleasant incarceration, which is surely the most severe form of punishment imaginable. I also offered the opinion that the death penalty should be considered cruel and unusual, thus unconstitutional, as it once was, because it is certainly applied only infrequently, and the cruelty derives from subjecting the convicted criminal to a period of awaiting execution, with the attendant terror of anticipating one's own death, as a time and date known beforehand. none of these arguments were original. Amid the uproar precipitated by my letter, a good friend of mine wrote own of his own, disputing everything I said, and basically arguing that death was the only just remedy for such a heinous, senseless crime. As I recall, the community responded far more favorably to his position, even though I felt that he offered little in the way of actual well conceived reasoning, but relied almost exclusively on an emotional appeal. Now, as then, the most ardent proponents for capital punishment are those in the conservative Christian community, which I find odd, and contradictory. The Mosaic commandment "thou shalt not kill" is quite clear, and includes neither exceptions nor qualification. One might conclude that all who truly embrace the Judeo-Christian moral philosophy would not only be against corporal punishment, but would be pacifists and vegetarians as well. But of course, in the Old testament, God repeatedly violates his own laws, so, why shouldn't they, unless they, like god, are somehow excepted from following them. Verily, among today's conservative christian community, one is hard pressed to fine opponents of the death penalty, or, for that matter, pacifists and vegetarians. but, by the smae token, among conservative Christians can be found far more personal profit seeking capitalists than socialists eager to render unto Caesar, sell whatsoever thous hast, and give unto the poor, for the poor, among these arguably hypocritical people, are solely responsible for their own plight, and therefore deserve neither sympathy nor assistance.