McVeigh's Execution

So Timothy McVeigh is going to receive his lethal injection May 16, 2001. He has given up on legal appeals, but has reserved the right to seek clemency from President Bush. Good luck. While Governor of Texas, Bush only granted clemency once, and he shows no signs of doing so in this case.

Setting aside my objections to the death penalty for a moment, lets think about what's particularly repulsive about this execution. It's bad enough that some people have to watch because they are legally required to do so. However, they don't have enough room for all the people that actually want to watch, of their own free will, so they plan to let people watch by closed circuit television.

I'm appalled. Public executions used to be almost a public holiday. People of all ages came to watch, but I can't imagine what they got out of it. Maybe in a pre-television era there were not many entertainment choices; watching to see if the hangman screwed up, or how the victim behaved was as good as it got. From the viewpoint of the victim I suppose it was only slightly better than being put to death by the mob in the first place.

Much of our legal system was developed to protect people from abuse of power by the government of the day. Recently our society has begun to believe that accused criminals have too many rights, and that their victims don't have enough. And they are right, victims don't have many rights under our legal system, partially because it was assumed they could take care of themselves once the criminal was dealt with. As well, when the State is prosecuting it doesn't have a personal revenge motive, so trials could be handled impartially. The State would decide how much effort to put into seeking the criminal and bringing them to justice. In some societies McVeigh would have to be killed again and again to satisfy the thirst for revenge. Maybe his family would be hunted down and punished. We don't do things that way in a Common Law legal system.

We seem to have a particular horror of bad things happening to innocent people. When something bad happens to people that are "not-innocent" we say they had it coming. The people that McVeigh killed are about as innocent as they come. They were ordinary people going about their lives; never dreaming that they were about to die in a horrible tangle of concrete, metal, and glass. The suffering is over for the dead. Only the living have to cope with this tragedy.

It's callous, but that's life. Shit happens, and it will continue to happen. It doesn't matter how nice or nasty you are. When it happens to you the only choice is either roll over and die, or pick up the pieces and carry on. Somehow though, particularly in the United States, it has become fashionable to believe that nothing is ever one's own fault and that nothing bad is supposed to happen if you're a good person. There's always someone else to blame, and preferably, that someone else is rich. But it isn't enough any more to blame someone else and win damages. No, now they have to achieve closure, whatever that means.

Some people believe that watching McVeigh die will achieve that closure. If they can't get their lives back together in the six years since the explosion, watching someone on television get a needle and stop breathing isn't going to do it. Who are they going to blame after McVeigh is carried out of the execution chamber?