Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301070087
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
IT'S WRONG TO REVEL IN DEATH
Death and death and death.The boy was only 4 years old. Apparently targeted at random. The man kidnapped him, tortured him for several hours, raped him, killed him, raped him again.
The murderer said he understood the evil he had committed. He didn't want to do it again. He believed in heaven and hell. He wasn't sure, but he figured he would be going to hell. The penalty for his crime is death. He wished to die by hanging, rather than lethal injection, as a partial atonement for his sin.
His wish was granted.
Outside the prison, an angry crowd was in a jubilant mood. The child molester was about to die. A young woman in black holds up an oblong piece of cardboard on which are written the words "an eye for an eye." Around her neck is a slender cord, fashioned in a loop with a hangman's knot tied in it. She and the crowd counted down the seconds to the murderer's hanging and raised a cheer when the seconds ran out.
An innocent 4-year-old boy died. So horribly that we cannot even think about it without a wave of nausea, without tears, without righteous anger.
And his killer died in what is probably the most risky and least efficient of the legal methods of killing allowed by the state.
And a part of that young woman - and all of us - dies every time a crowd acts like the one in front of that Washington prison.
It is a fact that the major religions followed in the Western and Near Eastern world allow for capital punishment.
Some crimes deserve retribution or society needs the ultimate protection from the potential actions of some people.
But relatively few of the adherents of those religious systems would argue for full enforcement of the punishments once endorsed by the founders of their faiths.
Not only do most of us now reject capital punishment as a consequence for homosexual activity and blasphemy, we even have grown too sophisticated to adhere to laws that were once considered humane.
The biblical admonition requiring an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and a life for a life was intended, scholars tell us, as a limitation on the amount of retribution a victim could demand.
So, if you knocked someone's tooth out in a fight, the injured person could demand only a tooth in return - not a more crucial body part. Likewise, even a death could be repaid only with a single death, not with the death of an entire family.
We now believe there are other, better ways to render justice for hurt - though some might question the use of the courts or prisons to do that.
Whether or not we agree about the necessity or effectiveness of capital punishment, we should be able to agree that to revel in it is wrong.
Capital punishment may satisfy our fears about certain criminals ever gaining even the possibility of release. It may or may not deter some from committing certain crimes. It certainly can satisfy our primal urge for revenge - for the settling of scores.
But as it is currently applied - almost exclusively in cases of the most heinous, brutal murders - it never rights a wrong. It never gives back a life for the one taken.
To revel in the execution, cheering its fulfillment, is so barbarous as to lower those participating to a level of contempt almost as low as the condemned.
We don't need Scripture to tell us that. We know it in our hearts. We've known it for a long time.
Among the world's masterpieces of fiction is a work called "The Lord of the Rings." At one point the hero decries the fact that one of his foes was not killed when a relative had the chance to stab him unawares.
"He deserves death."
A wise man responded:
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that [he] can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it."
The issue of capital punishment cannot be reduced to a few platitudes. It is too complex for that, too emotional a subject.
But a society that allows for its necessity, for the time at least, can have no excuse for glorying in its use. We must despise that. We must condemn it.
Cody Lowe, a staff writer for this newspaper, reports on issues concerning religion.