Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412030011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Apparently bludgeoned to death, his head was beaten to a bloody pulp on the floor of a bathroom in a Wisconsin prison last week.
How appropriate for the man who killed 17 boys and men, frequently torturing his victims before sexually abusing their dead bodies and cutting off their heads.
How convenient for those of us who have qualms about state-imposed executions, that one of Dahmer's fellow residents did the deed. We can cluck about the failures of the prison system, but still feel relieved that the whole of humankind is no longer tainted by his presence among us.
If you don't have any problem with capital punishment, I suppose Dahmer's death really is a justifiable homicide - though it seems to me that accepting that premise is ethically akin to the vain attempt by some to justify the murders of abortion providers.
That is a slippery slope that has no bottom. If any one of us is morally empowered to be judge, jury and executioner for a murderer, why not for a child abuser or shoplifter or jaywalker?
For thousands of years now, civilized people have rejected that idea.
The biblical injunction limiting revenge to "an eye for an eye" was a tremendous advance for its time, preventing the taking of a life for an eye. Later, followers of Jesus were urged to decline even that allowance, to turn the other cheek and leave vengeance to God. Today, secular society demands that the state, through a set of supposedly impartial laws, be left the task of exacting revenge, retribution, punishment and, once in a while, rehabilitation.
These days, punishment - still the primary function of the criminal-justice system - rarely means death.
In the lifetimes of most of us, we have drastically limited the cases in which capital punishment is allowed. A number of other Western nations have eliminated it altogether, and in the United States we have confined its application to a few particularly monstrous types of murder.
Two decades ago, though, murder was just one of several crimes punishable by death in many states. A criminal could be electrocuted, gassed, hanged or shot by the state for rape, arson and burglary, as well as several types of murder. By the mid-1970s, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all those offenses didn't merit death and forced all the states to reconsider the penalty after outlawing it everywhere. In 1976, the court allowed states to reinstitute the ultimate penalty and many, including Virginia, did so almost immediately.
The reason so many did is to fulfill a deep-seated and widely held view that execution is the only appropriate response to some crimes.
Life in prison just doesn't seem to be enough.
The comments of some of Dahmer's former neighbors and victims' families this past week are evidence of that. His own grisly death was too easy, many of them said, one even suggesting that salt should have been rubbed into Dahmer's wounds during that last hour of his life.
Dahmer's widely reported religious conversion doesn't seem to hold much sway with anybody, either. Even those who believe that the worst sins can be atoned for by faith in Christ were reluctant to accept Dahmer's profession of faith as genuine. Maybe we just didn't want to believe it, preferring instead to feel that some crimes are so heinous they deserve eternal punishment.
There's a whole body of Christian theology devoted to this subject - including at least one parable attributed to Christ himself. The doctrine says that no matter how bad one's life has been, God can and is willing to forgive all if one is genuinely penitent, even at the moment of death.
As the parable points out, it doesn't always appear to be fair. That seems to be the point.
Sometimes forgiveness demands that we be willing to suffer hurt or humiliation without retaliation, without recompense. We expect that kind of forgiveness of God and we often expect it of each other.
The hard question is, can we give that kind of forgiveness?
I once thought that I had settled the question of capital punishment in my own mind. It just seems absurd to condemn murder by individuals and allow the state to kill people. I have to admit, though, that there are cases in which genuine concern for community safety or a powerful primitive sense of justice seem to demand death.
I'd like to think there is another way. Certainly, I'd like to believe that redemption is possible for every human being.
That, really, is what we have to decide. Was Jeffrey Dahmer redeemable - individually, socially, religiously? And even if we grant that redemption was possible, did he deserve the attempt and were we obliged to make it?
I believe the difficult, uncomfortable answers are "yes."
by CNB