| Capital Punishment Does Not Kill Anguish By Jim Correale (Published in the East Boston Sun Transcript on May 18, 2001.) Despite the FBI's recently revealed flubs, the federal government is still set to execute Timothy McVeigh for his horrific and despicable murder of 168 innocent people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Assuming there are no more revelations of government sloppiness (or sneakiness), and assuming that McVeigh's lawyers don't pursue all the legal avenues open to them (and their client has insisted on not doing as much so far), America's public enemy #1 will have his life terminated by lethal injection on June 11. As of this week, 712 people have been executed in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment is constitutional. What makes McVeigh's case different from each of those is that his death would be the first under the auspices of the federal government, as opposed to individual states, since 1963. McVeigh is certainly a depraved person, and his crime is repulsive. He must be removed from society permanently; however, he should not be sentenced to die. The issue of capital punishment has been studied and discussed endlessly. The weight of evidence is so clearly stacked up against state-sponsored executions that I am not even sure what line of argument that pro-death penalty adherents use any more. Consider: Capital punishment is not a deterrent. Though 80% of those sentenced to death are in southern states, the murder rate in that region is the highest in the country. Capital punishment does not save any money. The appeals process that is part of any death sentence costs millions of dollars. Capital punishment can never be undone. At least 94 people have been exonerated after spending time on death row since 1976. That means that almost one in every eight people sentenced to die in the last 25 years was wrongly convicted. Capital punishment is never applied fairly. Those who die at the hands of the government are almost always poor. Those with enough cash to hire a legal team are certain to get off. Look at O.J. Simpson. If America needs any further indication that such practices are no longer part of the civilized world, we should look around at what other countries have done. Almost every one of our allies no longer employs the death penalty. In fact, countries that still use capital punishment are not allowed to join the European Union. Meanwhile, the US is aligned with the oppressive governments of China, Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq -- none the bastion of human rights that this nation likes to consider itself. Out in Oklahoma, the families of those who perished in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building were preparing to watch McVeigh die when they found out that the execution wouldn't happen until mid-June at the earliest. Some were angry. "We were really looking forward to this," said one relative. His words hint at the generally unspoken rationale for the sentence of death: revenge. Is our society, then, much better than McVeigh, who carried out his heinous crime as a twisted act of retribution against the federal government for the Branch Davidian debacle in Waco, Texas? Wouldn't it be a more fitting punishment to have such a murderer permanently sequestered from the rest of humanity, forced to dwell on his actions every waking moment? Wouldn't such a sentence be a better way to teach our children about the sanctity of all life? I would never condemn the relatives of the victims for their anger. Each of them had someone torn away from them unfairly, and now they want to see to it that the perpetrator of such a dastardly action gets his. They would like some measure of closure. But once the lethal dose has done its work and the reporters are gone, my sense is that the anguish will remain behind, not diminished in the least. |