Julia Schwartz
May 12, 2003
Isn’t
Capital Punishment in Cold Blood?
While reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the debate raging in my mind as to my thoughts concerning capital punishment born in the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the potential punishment of Osama bin Laden came to a pinnacle. My problem is that I think certain people don’t deserve to live – but I think it is altogether inhumane to kill them. For instance, in the case of Osama, while I by no means thought he deserved to live for the atrocities he orchestrated, the idea of CIA assassins hunting him and others down repulses me. “An eye for an eye…” – but “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
It is clear that Capote’s intent with In Cold Blood is to fight against the death penalty, and where I can identify with his argument, I can’t say for certain whether I can justly support it. Capote clearly did a good job of introducing us to Perry and Dick, showing us their intimate characteristics – their human qualities. I realized during one class discussion that we as readers are unfamiliar with the Clutter family because it dehumanizes them: by not believing in the Clutter family’s existence, it is harder to believe in their demise. As such, we see Perry and Dick as the humans, and we forget about the lives they ended, which is clearly their doom. A general consensus of the class seems to be that the majority likes Dick and Perry, especially Perry, and these feelings of concern for the protagonists (for I do believe that the two men are the protagonists, perhaps set up by Capote as victims) promote the reader’s disdain for the death penalty.
Quite frankly, I don’t feel this way. I can’t imagine how Dick and Perry could so brutally and cruelly murder the Clutters; I don’t understand the utter disregard they hold for human (and even canine) life. Because of this, I can only see Perry and Dick as savage killers, despite any efforts by Capote to convince me otherwise. He could go on ad infinitum about the gentle qualities of Perry and Dick, and though I would be able to see them as killers with a soft side, they still remain killers.
So, then, what do I feel about the death penalty? I have already established that Perry and Dick are guilty. I don’t buy the deluge of insanity pleas -- perhaps you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re killing someone, but as someone once said, anyone who takes another person’s life has to be insane. I also hate plea bargains. There, I could cite the injustice of our justice system - yet that is a different argument. I hear of the atrocities certain people commit, and I wonder how they should still be afforded the privilege of life, but then I’ll drive past a prison and think of the people within its walls and wonder how they could be killed, or see images of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or Timothy McVeigh, and be baffled by how someone could simply determine that their lives were no longer deemed viable and chose to end them.
And in the same vein, how could one live his life, knowing the day of his death? How would you live your final days? How could Perry sit in a jail cell knowing that he only had a few more hours to live? How could you walk up to the gallows, or sit in the chair? Death is scary enough as it is; yet we are so lucky as to not to have to worry about it as a direct occurrence. How do you, like a doomed one, cope with knowing when it will occur? (Perhaps this is like Owen Meany… and I can’t say his knowledge necessarily served his happy pursuit of life.)
Or if I was to think of the Mayans, and their blood-letting and practices of human sacrifice: we, as Europeans, looked upon those cultures who partook in human sacrifice as uncivilized. Yet how is capital punishment really any different? We are still intentionally ending a life; at least the Mayans believed that the human sacrifice had meaning and value.
I realize that I don’t agree with capital punishment, for the concept is utterly unfathomable to me. An alternative, however, is yet to come to me, for I still don’t believe murderers, especially those like Perry and Dick and Osama deserve to live. We can’t keep them in jail; to be blunt, it’s too much of a drain on the economy. And we cannot simply let them continue their lives as normal, because what is to stop them from taking more innocent lives?
I suppose this is the point where I demonstrate my faith in the higher powers of the world and revert back to my thoughts after September 11th when I determined that Osama was not deserving of life anymore, but that we were not given the permission to end his life, so my conclusion was that he should suffer a tragic accident. After all, where is the justice in the fact that so many kind, innocent people die from gruesome diseases like cancer, and the “bad guys” always manage to live until old age? Why do we have to see such pain endured by the good, and then just zap the bad? Wouldn’t it be easier if those who committed crimes got stricken with such diseases?
But now I begin to repulse myself. I cannot bring myself to wish pain and suffering upon another person, as much as I despise him or what he did. Doing so is something that makes me feel incredibly guilty, heartless, and punishable. But what about Perry and Dick?
What about Perry and Dick…? What about all the thousands of criminals and murderers lying on hard cots in stony jail cells about the world? What do we do with them? Deep down, I know I wish that we could just put them in a “happy chair,” where the zap would be a zap of purification, and instead of dying they would merely repent, and cease their ‘lawless ways.’ Or perhaps everyone could just be born good, and there could be no evil!
The truth is, there is no just answer, for as long as evil exists in the world, it will exist. And as long as evil exists, we will have to deal with these questions – we will have to determine whose lives are more important, and we will be forced to make appalling decisions like one to tie a rope around Perry or Dick’s neck and loosen a hatch. I suppose the deaths we administer should be as quick, easy and painless as possible. All I know for now is that I can’t soundly agree with the death penalty, nor disagree with it. If it comes up on a ballot someday, I think I’ll just leave that question blank.