Last night, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection. Muhammad, you might remember, is the infamous Beltway Sniper, who terrorized a large swath of Virginia, DC, and Maryland in 2002. I remember it very well, living in Richmond at the time, because he came as far south as Ashland, about fifteen minutes from where I was living, and school was closed for two days in absolute terror of kids being picked off at their bus stops. After our “sniper days” ended, I still walked nervously in the dark to await the bus, afraid the bullets could come at any moment. That’s a pretty weird goddamn feeling, and I will never, ever forget it. But at least I lived; others were not half as lucky.
And so he was caught, tried, sentenced, and executed. He died without remorse, maintaining his innocence, and went silently to his death. It was almost defiant. Remarked one witness, “They both [Muhammad and teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, who was a minor and thus will not be executed] committed the same crimes. No, I don’t feel any closure. I mean, it’s … it … nothing changes.”
Nothing changes.
If I may adhere to my blog’s tagline a moment, and find God in the geekiest place, this reminds me of an exchange from — you guessed it! — Deep Space Nine, the episode “Duet”. Major Kira has captured a Cardassian war criminal, the infamous Gul Darhe’el, who ran a brutal labor camp during Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor, renowned as it were for the murders committed under his watch and per his orders. Intent on seeing the man die for his crimes, he waits in his cell and mocks her. “Let them kill me. Don’t you see? It doesn’t change anything! Kill me. Torture me… it doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost, Major. You can never undo what I’ve accomplished. The dead will still be dead!” And it’s as true as anything he says. The dead will still be dead.
That’s the sad reality. It would be damned nice if killing the guilty could undo what they’ve done. It’d be damn nice if we could bring back every murder victim, undo every rape, resuscitate the bodies found under Gacy’s floorboards using the drops of life wrung from them. But we can’t. The past is done, and cannot be undoable. It lives in our memories and stalks us in our sleep and makes us fear for the future. We can’t fix things like that. So we settle. We settle for revenge. They hurt us, and now we’re going to hurt them. It is, in its way, justice.
But Bishop Loverde of Arlington — no heady liberal — responded to the upcoming execution in a characteristically pastoral way.
Because each person is created in God’s image and likeness, each person retains an intrinsic human dignity — even someone convicted of a heinous crime. This dignity is what leads the Church — while acknowledging the legitimate defense of individuals and society — to teach that the death penalty cannot be justified when a government has other ways to protect its people adequately against an unjust aggressor:
If non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267; Evangelium Vitae, 56).
In solidarity with this teaching and with the consistent appeals made by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for an end to capital punishment in modern society, we are called to choose hope — hope in the redemption of an immortal soul – over the despair embedded in the death penalty. If the woman had been stoned, she would not have had the opportunity to “not sin anymore.” And so, despite the initial reactions we might have in seeking revenge, we must not opt for the death penalty.
And that’s true, too. I spent some of yesterday praying for Mr. Muhammad, that he’d admit and seek forgiveness for his crimes, that he’d be shown the mercy none of us deserve, but that all of us have been offered: freedom from death and entry into life. Because nobody is irredeemable, and we are called to choose hope. And hope can have no place in a death penalty regime, where we make the decisions Christ alone can make. Life and death are not and should not be in our hands.
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November 11, 2009 at 12:35 pm
bronzedshoe
Well written. The death penalty makes no sense in our society.
November 11, 2009 at 12:38 pm
bill bannon
Each day I pray for criminals to repent as part of my daily prayers and then I pray for individuals I know of who many years ago were in that category and I’ve prayed for those individuals for decades now.
But the death penalty can motivate to repentance as we saw with the good thief (who one gospel account has reviling Christ with the bad thief at first and so he only repents much nearer to death than we sometimes think).
But the bishop is merely reciting the script on the death penalty from John Paul II and I’m sorry but I don’t see the turn around on this issue that John Paul orchestrated as “development” since there always were life sentences even during the Avignon papacy since life sentences only require relative affluence in a government….enough affluence to provide a locked room with food each day and then one can prevent that person from killing again whether in 1458 AD or 2009 AD.
But given a large prison and court ordered phone and mail contact, California found that some of its gang related lifers were ordering murders out on its streets in the hundreds over a ten year period. So John Paul’s “modern penology” is fine in small venues but utopian as soon as the country is large like the US or Brazil and coded messages among inmates and visitors are unstoppable also and also carry hit orders. Mexico by the way has not had a death penalty for a long period of time and it may be the worst advertisement for John Paul’s theory.
Once Romans 13:3-4 became canon during the later patristic era, the pacifism on such issues as was found in the early Fathers dissipates and from Augustine til 1969 (as to papal state law being changed in 1969), the death penalty was affirmed and verbally as recently as Pius XII in a 1952 speech. Strangely John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae did not even feel obligated to cite Romans 13:3-4 on the topic and deal with it’s description of the state as the “avenger” with “the sword” of God’s “wrath”…a passage first given in other wording for Jews and gentiles and (presaged for the gentiles later) in Genesis 9:5-6. Fundamenatlist type Protestants are not 100% incorrect that our relationship to scripture is not wholly consistent nor intimate though they too manage the same tendency of voiding verses on different issues like the Eucharist and divorce. But their being wrong so often does not preclude our being wrong at times on our treatment of God’s word.
November 13, 2009 at 12:09 am
Ian
I think this is one of those cases where you are right to say, “I’m neither conservative nor liberal; I’m Catholic.”
Keep in mind I’m dealing with extremes here, when I give the following examples. The liberal would say, “He’s not to blame for his crimes, it’s societies fault that he did those things. Each murder was just a cry for help.” While the conservative would say, “He’s a monster and deserves to die.”
The Catholic perspective as always, is a mixture of accountability and mercy. John Allen Muhammad did do monsterous things and he did do them of his own free will. He is responsible for his actions and therefore deserves punishment. But since he is made in the image and likeness of God and has intrinsic and indestructable dignity, it is wrong to execute him. He should have been locked away in a maximum security prison for life with no hope for parole.
I think in the case where criminals are still ordering hits from the inside, they are still a danger to society. If it can be proven, in a court of law, that they are still (even indirectly) commiting murder, it would be morally permissable to execute them. But Muhammad, not being involved in organized crime, would not have this ability. He therefore would be no longer a danger to society. So the death penalty was not morally justified in his case.
November 14, 2009 at 12:59 am
bill bannon
Ian
Aquinas agreed with you as to deterrence…but deterrence is no where mentioned in Romans 13:3-4…instead…something else is mentioned: avenging God’s wrath which no Catholic leader is even talking about at all. No one. And Muhammed may indeed have sooner or later murdered in prison since he was there not for a murder of passion as in romance…but he was there for calculated murders of total strangers….which prison has an abundance of. Jeffrey Dahmer and Fr. Geoghan were both murdered by lifers which again makes John Paul II look unaware of the topic as to its detailed reality rather than his imaginative rendition of what is happening…ie (no one is getting killed in prison).