Jesse Weathington
Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting ‘The Remnant of an Army’ depicts
Dr William Brydon, sole survivor of the British retreat from Kabul in 1842.
The Massacre of Elphinstone’s Army
By Christmas 1841, Britain’s two representatives in Kabul had been assassinated. Her Majesty’s government ordered the British garrison in Kabul withdraw to the relative safety of Jalalabad, 90 miles away. 4,500 soldiers and mercenaries, with 12,000 civilians, set out 6 January 1842 with the understanding that they had been offered safe passage south, through the Khyber pass, and on to British India. They were massacred over the next seven days.
In the deep snow, on 13 January 1842, twenty officers and forty-five soldiers, mostly of the 44th East Essex Regiment of Foot, found themselves surrounded on a frozen hilltop near the village of Gandamak. With a handful of serviceable muskets, pistols, and a few unbroken swords, the retreating English had no hope. When offered arrangements for surrender, they replied: “Not bloody likely!”
Their captain was captured with a handful of men, wrapped wounded in the regimental colours. Of six mounted officers who managed to escape, five were shot along the road. Only one man survived to arrive in Jalalabad: East India Company Army Surgeon Dr. William Brydon, depicted above in The Remnants of an Army. His wounded horse collapsed dead upon arrival. Dr. Brydon only narrowly escaped death by dulling the blow from an Afghan sword with a copy of Blackwood’s Magazine, stuffed into his helmet for warmth. The incident dealt a severe blow to English ambitions in AfPak and marked a turning point in the First Anglo-Afghan war.
After the defeat of 1842, British forces launched a punitive expedition from Peshawar. At Defence of the Realm, Dr. Richard North notes that the September 1842 capture and razing of Kabul was “that which actually put an end to the war, leaving the UK victorious and the dominant power in the region but one temporarily resolved not to interfere in the internal politics of Afghanistan.” Such was the English victory.
The Great Game
From 1807 to the Second World War, Imperial Russia and Britain waged power politics across swathes of Central Asia. As Russian troops extended the remit of the Tsar eastwards, the British began to feel their interests in India were threatened; especially near the north-western border in Afghanistan. The First (1838-42), Second (1878-80), and Third (1919) Anglo-Afghan wars showed the ease with which a superior military force could overrun the remote country as well as the difficulty in subsequently imposing domestic order.
The modern history of Afghanistan has seen little tranquility. Since Persian authority had been rebuked and Afghanistan became a distinct nation, internal strife and foreign entanglement have been the rule rather than the exception. As Christopher Booker writes in the The Sunday Telegraph:
“What we are hardly ever told about Afghanistan is that it has been for 300 years the scene of a bitter civil war, between two tribal groups of Pashtuns (formerly known as Pathans). On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir.
Ever since Afghanistan emerged as an independent nation in 1709, when the Ghilzai kicked out the Persians, its history has been written in the ancient hatred between these two groups. During most of that time, the country has been ruled by Durrani, who in 1775 moved its capital from the Ghilzai stronghold of Kandahar up to Kabul in the north. Nothing has more fired Ghilzai enmity than the many occasions when the Durrani have attempted to impose their rule from Kabul with the aid of “foreigners,” either Tajiks from the north or outsiders such as the British, who invaded Afghanistan three times between 1838 and 1919 in a bid to secure the North-west Frontier of their Indian empire against the rebellious Ghilzai.”
Sound familiar? The peaceful periods read just as well. From 1880 to 1901 the Iron Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had succeeded in uniting all Afghanistan under a central government in Kabul. To do so, he had:
… defeated all enterprises by rivals against his throne; he had broken down the power of local chiefs, and tamed the refractory tribes; so that his orders were irresistible throughout the whole dominion. His government was a military despotism resting upon a well-appointed army; it was administered through officials absolutely subservient to an inflexible will and controlled by a widespread system of espionage; while the exercise of his personal authority was too often stained by acts of unnecessary cruelty. He succeeded in imposing an organized government upon the fiercest and most unruly population in Asia.
As many Americans discovered in 2001, history did not end some two decades ago. The prevailing disorder in Afghanistan is not the result of 9/11 but a continuation of the centuries old Great Game. Like the British, Tsarist, and Soviet empires, the imperial United States finds itself the hated interloper in a domestic disturbance. 2001 is 1979 is 1919 is 1878 is 1838. Mr Booker continues:
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, after years of Durrani rule, it was to support a revolutionary Ghilzai government. But this new foreign presence inspired general Afghan resistance which was why, by the late 1980s, the Americans were supporting the almost entirely Ghilzai-run Taleban and their ally Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the Taleban-Ghilzai got their revenge, imposing their theocratic rule over almost the whole country. In 2001, we invaded to topple the Taleban, again imposing Durrani rule, now under the Durrani President Karzai.
We are hopelessly out of our depth when attempting to think strategically about the problems of Afpak. Our ignorance prevents the understanding and definition of victory. Silence here is concession, so our foes define the conditions of victory. “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it”, as General Douglas MacArthur said. Still more fatal to enter a war without knowing what winning means. Another famous soldier said: “knowing is half the battle.” (The other half is red and blue lasers.)
Dr North concludes, “Whatever our grand aspirations, our intentions and our broader strategic objectives, the Ghilzai Pashtuns are reliving their own history. It should thus come as no surprise that when earnest young coalition officers solemnly tell tribal elders that they are from “the government” – i.e., Kabul – representing a Durrani president supported by Tajik soldiers, the “hearts and minds” message rather gets lost in translation.”
Perhaps the Great Game is like a dollar auction. The only way to win is not to play.
Great music, great illustrations. This is why I had to play outfield in Little League, I’m convinced of it.
JW, master of persuasion as he is, and potentially a future contributor to this blog, writes:
As you know, we disagree on this subject. While I would be prepared to argue that the capital punishment should never be applied, I think there are practical and philosophical reasons that would lead one to reject your position.
From a practical standpoint, I think there is evidence that the ultimate penalty’s deterrent effect is limited. Spectacular horrors like the ones you mention are not committed by men who are afraid of the consequences. The deterrent effect (if it exists) would only be among those lesser crimes for which you concede death is not appropriate punishment. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is little to recommend the death penalty that does not hold also true for life without parole.
I am certain that public hangings provided a grim lesson to potential criminals in years past, but our society has progressed beyond this practice. Even with a higher standard of evidence, it is conceivable that an innocent can be executed. There are well worn arguments about the cost of execution trials. It will not deter the heinous crimes where you would apply it.
On philosophical grounds, it would be in every individual’s interest to remove the power of life and death from their government’s hands. You equate their crimes with attacks on the amorphous mass, demanding the ultimate sanction in return. The crime may be applied ’socially’, but justice can only be applied on an individual basis. Each citizen regards the threat of mistaken conviction as utterly remote, yet when faced with prosecution every person would demand full quarter to defend themselves.
A civilized society no longer needs a parade of corpses to justify the power of the state to force cohesion and obedience. I am sure the sight of a wretched old man in shackles will have a similar effect as a the serene body of an executed lunatic, without having to resort to state sanctioned murder.
JW in the comments
Basically, JW attacks limited application of the death penalty on grounds that it is a weak deterrent and still risks taking innocent life. I disagree.
First, deterrence is ancillary to my main points. I’m arguing from a retributivist’s perspective, which is moral in nature. Each murder the policy prevents is a benefit, but in no way does it form the core justification for the death penalty in my view. Second, I think these arguments gloss over my point that it may deter people from pushing their crime from murder to mass murder. This applies more to serial killers and shootings than, say, a bomber who takes out victims in one fell swoop.
A person who has to make his decision over and over again, however, would certainly at least consider the risk that what he is doing will push him into death penalty territory (whereas now the first murder gets you death, so why not kill a few more?). Cho killed two people in his initial wave, waited two hours, then killed 25 in the second building. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that a potential copycat less demented in that situation would have used that time to consider the gravity of launching another killing spree. If the prospect of the death penalty contributes in a non-trivial way to stopping a further wave, this is a benefit to my proposal.
Third, I don’t think the death penalty does deter people exactly like Hasan. But it might generally deter someone who is a bit less troubled, a bit less committed. We can’t eliminate the risk, we act to contain it. Responding to his crime with the death penalty may short circuit some future plot orchestrated by a man less dedicated than the people who actually ended up going through with it.
As for the “innocent life” argument as presented by JW, it doesn’t apply to the examples I’ve provided. I actually can’t think of very many real cases other than the ones I’ve mentioned in Parts I, II, and III that would deserve the death penalty in the past two decades under my four-point metric. Interestingly, each of these cases have in common either an open confession or undeniable affirmative proof beyond any doubt who the perpetrator was.
McVeigh took credit. Hasan had to be shot and potentially permanently paralyzed to end his rampage. Muhammad was caught with the murder weapon, a sniper hole cut into his trunk, and a map marking his past shootings. Rudolph confessed to the Olympic bombings. Cho had tons of hollow-point ammunition on his person when found after he committed suicide. What practical doubt could you have at all? In a metaphysical sense I suppose you could make a philosophically interesting point about shared perceptions or something, but in any real sense it is a fact who the killers were.
My enhanced standard of proof was set up precisely to avoid the situation Jesse describes. A damaging counter-argument must produce some evidence establishing any real doubt about the cases I’ve given. Another option would be to provide an actual case which meets the four standards I’ve outlined (mass murder, deliberation, extraordinary heinousness, and the incitement of panic and paranoia altering our way of life) and yet has some non-reasonable but actual doubt as to the perpetrator’s guilt. Then, we could argue whether a case like this would have ever gotten past the jury under my standard. Otherwise, a point about the risk of taking innocent life remains only philosophically (as in, not worth considering) and not pragmatically damaging. The much more interesting question is whether it is still unjustified for the state to take the life of someone who is definitively guilty. I would welcome a debate on this point.
Lastly, the “parade of corpses” language is emotive, but a bit dishonest. We are talking about applying the death penalty 5 times over the past 10 years in response to over 200 deaths. The only corpses on parade were choreographed by terrorists like McVeigh or self-styled heroes like Cho. Taking the lives of a handful of mass murderers hardly qualifies.
Ellie raises a criticism that poses serious problems for my argument:
I don’t think the social paranoia argument works. It seems like the issue here is not necessarily a question of quantity, but proximity. Ft. Hood killings will in all likelihood leave public’s perceived threat level relatively at ease due to the illusion that we don’t live on military bases, therefore it can’t happen to us. Likewise for the collectively induced myth that, for instance, St. Louis is safe because all the murders (including multiple murders at the hand of one person) only happen across the river in East St Louis.
Panic sets in with the awareness that murder can happen anywhere and at random, not merely at random at the hand of one person. One should account for precedent- an isolated mass killing spree does less to incite panic than the accumulation of multiple, small scale murders happening everywhere, which necessitates multiple actors.
Ellie in the comments
I think this counter-argument assumes that what is necessary is the creation of a national, general fear of mass murder. But this wasn’t my point. For the state to justify taking a life, the crime should incite paranoia in a community, not the nation as a whole. For example, if a serial killer took the lives of 15 people, but targeted only women, I would still say retribution demands his life as well. This despite half the population not feeling threatened whatsoever (though definitely fear for wives, mothers, and daughters).
Hasan’s case is special because he attacked a military base as an Army officer. He will be courtmartialed, not tried in a Texas state court. If we reconceptualize the level of abstraction here from “state of Texas” to “the military,” for Ellie rightly points out that the crime was not directed towards Texans, then it makes a lot more sense why Hasan should be put to death.
He commits a crime that certainly creates a new fear of either a troubled officer or wannabe Jihadist going on a shooting rampage on a military base. Most people in the military, and their families, live on military bases – previously thought of as safe environments. The military court should exact retribution based on the community it serves. So the fear need not spill over to the general public to justify the death penalty, though I’m sure that it would be difficult to explain to any mother whose son was stationed at Fort Hood that Hasan’s actions had no effect on her.
Another person to look at might be Eric Rudolph. Rudolph bombed the Olympics and a handful of abortion clinics. He attacked the latter with a design to scare women away from seeking this procedure and doctors from performing it. Rudolph created a specific fear while he was loose – if you were a woman going to Planned Parenthood in the South at the time, you of course had to consider the possibility that Rudolph would strike your local branch while you were there too.
This is what I mean by the creation of a specific fear. We are always afraid of murder, as unlikely a possibility that is. It’s a random walk whether we happen to be a victim of it, but we take precautions by altering our lifestyles in sane, non-intrusive ways like walking home at night with a friend. However, there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from someone like Rudolph short of not seeking abortion at all. Or McVeigh or Muhammad short of not going to work. Or not going outside. Their terroristic actions served to create the reasonable fear among the people in their communities (federal employees, commuters) that any one of them could go next.
Even if this was not true, I still disagree that fear decreases the less proximate we are to the crime. In fact just the opposite. I argued as much in a post titled the “Crisis Proximity Syndrome” a month ago. Hopefully y’all following this argument read it, because I believe it applies here. In the post I tried to explain why people in South Korea weren’t really shaken by new threats from Kim Jong Il, while Americans hopped up on yellow journalism may as well have built bomb shelters in their backyards the level of hysteria was so great. My conclusion was “the more distant we are from the event, the more our conception of the place where it happens is consumed by the news coming out of it.”
The Virginia Tech and subsequent copy cat killings support this line of reasoning. Seung-Hui Cho didn’t just attack Virginia Tech’s campus, he designed to strike fear in students at any university about attending class (he wanted strike out at the “rich kids” and the “deceitful charlatans,” seeing himself as a hero). Any determined kid with a few semi-automatic weapons could kill dozens over the course of a few hours, and not only would we not be able to defend ourselves, but we likely wouldn’t even know it was happening due to poor notification measures. The fear has subsided because we are human beings and get distracted easily, but at the time there was real anxiety in college campuses across the country. Will my school alert me in a timely fashion? Is there anything I can do to get myself out of a situation like this? Should I start bringing my firearm to class?
These aren’t questions we should have to think about, but Cho designed his plot to get us thinking about precisely these. Geographical location had very little to do with it because as college students we all knew that the line had been crossed, Cho had definitely established a new norm and given someone else the idea who wouldn’t have otherwise considered or gone through with it. Creating these new risks, raising not a general fear of murder on campus but at the hands of an imbalanced student on an unstoppable rampage, is what made his crime different from an ordinary street killing over drugs or an argument.
The innumerable copy cat threats that followed and the Northern Illinois shooting support this claim. When an actual shooting happens south of 61st street in Hyde Park (it’s not that often but it happens), the University of Chicago doesn’t shut down. If an anonymous internet poster makes a threat about a school shooting, the administration would at least consider it. They’d probably do it to avoid future liability in civil proceedings. That’s a pretty powerful legacy and one that, if Cho didn’t take his own life, should have been responded to with the ultimate penalty.
Commenter Brooke brings up a great example that I think might serve to better define what I see as the limitations to the death penalty.
The death penalty for serial rapists would have the same benefits you cited for mass murderers: eliminating role models, deterring potential serial offenders, bringing closure to victims and women who fear they could be targeted next.
Brooke in the comments
My first contention would be that using the death penalty on a rapist is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court held, “Difficulties in administering the penalty to ensure against its arbitrary and capricious application require adherence to a rule reserving its use… for crimes that take the life of a victim.” Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008). The decision extended upon the precedent in Roper barring the penalty for adult rape to the rape of children as well.
So that’s what the law is. Do I think that’s what the law should be? Reluctantly, yes.
Arguments that rape is equivalent to murder in that it metaphorically kills the psyche of the victim, leaving a shell or an altered life in its wake, are very convincing. Never having been the victim of a rape, I can’t speak to the accuracy of this notion. I am willing to believe women and men who have been raped and feel exactly this way because the phenomenon is extremely common. Furthermore, Brooke adds:
[E]very time a woman walks alone to her car in a parking garage, down a dark street by herself, through a bad neighborhood, and dozens of other situations, the threat of rape is right there, and very real — in fact, between 1 in 12 to 1 in 4 rapes occurs in parking garages. This isn’t a fear that ever goes away. Women must go their entire lives knowing that they have a 25% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted.
more from Brooke
I think this is why rape may be different from murder in nearly every circumstance it has occurred. In my previous post I argued that the reason we can justify the death penalty for mass murders like the Oklahoma City bombings is that McVeigh had “created a specific and public anxiety and fear… flowing from [McVeigh] himself.”
If one man rapes a half-dozen women, he is contributing to the general fear of rape in the statistical sense, but he is not designing to create panic and paranoia in such a way that it undermines order. The order is already undermined – women are already afraid to go outdoors at night. Thus his crime isn’t unique enough to justify the most severe punishment available. Keep in mind I’m not trying to downplay the significance of rape, only explaining why I think there is a difference of degree here and the extremely narrow application under which a death sentence is justified.
To be fair, I can imagine a scenario in which a serial rapist leaves behind ‘calling cards’ (I don’t want to go into grotesque details on this blog so leave those up to your imagination. Or don’t.) in such a way that women in his community specifically fear rape by him, or rapes in the same manner as done by him. One example would be if they were all done in public restrooms on subways, this would create the specific fear of using the restroom near a subway, rather than contribute to the general fear of the act of rape itself late at night.
Rape is gruesome and deserves harsh punishment (automatic life sentence would be appropriate), but I don’t think killing the serial rapist, even if it did create public fear and paranoia in a particularly heinous way, is proportional to his crimes. The woman is not actually killed – it may take decades and she still may never be the same, but she can still potentially recover through therapy. In the same way, we wouldn’t think the death penalty appropriate for a person who severely disfigures his victims without killing them. Their lives are dramatically altered, but they still have lives. The appropriate punishment would be to dramatically alter the rapist’s life by forcing him to live out his years in a maximum security penitentiary – but still allow him to keep his own life. Until he steps over the line of intensely deliberated, indiscriminate murder in a way that directly constitutes an offense on the public, the people have no right to bring about his premature end through the machinations of government.
Finally, I essentially agree with the logic of Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Kennedy. If we allow the death penalty for rapes, we would open the philosophical floodgates to any sort of crime done on a mass scale in a heinous way. Serial arsons, assaults, and torture without killing would not be a stretch from serial rape. This would weaken the symbolic nature of the extremely limited application of the sentence I would advocate, risk punishing criminals disproportionately to their deeds, and open the door for mistaken executions.
Retribution. The idea that society punishes criminals in order to right a moral wrong, coercing them into paying back their debt to society. Though utilitarian calculus or rehabilitation largely overshadow these ideas in academia, no theory has yet found a way to eliminate our gut instinct that criminals should get what they deserve.
This instinct likely motivated, in part, the U.S. Supreme Court’s and Gov. Kaine of Virginia’s decision not to stay the execution of John Muhammad, the same day the President flied to Fort Hood to honor the victims of Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan’s monstrous mass killings last week.
Muhammad was killed by lethal injection at 9 pm Tuesday, and the same fate likely awaits Hasan after his inevitable court martial sometime in the near future. Whenever a prominent case results in a death sentence, it should give the nation pause to consider whether the state’s taking the life of another human being in our name is really necessary or justified.
It’s an issue I’ve long considered and kept my reasons for dormant for some time now. My views probably piss off a lot of people on either side of the debate. But one conclusion is clear to me – the men directly responsible for the D.C. Sniper Shootings and Fort Hood Massacre absolutely deserve the death penalty. Justice demands that crimes of this nature be punished by the ultimate punishment. However, due to the severity of the measure, we should limit its application only to similarly heinous crimes.
As an intellectual exercise, I believe this position represents the best counter-argument to death penalty abolitionists. What I’d like to accomplish with this post is to put forth the strongest argument for why these men (and others who committed similarly heinous crimes) deserve to be put to death as an expression of retribution for their actions.
(Warning: this is extremely long for a blog post, but if you are at all interested in this issue it’s probably worth it.)
First off, what I am not proposing.
Am I arguing that the death penalty should ever be used when there is a sliver of actual, rather than simply legal doubt? No. The chief executive has a moral responsibility to act as a life preserver. In death penalty jurisdictions, the clemency power is arguably the most important function of the governor, for this alone has the greatest impact on the life or death of an individual under his or her charge to protect. We should force governors to personally review the files of each prisoner on death row and make public statements explaining why they believe sending a person to death serves the public interest. I would even argue that death penalty sentencing require a standard higher than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” So this conception of a justified death penalty is extremely limited, albeit necessary, in scope and application.
Instead, the death penalty should be used only when all of these conditions are met 1) the crime is mass murder 2) the perpetrator intensely planned or deliberated 3) the murders were done in such a heinous way as to be unimaginably horrifying 4) the murders caused panic and paranoia, threatening our way of life.
The death penalty should only be used on mass murderers for two reasons. The first is practical. The death sentence is an irreversible mistake. We simply cannot guarantee the level of evidential certainty required to put a person to death for the killing of only one or two people. The patterns aren’t there, the motives can’t be totally clear, and DNA evidence can be faked or used mistakenly. On the other hand, mass murder leaves a paper trail, witnesses, and enough missteps along the way that we generally catch the killer red-handed. Hasan was caught with the same rifle used to kill 10 people according to ballistics tests, the computer of his first victim, and a map program marking ’skull and crossbones’ where previous killings had taken place. You don’t generally get that kind of evidence with your run-of-the-mill first degree murder.
Furthermore, the death penalty is too harsh a punishment on people who have only killed once, or even twice. Often, murders are mistakes in judgment or temporary rage. They occur under very unique circumstances. While a murder certainly shows in someone a propensity to take another life, incapacitating her in prison should be enough to protect society from her further misdeeds. Mass murder is also rare enough that it limits the scope of the death penalty to the truly exceptionally disgusting acts that make the punishment a symbol of moral condemnation rather than a clinical means to an end.
Why is it important that the criminal plan or deliberate? The deliberation shows in him a uniquely immoral heart or wicked mind. Over the course of months or even years, people like Timothy McVeigh or Hasan had the opportunity to consider the impact their actions would have on innocent people. They were aware of the risks of capture and went ahead with their plans anyway. They took advantage of the freedoms afforded to law abiding citizens and repaid us with a total disregard for any of the rules, moral or legal, by which the rest of us are bound. In essence, they are the most culpable of the culpable. There is no possible excuse that their actions were accidents, fits of passion, or out of character.
The third standard helps elucidate what makes these crimes unique enough to justify the severity of the death penalty. Mass shootings are peculiarly deserving of punishment because the gunmen had an opportunity to stop after each additional life taken. Each pull of the trigger came with a new decision to indiscriminately kill. The moral and ethical choice was renewed at each moment Hasan decided not to turn or do himself in. Moreover, a person who makes a bomb does so knowing that dozens of people will lose their lives as a result. That a person is able to conceive of the idea and plot it out makes one extremely dangerous. To actually follow through with it is so exceptionally evil and wrong that it demands an exceptionally severe response.
Crimes like these take a toll on our social psyche. It takes an especially twisted mind to go up into a bell tower and use a sniper rifle to mow down coeds. Or to use fertilizer to blow up a federal office building. The inventiveness and creativity of the crimes are uniquely harmful to us because they introduce new risks, desensitize us to future acts of violence, and traumatize our ability to think of human beings as inherently good creatures. Our psychiatrists are not now close confidants, but close-confidants-that-just-might-be-plotting-to-set-fire-to-seven-churches. Anyone could be suspect; our neighbors are potential enemies. This effect is unique to particularly heinous attacks, as they thrust upon us a previously unrecognizable darkness in our humanity.
Don’t the methods used themselves show that people like McVeigh or Hasan are insane, and should be shown mercy? This begs the question. Only a crazy person would blow up a building. Why? Because it’s crazy to blow up a building. Why? Because you would only be capable of this if you were crazy. I’m not convinced. In each of these cases, the plotters were able to function at a level high enough to purchase or make weapons and evade detection. Some fashioned themselves freedom fighters; political beliefs motivated their intent.
An incapacity for empathy is not insanity – it’s a defect. A personality defect like sociopathy doesn’t make someone insane to the degree that they would literally have no conception of the possible consequences of their actions. McVeigh understood people would die, and he understood that if he were caught bad things were going to happen to him – he just didn’t care. Coldheartedness ought to be condemned and punished, not sympathized with.
The last, and most important, standard is that the killings created such fear and paranoia that they have threatened our way of life. By way of life, I don’t mean something as abstract as in the previous paragraph. Rather, I mean that the killer designs to undermine our daily routines, our ability to function, and our basic trust in the others we interact with not to bring us harm for reasons totally out of our control. The murderers in these cases all have one common goal: to terrorize.
This is opposed to the highly personal motivations behind a typical killing. When a bar fight gets out of hand and one of the brawlers ends up impaled by a pool cue, we are predictably mortified. That bar will likely never gain back its reputation. But none of us are particularly scared of going to bars in general. Or afraid of pool halls. The crime is much too context dependent for us to form fears that would significantly alter the way we go about our lives.
Not so with the Oklahoma City bombings. When reported that McVeigh had placed his truck beneath a day care center, claiming the lives of 19 children, what mother in the country with kids in a federal office building’s playpen didn’t consider pulling their kids out in case something like that happened again? Which government official felt safe simply showing up to work the next day in case it was just the first wave? When Muhammad was on the loose, who didn’t look for cover when he stepped outside in Northern Virginia? Or feared for her life just minding her own business driving on the highways?
Hasan may have permanently damaged the morale and cohesion of military units now paranoid that one of their own might go on a murderous rampage. What place should feel safer than the barracks of a military base located in the United States? If an installation as heavily armed as Fort Hood can’t stop a doctor from killing 12 and injuring over 30, what hope do the rest of us have in a shopping mall, church, or city square?
What these cases do to us is demolish the illusion that society in any way protects us against the violence of a highly determined and organized individual. The motivation and the true intended victim is society. The goal is panic and general paranoia, the breakdown of order. These harms have drastic psychological and economic impacts that are as immeasurable as they are impossible to solve completely. Each of the criminals I’ve used as examples attempted to prey on our animal-level instincts, risking the health of our communities and the future preservation of our liberties (we generally overreact and pass insane, ineffective counter-measures as in the Columbine shootings) to further some bizarre interest. To McVeigh, Hasan, or Muhammad, the specific victims were inconsequential. They could have been replaced by any names or faces and it wouldn’t have mattered to them. The crimes were directed against us as a people, therefore only in these instances are we both justified and obligated to take a life in the name of the people.
My viewpoint is not without some valid counter-arguments. The prime objection I must overcome is that it is never justified for the state to take a life. Insert John Locke quote here. First, if we were to take that idea to its extreme, we would not give our police the authority to use lethal force, nor could we justify the existence of the military. Both legitimate state actions result in far, far more deaths each year than would result under my proposal. Neither afford the deceased the opportunity for due process. State-sponsored killing is a fact of modern society, so unless one is willing to argue for a defenseless state (maybe Costa Rica is on to something, probably not) one must admit that at least in some circumstances it is ok for the government to take lives.
Second, the justification for both the death penalty and the military are similar – protection. The military protects us from external existential threats, the death penalty similarly protects us from internal existential threats. Third, mass murderers surrender their right to life by breaching the social contract. They have chosen the way of Leviathan, so let us make the rest of their lives nasty, brutish, and short.
Fourth, the state is not playing God, in any real sense, differently than we allow doctors to play God when pulling the plug on a coma victim. Sure, she might have a living will implying or explicitly giving the doctor consent to withdraw life support. But how are we to know that the patient didn’t change her mind moments or even months before the accident, but before she had the chance to update her legal documents? Or if given the opportunity while in a coma, she would choose coma over death? If this was the case, the doctor would be killing the patient against her will. My point is that we accept this possibility and often perform the written wishes anyway, partly out of the interests of the greater good. If it ever justified to risk taking an innocent person’s life against her will, it is surely justified to take it from the handful of people capable of performing and actually executing mass murder.
Why isn’t life in prison enough? Crimes at this level of enormity deserve a greater punishment than ordinary murders and justify state killing because they are crimes against society in a real rather than theoretical sense. When a mugger accidentally kills an innocent by an errant gun shot, he does direct harm to the victim as well as his family. Society is also harmed indirectly by the senseless loss of the victim’s contribution, and because the crime adds to the general sense of anxiety we feel about violent crime.
The difference between a murder of this character and the cases for which I believe the death penalty is justified is that the actions of the defendants have not contributed to, but created a specific and public anxiety and fear. Not fear only of the type of crime (federal bombings, shootings at a college, sniper attacks on freeways) but fear specifically flowing from the defendant himself. The psychic damage done to the public, the idea that one man or woman can act in such a way to give us pause whether to continue our daily routine, is of such a unique and traumatic character that nothing but the most extreme expression of condemnation could possibly suffice to make the punishment proportional to the crime. Only taking the criminal’s life can bring about the closure society needs to heal the deep wounds caused by the rare, extraordinarily heinous actions of wicked men.
A few words on deterrence that I’m not necessarily dedicated to but I think support my position. First, eliminating the criminal eliminates potential role models. This deters copy cat crimes. Second, the death penalty is final and conceivable, unlike life in prison. The shame of death row, the idea of the poison coursing through his veins, the judge reading off the condemnation. There is no rationalizing away these consequences – no illusions of early parole, or a life in a mental institution, or being treated like a god in prison. The unequivocal response to crimes of this nature further increases the certainty of the result. Any criminal looking to make a statement by murdering innocents will know that the efficacy of his statement digs his or her own grave. It therefore acts as a greater general deterrent to future acts.
Third, distinctions between murders may create a tiny incentive for a future potential serial killer to stop before he reaches the threshold of mass murder. In states where one murder gets you the death penalty, the fugitive has no reason to discontinue her senseless violence because the punishment will be the same regardless of how many murders are committed.
Nothing I’ve said here should be construed as defending a broad application of the death penalty. Rather, this post should function as a philosophical defense of the option to use the death penalty in exceptional cases. Keep in mind if you respond that I am arguing for a higher standard, and I would oppose the death penalty nearly every time it has been used in Texas or Virginia over the last decade. I am also not arguing children should ever be sentenced to death.
I am convinced that the only way to argue against my position would be to say that the death penalty is never justified on any grounds, regardless of the magnitude of the offense (number affected, damage to public psyche) and level of certainty (beyond beyond a reasonable doubt). I welcome and look forward to your arguments, both for and against.
First baseball stadiums, next public transport. Facing a $178 million budget deficit even after making $122 million in cuts, the Chicago Transit Authority has decided to get creative with ways to fund its infrastructure repair and renewal projects.
Apple would pay for refurbishments to a train station in exchange for “first dibs” on any and all advertising that would go up at the station. Not surprisingly, the station being discussed is North/Clybourn on the Red Line; construction is already underway on a new Apple store nearby. (Apple decided on that location for its new store after its much-publicized split with the Block 37 project.) One thing the deal, which could give the CTA up to $4 million in funding for the refurbishments, will not do is hand over station naming rights.
From Chicagoist
But why not license station naming rights? MARTA is famously underfunded, frustrated by laws restricting its budget decisions. One great way to remedy this would be to allow corporations to rename stations, lines, trolleys, and buses. If the practice was widespread it could be a coup for brands attempting to either enter a market or maintain their dominance. Given how many people use public transport, it would also be quite lucrative for city governments. (Cisco is paying $4 million a year for the naming rights to the A’s new stadium; no one goes to see them play.)
Companies could also compete for stop naming rights close to demographics that would be more likely to buy their products. The hipster-ass Damen Ave. stop in Wicker Park could be the “American Apparel Damen Station,” A stop around Madison Avenue in New York could be sponsored by Tiffany’s.
Perhaps that would get confusing for visitors. I would also object if my own neighborhood became known as the “place near that Kentucky Fried Chicken subway stop.” Admittedly, corporate sponsorship of public transport might buff off that classy sheen most cities strive to cultivate.
However, sponsoring bus routes or entire lines certainly wouldn’t be much worse. What information is actually conveyed by “the 6″ to a tourist? Or being on the ‘green line?’ The impact on the broader level would be less intrusive and yet still provide value to potential advertisers. Also, transit authorities could choose sponsors carefully to reflect the businesses most closely associated with the city. Atlanta would obviously solicit Coke. Goldman Sachs would be the logical choice for a Metro line in Washington, D.C. (they run everything else there already).
The Apple-CTA deal may prove to show us the greatest benefits of such a scheme. City governments simply do a poor job keeping their stations and facilities clean and safe. This deal could align corporate interests with the public good. Apple will be extremely concerned with the spillover effect of negative associations tied to filthy facilities, encouraging it to pump money into further improvements for image reasons.
Really the important thing is that CTA doesn’t go bankrupt or raise the fees to $3. Since I don’t want to be stuck in Hyde Park on weekends, I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.
So I admit that leaving the blog untouched, unmaintained for two weeks following a post titled, “Off to the place where fun goes to die,” may not have been such a wise move. But surprisingly enough it’s the over-abundance of fun, (and the lack of internet at my apartment until recently) rather than the lack of it which has kept me away from the intertubes for the last 2 weeks.
However, now that my shit is together, or as much together as it has ever been I guess, blogging will return to near the top of my priority list. I hope that it can rest somewhere in the middle of yours?
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, I’m leaving Atlanta today to attend law school at the University of Chicago. Wish me luck on my voyage north, and I will resume blogging again as soon as I get an internet connection.
My last trip left me scratching my head and impatiently tapping my foot. This time I was in an out of the store in 30 minutes, a new iPhone and a copy of Snow Leopard in hand. The clerk even taught me a few tricks I didn’t know existed on the iPhone (especially using the headphone volume control to answer calls).
Apple will be rolling in dough even if their customer service representatives are replaced with the cashiers at the Varsity, so I don’t suppose it would matter too much if I never updated or qualified my previous disparaging remarks on its retail experience.
I am, however, going to revise my opinion of the Lenox Mall Apple Store — one thumb up for making the customer feel special. Though I still think it’s stupid to make the point of purchase a game of “chase the guy in a blue shirt.”
