What we want

Yesterday, John Allen Muhammad was executed in the Commonwealth of Virginia for a horrific series of crimes that he committed in 2002 over a three-week period. I remember it well. The "D.C. Sniper," as he was called, terrorized this entire area for weeks while people were terrified to go outside, to get gas for their cars, to send their kids to school.

If there were ever an offense that called for the administration of the death penalty, I suppose what Mr. Muhammad did would be it.

But every time I see his face of television or in the papers or on my computer screen, my eyes close instinctively and I turn my head away. Because I can not accept what is being done in our name. Even though I am not a resident of Virginia, it is being done for me. It is being done, ostensibly, for all of us, for each person who lives in the state and area and nation, as retribution for the crimes he committed against us.

I understand the impulse toward retribution. I really do. I understand this feeling that we have, that when someone does something as awful as what this man did, brought so many families to the brink of destruction and caused them unimaginable pain, that we want to do the worst thing we can to them.

But what we do with that impulse doesn't make sense to me. The whole legal framework--the combined body of cases and laws and statutes and the granddaddy of all our documents, the Constitution, come together to create a world where it is against the law to willfully deprive someone of medical treatment, but it is okay to willfully kill them.

Even the members of the Bush administration asserted, over the course of a three-year torture scandal, "we do not torture." Because they believed, as I do, that torture is wrong. Instead, they drew up a set of tactics that doctors and lawyers assured them was not torture, and did that instead. But they would not call what they did torture, because as we all know, torture is wrong. But it is okay to kill? Is it right, is it proper and just, for a crowd to gather at the Greenville Correctional Center in Virginia at 9:00 pm on a Tuesday night, for them to stand before a curtain which is drawn back, and then watch a man violently shake to his death?

The prosecutor responsible for convicting Mr. Muhammad in the name of the people of Virginia says that he hopes the event will bring closure to the families of the victims.

Maybe it will. But does it matter?

Our justice system seems to be in a heightened and heightening state of confusion about how much we care about what the victims of crime want. Notions about victim satisfaction inform the very core of our entire system of punishment: it has never been, and as far as I can see, never will be merely about rehabilitation or deterrence. No, it has always contained some element of retribution, and who is the retribution for if not for the people whose lives the crime touched?

It is for them and not for them. Because the plaintiff is not the victim. The plaintiff in every criminal case is the state. Sometimes when the victim of a crime declines to serve as a witness for the prosecution, the case is abandoned--but sometimes it carries on without her. A victim's family's desire to see the killer of their loved one put to death or not put to death does not govern what the prosecution seeks.

In the end, what victims want only seems to matter when the victim wants a harsher penalty. I have seen individuals who were denied parole because of the strident objections of the victim's family. I have seen the wants and needs of victims invoked in every single execution committed in my lifetime. I have seen victims' opinions invoked by politicians and prosecutors and prison administrators as the reason that we must be swift or harsh or violent.

But aren't we all victims? Isn't that the entire principle of the criminal justice system, that we are all affected by crimes that are committed against our persons and our property? I've had enough death. I've had enough of brutality, enough of pain.

When you talk about the legitimacy of capital punishment, people often try to make it an imagination exercise. "If someone brutally murdered your husband/daughter/entire family, wouldn't you want that person dead?"

I honestly don't know.

I suspect I wouldn't. But I don't know because I haven't been there. And I have a difficult time imagining that I would wish for the death of another human being, although I'm sure it's more than possible.

What I do know is that there are people who have found themselves in that situation and haven't advocated for the death penalty for the killer. Why doesn't that matter? Why does it only matter that there are people who do pray for the death of the killers of their loved ones?

When will we stop pretending that it's about what we want? A vengeful heart is not enough.