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What Do Murderers Deserve?

David Gelernter
A Texas woman, Karla Faye Tucker, murdered two people with a pickax, was
said to have repented in prison, and was put to death. A Montana man,
Theodore Kaczynski, murdered three people with mail bombs, did not repent,
and struck a bargain with the Justice Department: He pleaded guilty and will
not be executed. (He also attempted to murder others and succeeded in
wounding some, myself included.) Why did we execute the penitent and
spare the impenitent? However we answer this question, we surely have a
duty to ask it.
And we ask itI do, anywaywith a sinking feeling, because in modern
America, moral upside-downness is a specialty of the house. To eliminate
race prejudice we discriminate by race. We promote the cultural assimilation
of immigrant children by denying them schooling in English. We throw honest
citizens in jail for child abuse, relying on testimony so phony any child could
see through it. We make a point of admiring manly women and womanly
men. None of which has anything to do with capital punishment directly, but
it all obliges us to approach any question about morality in modern America
in the larger context of this country's desperate confusion about elementary
distinctions.
Why execute murderers? To deter? To avenge? Supporters of the death
penalty often give the first answer, opponents the second. But neither can be
the whole truth. If our main goal were deterring crime, we would insist on
public executionswhich are not on the political agenda, and not an item
that many Americans are interested in promoting. If our main goal were
vengeance, we would allow the grieving parties to decide the murderer's
fate; if the victim had no family or friends to feel vengeful on his behalf, we
would call the whole thing off.
In fact, we execute murderers in order to make a communal proclamation:
that murder is intolerable. A deliberate murderer embodies evil so terrible
that it defiles the community. Thus the late social philosopher Robert Nisbet
wrote: Until a catharsis has been effected through trial, through the finding
of guilt and then punishment, the community is anxious, fearful,
apprehensive, and, above all, contaminated.
When a murder takes place, the community is obliged to clear its throat and
step up to the microphone. Every murder demands a communal response.
Among possible responses, the death penalty is uniquely powerful because it
is permanent. An execution forces the community to assume forever the

burden of moral certainty; it is a form of absolute speech that allows no

waffling or equivocation.
Of course, we could make the same point less emphatically, by locking up
murderers for life. The question then becomes: Is the death penalty
overdoing it?
The answer might be yes if we were a community in which murder was a
shocking anomaly. But we are not. One can guesstimate, writes the
criminologist and political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr., that we are nearing or
may already have passed the day when 500,000 murderers, convicted and
undetected, are living in American society.
DiIulio's statistics show an approach to murder so casual as to be depraved.
Our natural bent in the face of murder is not to avenge the crime but to
shrug it off, except in those rare cases when our own near and dear are
involved.
This is an old story. Cain murders Abel, and is brought in for questioning:
Where is Abel, your brother? The suspect's response: What am I, my
brother's keeper? It is one of the first human statements in the Bible; voiced
here by a deeply interested party, it nonetheless expresses a powerful and
universal inclination. Why mess in other people's problems?
Murder in primitive societies called for a private settling of scores. The
community as a whole stayed out of it. For murder to count, as it does in the
Bible, as a crime not merely against one man but against the whole
community and against God is a moral triumph still basic to our integrity,
and it should never be taken for granted. By executing murderers, the
community reaffirms this moral understanding and restates the truth that
absolute evil exists and must be punished.
On the whole, we are doing a disgracefully bad job of administering the
death penalty. We are divided and confused: The community at large
strongly favors capital punishment; the cultural elite is strongly against it.
Consequently, our attempts to speak with assurance as a community sounds
like a man fighting off a chokehold as he talks. But a community as cavalier
about murder as we are has no right to back down. The fact that we are
botching things does not entitle us to give up.
Opponents of capital punishment describe it as a surrender to emotionsto
grief, rage, fear, blood lust. For most supporters of the death penalty, this is
false. Even when we resolve in principle to go ahead, we have to steel
ourselves. Many of us would find it hard to kill a dog, much less a man.
Endorsing capital punishment means not that we yield to our emotions but
that we overcome them. If we favor executing murderers, it is not because

we want to but because, however much we do not want to, we consider

ourselves obliged to.
Many Americans no longer feel that obligation; we have urged one another to
switch off our moral faculties: Don't be judgmental! Many of us are no
longer sure evil even exists. The cultural elite oppose executions not (I think)
because they abhor killing more than others do, but because the death
penalty represents moral certainty, and doubt is the black-lung disease of
the intelligentsiaan occupational hazard now inflicted on the whole culture.
Returning then to the penitent woman and the impenitent man: The Karla
Faye Tucker case is the harder of the two. We are told that she repented. If
that is true, we would still have had no business forgiving her, or forgiving
any murderer. As theologian Dennis Prager has written apropos this case,
only the victim is entitled to forgive, and the victim is silent. But showing
mercy to penitents is part of our religious tradition, and I cannot imagine
renouncing it categorically.
I would consider myself morally obligated to think long and hard before
executing a penitent. But a true penitent would have to have renounced (as
Karla Faye Tucker did) all legal attempts to overturn the original conviction. If
every legal avenue has been tried and has failed, the penitence window is
closed.
As for Kaczynski, the prosecutors say they got the best outcome they could,
under the circumstances, and I believe them. But I also regard this failure to
execute a cold-blooded, impenitent terrorist and murderer as a tragic
abdication of moral responsibility. The community was called on to speak
unambiguously. It flubbed its lines, shrugged its shoulders, and walked away.
In executing murderers, we declare that deliberate murder is absolutely evil
and absolutely intolerable. This is a painfully difficult proclamation for a selfdoubting community to make. But we dare not stop trying. Communities in
which capital punishment is no longer the necessary response to deliberate
murder may exist. America today is not one of them.
David Gelernter is the author, most recently, of Machine Beauty (Basic
Books, 1998). From Commentary (April 1998). Subscriptions: $45/yr. (12
issues) from the American Jewish Committee, 165 E. 56th St., New York, NY
10022.