From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
An Infinite Wrong
Why the snipers merit execution.
At the moment, there doesn't seem to be much opposition to executing the Beltway snipers. Before thinking about the status of the death penalty in America, a few delicate matters need to be addressed.
There is the matter of a "rush to judgment." Some think it unseemly to be discussing the execution of two individuals who haven't yet been tried, but the court system can attend to that. Nine people are no longer living, and the available evidence of this case survives the test of common sense.
Also, John Lee Malvo is presumably 17, a "juvenile," which in some minds automatically disqualifies him as a candidate for the death penalty. A juvenile? It looks like he's a big boy now. As New York attorney Paul Callan pointed out, Mr. Malvo, across three weeks of murders, had ample chance to opt out.
On the day of the two suspects' arrest, it was interesting to note the manner in which TV's legal analysts parsed which jurisdiction would be most likely or able to execute them. Normally such discussion, as occurred with former Texas Gov. George Bush, drips with disgust for the policy of executing murderers. But there wasn't the slightest hint of that on this day. The blunt spin then seemed to be which state, or the Feds, would most likely get the job done.
But why are these killings any different than so many others, such as those at issue the past several weeks in Illinois Gov. George Ryan's recent effort to effectively overturn his state's death penalty? By ironic coincidence, Illinois held 142 clemency hearings last month at the very time most of these nine were falling dead near Washington, each from a single .223 bullet. Those nine died instantly. Many of Illinois's murdered citizens did not.
Apparently to great surprise, the Illinois hearings brought again to the surface the nature of the murders and what the murders did to the family members left behind. After one young mother and two of her children were murdered, the mother's full-term fetus was cut from her womb. If there is a national consensus that John Allen Muhammad deserves execution, then surely this woman's killers fall within it.
Retribution, as a form of vengeance, may strike some as one good reason for the death penalty, but it isn't sufficient. I think St. Claire County, Ill., State Attorney Robert Haida, speaking for the families, put his finger closer to the substance: "Part of their life is devoted to making sure that justice is done to their loved one who was murdered."
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Europe on the Death Penalty "Maintaining the death penalty would . . . bring to light undesirable expiatory features of criminal law. Accordingly, major reform initiatives were carried out, restructuring the criminal sanctions so as to make them more conducive mainly to the rationale of social rehabilitation and reintegration of the offender in the community, simultaneously taking into account the need to ensure the protection of society and to prevent crime, rather than punish it." --EU Memorandum on the Death Penalty, Feb. 25, 2000 |
You can go into the Web sites for these groups and encounter pages of sincere, intellectual argument against executing murderers. But I think the simple consensus that emerged for executing the snipers is rooted in realities that the opponents seem unable to understand. That consensus also moves us closer to understanding why this ultimate sanction is defensible in a just and good society.
Let's consider the case of Pascal Emile Charlot, the 72-year-old native of Haiti who took a bullet in the neck while standing on a street corner. Like the other eight victims, Mr. Charlot, a carpenter, was just folks, someone who would never find his name in the Washington Post, which wrote eloquently of his funeral. Any statistician can tell us how may seconds have ticked through a 72-year life. But can they total up for us every single moment Pascal Charlot spent with another human being, and what the fabric and effect of each of those moments was? One of his five children, Myrtha Cinada, provides a hint: "I will miss him. That's a big hole in my life that will never be filled by anyone else."
People said similar things about the other victims. Sonny Buchanan, who was shot the first day mowing a lawn: "Sonny was the dad to literally 400 kids," said a volunteer at the local Boys and Girls Club. Kenneth Bridges, shot at the Virginia gas station, "who co-founded Matah Network, which promotes black self-sufficiency through fellow alumni of Wharton Business School." Linda Franklin, the FBI analyst: "Probably the most giving person I know," according to a friend.
These aren't sob stories. These are stories of organized, civil society. What happens at the instant a murderer kills such a person is that the status of the killer and the dead becomes hugely, unacceptably, disproportionate. What the murderer, a self-chosen nullity, has extinguished from one life and the life of society is almost literally immeasurable. A murder is an infinite wrong.
The murderer, too, is a person, a point opponents stress as a matter of basic human dignity. That's not enough. The murderer, at one time, was one of us, accorded all the benefits and obligations of life in organized society. This is a gift. After the murder, it is forfeit. The death penalty is not mere vengeance. It is proportionate justice. It restores moral and social balance.
Europe is entitled to organize and moralize as it pleases. But September 11 and now these nine sniper murders, of an indescribable randomness, have helped many Americans understand the nature of justice in the kind of society in which they wish to live.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
