| About this series: The Tribune-Star is presenting a four-part series on the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Opinions expressed in this series reflect a consensus of the editorial board. The series is written by Dave Bennett, associate professor of journalism at Indiana State University. |
Invoking the death penalty
Capital punishment underscores basic respect for life
Third in a series
Capital punishment is repulsive.
Infinitely more repulsive, though, are the brutal acts for which we, as a society, invoke the death penalty. We must not allow a false sense of delicacy to dissuade us from what we know is right.
Critics say that executions won't bring back victims.
Justice has never been about bringing back the dead. Justice -- society's way of enforcing consequences for one's acts -- is about personal responsibility. Capital punishment is the consequence of murder, enforced in full.
Life is sacred, critics tell us.
Yes, life is sacred. So is survival. As individuals, we fight back when attacked -- we kill, if necessary. As a nation we fight, sometimes kill, for causes that are just. Civilized people do these things with regret, but regret does not keep us from doing what we know is right.
No nation, including those which have banned capital punishment as "barbaric," would flinch from war to protect its citizens. Heinous acts by criminals are no less serious an assault.
Gallup polls repeatedly ask Americans about capital punishment for murderers, which today is favored 2-1. From the 1950s and into the 1970s, Americans favored capital punishment but not overwhelmingly. By 1966, amid national debate over the death penalty's constitutionality, the tide shifted. For the first time, slightly more people opposed than favored it. As a result, no executions took place in the United States between 1968 and 1977, when Gary Gilmore, a brutal murderer, faced a firing squad in Utah.
A year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for executions when it decided that the death penalty -- neither cruel nor unusual punishment -- was not forbidden by the Constitution. Consider the court's reasoning:
"Indeed, the decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community's belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death."
The justices could have been writing of Timothy J. McVeigh's crimes.
His deliberate intent in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that warm April morning is clear: cause maximum terror and disrupt society. That terrible blast killed 168 people -- 19 were children in a day-care center -- and injured hundreds more.
Lives lost in the smoking rubble were of little concern to the self-styled guerrilla.
What the court called "the only adequate response" will soon be administered to McVeigh. He will be the first person executed by the federal government since the death penalty was reaffirmed and the 441st since Thomas Bird was hanged for murder in 1790.
The 38 states with death penalties have executed more than 700 people since the 1976 court decision. Certainly none focused attention on capital punishment as has McVeigh's impending execution.
In Missouri earlier this year, the execution of Stanley Lingar, 37, is an example of a murderer reaping what he had sown. Linger abducted a boy, sexually abused him, shot him three times then tried to finish him off with a tire iron. When the boy still wouldn't die, Lingar ran over him twice with his car.
Crimes of such brutal nature are no stranger to us. The only local man on Indiana's death row -- Bill Benefiel -- was sentenced to death in 1988 for the murder of 18-year-old Delores Wells in circumstances that numb the mind.
Benefiel abducted Wells off a Terre Haute city street. During the 12 days he held her captive, Benefiel amused himself by handcuffing and chaining Wells, then beating her with his fists and an electric cord, sexually assaulting her and inserting glue into her eyes and nose. A second teen-age girl, hostage for four months of rape and sodomized terror in Benefiel's house, escaped to tell the gruesome story.
Gary Gilmore was shot to death in Utah. Stanley Lingar died by lethal injection in Missouri. Timothy J. McVeigh is scheduled for execution Wednesday in Terre Haute. Bill Benefiel, we can only hope, will soon join them.
We believe that from a vantage of time, we will look back at those executions not as acts of vengeful justice.
Although we will regret the loss of life, we will clearly see their deaths as the result of their own acts -- consequences of murder, enforced in full.
We're sure that issues surrounding the death penalty will continue to test the national conscience. Particularly troubling are serious flaws that jurists and other legal experts point to in the courts. Opponents of capital punishment use such problems as evidence to condemn the death penalty.
Instead, fix the system and root out the abuses and injustices. Limit the death penalty to instances where the taking of a life is inescapable justice.
Critics will say we don't have enough regard for human life.
They are wrong. It is because we have so much regard for human life that we favor capital punishment as the justified consequence of cold, calculated murder.
The words of John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, are as persuasive today as in 1868 when he urged Parliament not to ban capital punishment because of flaws in the British system:
"Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that from another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates the right in another forfeits it for himself."
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