The death penalty, moral sobriety, and our Presidential candidates

A clue to choosing between two candidates this awful.

I’m scheduled to do a death penalty debate at Cornell Law School later this week. I’ve done several such debates before, and as I tried to figure out what to say this time, it occurs to me that the subject is especially ripe because it illuminates how we might choose between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — probably the most appalling choice for President in my lifetime, what with the latter being a self-absorbed blowhard and the former being a far Left cackler, to the minor extent she has any thought-through ideas at all.

The death penalty is a long-running debate in American law and politics. I’ve found that, as a general matter, it follows and illuminates the cultural divide between (1) those who believe our country is a force for good with the moral standing unapologetically, if reflectively, to defend its way of life and its legal traditions (generally death penalty supporters), versus (2) those who believe the country is irredeemably stained with racism, misogyny, poverty, cruelty, and other grievous flaws  that make us ripe for a nasty, if seldom fully described, “reckoning” (hence the title of this newsletter). These people are almost always death penalty opponents.

One of the most illuminating lines I ever heard was from a prominent death penalty
abolitionist, (at the time) Vice Dean of Harvard Law School, Prof. Carol Steiker.   In our debate (broadcast on C-SPAN), Prof. Steiker said that, yes, there are criminals who very likely deserve execution, but that our country lacks sufficiently reliable legal process — and more important, sufficiently assured moral standing — to do the executing.

That’s where many of the more thoughtful death penalty opponents seem to be coming from. But as is true so often on the Left, even their good faith and intellectually serious ideas arrive at their destination by whistling past specifics. That’s why I begin death penalty debates with what we’re actually talking about — murder, and specific cases of murder. Begging your pardon, I’m going to do that here as well:

Massachusetts abolished capital punishment in 1984.  About 30 years later, with no death penalty on the books, that state nonetheless hosted a capital murder trial, one put on by the federal government.  One of the victims suffered extensive injuries before he died.  The coroner described his wounds in words  I’m going to repeat because, as noted, this debate cannot honestly be conducted only in the abstractions of law. Instead we must understand that it is not just the defendant, but his victim as well, who is a flesh-and-blood creature with his own dignity and humanity.

This was the coroner's recounting, in part:

"The bomb severed [the victim's] spinal cord and abdominal aorta; severed and exposed his lower intestines; ruptured his stomach;  tore his liver, left kidney and adrenal gland; nearly tore off his left arm at the forearm; snapped a bone in his right leg; fractured and exposed his ribs; and bruised a lung.

[The victim] had third-degree burns on his back, buttocks and left calf. His body was covered with cuts, bruises and perforations from blast debris."

There were two other deceased victims at the murder scene, both women.  If it makes a difference, the victim I've been talking about was a white male.

His name was Martin Richard.   This is his picture about a month before he was blown apart:

He weighed 69 pounds and was eight years old.

His father, who had taken him and his mother and  sister to see the Boston Marathon, had a choice thrust upon him in the chaos that followed the blast.  He could hold his son in his final moments as his guts and his life bled out onto the sidewalk, or he could crawl  to comfort his seven year-old daughter, who lay screaming in pain and horror as she tried in vain to retrieve her left leg.

The daughter and mother did not attend Martin's funeral a few days later.  It's not that they didn't want to go.  It's that  they were still in the hospital, having the shrapnel and nails dug out of their faces and the more private parts of their bodies.

********************************************************************************

What do we get in exchange for giving juries, in rare cases, the option of imposing the death penalty if they unanimously agree it's warranted? There are differing views about the most compelling argument in favor of capital punishment, but for me it’s this: The United States and its people have, in the face of the most grotesque crimes, crimes outside the boundaries of civilized life, earned the right to say "no" and for once mean it.

It’s not merely misguided but preposterous to believe we live in the land abolitionists decry, a land so blackened with racism and class-structure that we lack the moral
authority even to execute stone-cold child killers. At the center of abolitionism
is a deep and paralyzing moral skepticism about the country, a
reservoir of distrust about its basic fairness and decency.  Abolitionism is the domestic first cousin of what in foreign affairs was brilliantly called (by Jeanne Kilpatrick) "Blame America First."   In this recounting, it's not Dzohkar Tsarnaev who's responsible for blowing apart a third grader to die in his father's arms.  It's we who are responsible.   We failed Tsarnaev  --  failed to make him feel welcome in America (not that we did any such thing or that he had any such feeling) or failed to treat his dysfunctional family.

I don't think so, and not merely because the endless if fictional excuses are a bunch of defense lawyer hokum.  More broadly and importantly, I don't think the jury that gave Tsarnaev a  death sentence consisted of a bunch of Rotary Club monsters. I don't think the state where those jurors live,  or our country, is barbaric, or backwards, or morally indifferent. The jury knew evil when it saw it, and had the wisdom and, properly, the power under our law, to decide that it should be brought to a permanent end.  Elite opinion to the contrary, the next jury facing the next Tsarnaev should have the same chance.

*****************************************************************************

So what does this tell us about the upcoming election? A fair amount, I think, precisely because one’s attitude toward capital punishment tends to be rooted less in position papers ginned up by your campaign staff than in your own pretty deeply held instincts.

What does Ms. Harris think, really? Five years ago, she told us. She was vehemently against the death penalty, see her piece here . The piece starts with:

I’ve long been opposed to the death penalty. It is deeply immoral, irreversible, and ineffective. And if we are going to transform our country’s broken criminal justice system, we must be fearless — unafraid to speak hard truths.

Last week, my home state of California issued a moratorium on the death penalty — a system that has proven time and again to be an abject failure. It has wasted taxpayer money, has not kept our communities safe, and has discriminated against those with mental illness and people of color.

This is the standard Left line. Whether Ms. Harris would say it today is anyone’s guess, because she’s trying for all she’s worth to pretend she’s a centrist, and the centrist position in this country favors the death penalty, certainly as applied to particularly hideous crimes. (A national majority has favored the death penalty for murder for at least fifty years). The press has, obligingly and since forever, failed to ask her directly. Even if it did, you know full well she’s not going to give a direct answer.

Still, can there be any real doubt? Not if the sun still sets in the west.

There certainly isn’t any doubt with Donald Trump. He’s for it. He proved it in his first term, not that proof was needed. One thing you can say for Trump: For the most part, the man is authentic. An unkind person might say, for sure, he’s an authentic jackass, and his inability to hide this is what might well cost him the election. But still, he’s authentic, and his support for the death penalty is genuine.

I seriously doubt Trump’s position results from his having read anything I or hundreds of other people have written. Not his sort of thing. And yet in its important way, that’s all to the good: In an election between a fancy-dance phony and a genuine blowhard, at least we know who’s telling you the truth about what he really thinks — thinks in a way that illuminates a critical aspect of how he views our country.

What Trump really thinks, even if only by instinct, is that America is a fair and decent nation, one that has the confidence, the right, (and the need) to execute grotesque killers. His opponent thinks otherwise, at least if her long-held, standard-issue Leftist words are to be believed.

This is not everything about the election. But in my view, it’s surely a lot.