Capital Punishment revision

Chapter 6: Why I am against Capital Punishment

When I was about six or seven I was playing with my Erector set. I wanted to play with the motor so I reached behind my bed to plug it into the wall. I decided it would be a good idea to put my finger on one of the prongs so that I could find the hole and guide it in. Well I sure found the hole. And my finger found an electrical current running at about a hundred volts. Since I was grounded to the bed the jolt was not nearly as bad as if I had been sitting on the floor. But the charge was significant and I held on to it long enough to notice that I could not breath.

Of all the pain I can remember as a child, that was the most intense. It frightened me so badly that I immediately began to wail. I ran around trying to catch my breath as my mother tried to console me. She searched my body frantically, looking for a wound or a burn. She had no idea why I was creaming but the intensity of my cries totally unnerved her.

“What is wrong? What have you done? Calm down. Stop crying. Where are you hurt?”

“I electrocuted myself. I put my hand in the socket accidentally and it shocked me.”

That was an intense lesson. I had been warned over and over again by my mother and my grandmother. But I pretty much ignored them.

A few days later I saw an episode of Superman. Superman was my favorite show. I used to tie a towel around my neck and fly around the house with my arms outstretched, making a swishing sound like the one in the series. In this episode, Superman was rescuing an innocent man from the electric chair. At the last second, he broke through the concrete wall and put his arm between the electrodes of the main switch. Never mind that it would have made a lot more sense for him to merely stop the guard from pulling said switch. But the sparks flying around him made for a dramatic climax.

Even though I understood only the rudiments of electrical conduction, it seemed hokey to me that Superman's arm didn't conduct enough juice to send the poor man to his death. But I never let hokey crap keep me from enjoying my favorite show. But this one sat with me for a long time because I remembered the pain involved in electrocution.

I became ghoulishly mesmerized by methods of execution. As a fifth grader, I bought all the monster models. There was Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Phantom of the Opera, and all those great monsters. As each new model came out, I saved up my allowance and bought it. I spent hours carefully painting and assembling each one. But the one I remember most vividly was the guillotine model. It was an odd addition to the series because there was no Hollywood movie featuring this instrument of death. In fact, there was no other model in that series that was based on an invention instead of a character.

I was walking down the aisle looking over the car and airplane models when I first saw it. It was in a box with a lurid picture depicting the moment of execution. I was absolutely spellbound by what I saw. The prisoner is strapped to a table while standing and then rotated 90 degrees and lowered under the blade. A stock is then placed over his neck to insure a clean cut. Then the blade is dropped. There is something theatrical about that sliding table. I tried to imagine the feeling of being strapped to that device and the terror of waiting for the blade to fall. Of all the horrors I explored as a child, this one truly terrorized me. To this day, it still frightens me.

One of the little known facts of that era was recently revealed in a documentary produced by the History Channel. It seems that most of the victims of the guillotine went to their deaths quietly and with dignity. But in the later years, when it's popularity was waning there was an execution that did not go by the script. A young woman who was to be executed broke free from her tormentors and ran about the scaffold trying to get away. As she was finally subdued, she screamed and plead for her life. Her screams pierced the air as the drama played out. It was the beginning of the end of the reign of terror. The heretofore blood thirsty masses lost their taste for murder as the inhumanity of that instrument was laid bare.

To this day, I still dream about being put to death. It is almost always by electrocution. In my childhood, the dream always ended with me being led to the chair kicking and screaming. But more recently I am resigned to my end. And lately, there has been a disturbing evolution in that recurrent nightmare. Now I am part of the execution team. I am being forced to perform the task and I am powerless to stop it. It reminds me of the protest signs I have seen at executions that reads, “Don't murder in my name!”

As a child, the cruelty of capital punishment and the methods of state sponsored murder seemed incompatible with Jesus and Christianity. As an adult, well, let's just say it's one of those things fundamentalist Christians are willing to ignore. Any way you look at it, frying a man over a period of about three minutes is just barbaric. The idea that it is instantaneous has been proven false over and over again as botched electrocutions produced burned and miserable victims screaming for help. It is exceptionally cruel and unusual punishment by any standard. The fact that our Christian society tolerates it, and encourages it, shows just how primitive we are. It is nothing more than revenge. The fact that it has been rendered humane is probably the most disturbing new twist in this macabre saga. Lethal injection has made state sponsored murder seem palatable. It is ironic in the extreme.

I believe it goes against one of Christ's most important subjects. It 's called forgiveness and it is a virtue sorely lacking in the fundamentalist community. Thank God the Catholics have distinguished themselves in this field by staunchly advocating for the abolition of capital punishment. It is one of the few social issues in which the Catholic leadership has followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. When I see nuns and priests gathering at executions to demonstrate on behalf of the condemned I am reminded that Catholicism is still a powerful force for goodness. If more Catholics would participate in that protest we could do away with capital punishment for good.

You cannot say that you believe the teachings of Jesus and believe in capital punishment. Hypocrisy of this sort exposes fundamentalist Christians for what they are. The murder of these people, often innocent, is the worst sin of our times. America is one of the few remaining civilized countries that still resorts to this thinly veiled instrument of revenge. I have deeply held gratitude to Catholics who work every day to eliminate the scourge of capital punishment from our society.