Death Be Not So Chic

by David Scott

Just when death-penalty foes are finally having some success changing public attitudes, along comes Luciano Benetton, designer–clothes maker and the world’s 111th wealthiest man, who’s going to raise “consciousness” on the issue. Benneton’s $20–million “We, on Death Row” advertising campaign is the kind of help we don’t need.

With its edgy photos depicting killers on death row as noble savages who got a raw deal, the campaign will only harden “get tough on crime” sentiments.
There’s not a word in the entire campaign about the victims of these killers. Instead, the killers are given a platform to wax eloquent on topics such as God, fishing, likes and dislikes, the loneliness of doing time, and what’s wrong with the world today.

Benneton’s campaign begins by quoting Pope John Paul II as calling the death penalty “both cruel and unnecessary.” But Catholic opposition to the death penalty couldn’t be further from the shallow moralism and misguided romanticism of crime expressed in this campaign.

death-row-2When Catholics oppose the death penalty, we never forget the victims, the families left behind, and we never excuse or seek pardon for the crimes that put these men on death row. We know that by any natural standard of justice, those rightly convicted and sentenced to death row “deserve” to die.

The argument made centuries ago by St. Thomas Aquinas still holds: “If a man is a danger to the community, threatening it with disintegration by some wrong doing of his, then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good, is to be commended.”

In early 21st century America, however, we don’t have too many Thomists in our legislatures or district attorneys offices. Fewer still are found among the pundit class or in the population at large.

And the politics of the death penalty gets more cruel and more unusual every day.

Not only do we want to impose the death penalty on mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh, a remorseless terrorist bent on disintegrating the social order. We also execute retarded criminals who are incapable of making moral judgements.

We’ve expanded the list of capital offenses to such ludicrous lengths that it’s clear we no longer have any sense of what truly constitutes a threat to our common good.

We have the ability to catch, convict and punish virtually every criminal who threatens our social stability. And we have the means to ensure, without using violence, that they never again hurt anybody. But that’s not good enough for us. We still want these people dead.

Capital punishment for us isn’t what it was for St. Thomas. It’s not about protecting us from criminals, punishing them, and restoring an upset moral order.

Seldom in capital cases is testimony presented about the harm the defendant has done to the social fabric. Instead, victims’ loved ones testify about the pain and loss they’ve suffered as a result of the crime. Executing the killer, prosecutors argue, will bring the survivors solace and heal their grief.

This therapeutic rationale has been at work even in the case of Oklahoma City bomber McVeigh, one of the few in our day that truly involves a clear and present threat to society. Calling the families of the victims “brave survivors,” federal prosecutors have said that killing McVeigh will “help them meet their needs to close this chapter in their lives.”

Without diminishing the anguish of those who lose loved ones to violence, we need to recognize that avenging deaths and providing “closure” to victims’ families are not legitimate uses of the state’s most solemn power.

It’s another sign that we’ve lost our capacity to make reasoned moral decisions about when and how to apply the death penalty.

Partly, that’s because we live in a culture fascinated by violence and death. We practice “smash mouth” politics, entertain ourselves by watching people kill and be killed on TV and in movies. We accept killing as a solution to social problems—aborting unwanted children, assisting in the suicides of the sick and elderly.

In a culture like ours, the death penalty appears as an understandable, even “natural” response to violent crime.

But in a culture of death like ours, the death penalty cannot heal and preserve the common good. Even killing criminals like McVeigh only makes our society sicker, only desensitizes us further to the violence all around, only feeds the forces of social disintegration. Things are so strange that we hardly think twice when Benneton, a major multinational corporation, starts using murderers as models in a crass bid to increase it’s market share.

In a culture that has apparently forgotten the value of human life, capital punishment can only make us ever more cruel, ever more unusual.

Originally published in Our Sunday Visitor (February 27, 2000)
© David Scott, 2005. All rights reserved.