An Execution is Not Absolution

Peter Hegseth has decided, in some sordid, sadistic and shadowed part of his soulless being, to livestream the execution of the Fort Hood murderer.  The man will be executed by firing squad.  I have no sympathy for Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base on December 3, 2009.  But, on his last day on earth, Hasan will take one more thing from us.  He will take a piece of our humanity. 

To explain why I believe this, I need to back up fifty-three years.      

At 6:52 p.m. on the evening of November 1, 1955 United Airlines Flight 629 took off from Stapleton Airfield in Denver, Colorado.  Eleven minutes later the Douglas DC 6B disintegrated in the air and plunged into a sugar beet field near Longmont, CO.  All 44 people on board died. 

            A bomb, 17 pounds of dynamite with a timer, had exploded in passenger Daisie King’s luggage.  It had been placed there by her son, John Gilbert “Jack” Graham.  At check-in Mrs. King paid a $27 fine because the bags were overweight.   She asked her son if she really needed all that much in her luggage.  Cold as ice he had said, “Yes, mother, I’m sure you will need it.”  Jack Gilbert had then turned to his wife, gave her some money and told her to buy three life insurance policies on his mother’s flight. 

            There was ample evidence at the scene of the disaster that a bomb was involved.  It was the first major act of criminal violence against a U. S. airliner. Thirteen days later, the FBI arrested Jack Graham.  He was convicted on May 5, 1956 and executed in the gas chamber of the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canyon City on January 11, 1957.

            A silent witness to this case, its history, ramifications conclusion and aftermath was a very serious and impressionable nine-year-old girl living in Denver.  I was that girl.  [I do admit to being a bit of a strange child.]  I read everything I could find about this crime.  This was the first trial in the United States covered by television and I was witness to the investigation and trial.  At this time, the death penalty was a given and when Graham was found guilty and sentenced to execution I felt no moral ambiguity about the findings of the court. 

I continued to follow the Graham bombing up to the day of the execution.  That is when I had an epiphany.  The execution did not make me feel better.  I had assumed that it would change things: that the crime wouldn’t seem as frightening; the innocents wouldn’t be as dead; life wouldn’t seem so uncertain or death so arbitrary. 

I was naïve. 

I was wrong.  

            As young as I was, I started to become a person opposed to the death penalty.  This was not an easy decision, and one with which I continue to wrestle.  I am certainly not soft on crime.   There are people who unrepentantly committed crimes that seem to revoke their right to life.  Many people who should be safely removed from society are being given comfortable lives in prison, or worse, released on parole despite histories of violent crimes.  The laws I thought made the death penalty unnecessary have proven inadequate to the job.  And yet, time after time, I see that taking a life that is finally removed from the possibility of doing harm to others does more harm to the executioner than to the executed. 

I do not object to force being used to apprehend someone who is not obeying the lawful direction of a policeman.  I do not approve of probation for criminals accused of felonies.  Mr.Hasan, once incarcerated, should have been confined to a small cell with minimal interaction, no television, no computer, nothing to read, few people to talk to and less to do.  Medical care should be confined to simple pain management. In other words, he should have been imprisoned with nothing but his own miserable thoughts for what remained of his wretched life.  There are fates worse than death. 

Capital punishment is a remnant of a darker past.  It puts us in the position of having to perform an unnecessary act of violence against a person who is entirely at our mercy.  We do not need to execute to neutralize and doing so becomes a hollow act that rings of vengeance instead of justice.  For Hegseth, a vile and incompetent homunculus to make an execution a spectacle tells us much more about him than it does about justice.  If he really thought this would be a deterrent, he would want us to publish the photos of school children murdered in shootings and witness how high caliber weapons liquify a young body, but he would not sanction that.  The violence he wants exalted is the violence of the fatherland. 

Of all the unconstitutional and illegal and immoral acts done by this is administration, none of them have brought me to my knees, begging for forgiveness for this nation.   Until now.  Please, help us keep the faith.