That all-American urge to punish

On Thursday afternoon I took the long drive down to the far southeastern corner of Virginia and took part in solemn observances to mark– and protest– our state’s killing of one of its citizens, Teresa Lewis.
It was a big and moving event. I was there not only as an individual but also in my capacity as a board member of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, so I spoke to a few media people in that capacity.
By far the most engaging person in the field outside Greensville ‘Correctional’ Center, where Teresa Lewis lost all hope of ever being further ‘corrected’ was Rev. Lynn Litchfield, who had been Teresa’s pastor for several years when Teresa was still in Fluvanna Woman’s Prison, near Charlottesville. Lynn had spent 2.5 hours with Teresa on Wednesday; and she spoke with great emotion and sincerity about how Teresa had, many times over the years, expressed remorse for the part she played (albeit only a small, facilitating part– no-one ever claimed she pulled the trigger) in the shooting murder of her husband and stepson back in 2003.
Lynn read out the portion of the scriptures that Teresa had asked her to read. (Phil.I, 12-28) Some 60 of us in the prayer circle sang and prayed together. And as Teresa was being killed we clanged a great heavy bell there in the darkening field.
I first became engaged in anti-death penalty activism shortly after my family and I moved into Virginia in 1997– coming from the District of Columbia, a jurisdiction that doesn’t have the death penalty (except the federal death penalty.) I was taken aback at the idea that by moving across the Potomac River into Virginia we were moving back into the Middle Ages… What with the death penalty and the still-standing laws that made sodomy into a felony…
A couple of years later, I was trying to weigh up how to divide my time and my concern between activism on death penalty issues here in my home state and on war-and-peace issues internationally. One of my Quaker friends helped clarify matters, saying quite simply that “It’s all the same urge, at home and abroad: It’s the urge to punish. It’s the stance that says ‘We are right, and we have the right to enact serious punishment on anyone we disagree with.'”
It’s also the point of view that holds that punishing, punishing, punishing all the time is somehow the “right” thing do– even when that punishing gets in the way of resolving conflicts or other problems.
It’s that self-righteous position that says that “we” are so right that we don’t even need to listen to anyone else… Not a Teresa Lewis… Not a Fidel Castro… Not an Ismail Haniyeh… Not the entire population of Gaza and the West Bank, which voted Haniyeh’s party into office in 2006… No, no-one else at all. Because, you see, “we” Americans are so inherently virtuous that we are always right; and anyone who challenges us is necessarily wrong, and should be punished.
Teresa Lewis, by her own account and that of the state, did one pretty bad thing at one point in her life. The state ignored her borderline mental retardation and determined that she had been “the mastermind” in the plot to kill her husband Julian Lewis, and that the two men who were the triggermen had somehow been only her pawns. They got life in prison– though one of them later bragged about how he had set her up, flirted with her, and preyed on her in order to pursue his tragic loser’s dream of somehow making it big as a respected and well-off “hit man.” He later killed himself in prison… The tragedies go on and on.
Meantime, we have still at large in our country, several people who have perpetrated acts very, very much more serious than Teresa Lewis’s. People who knowingly misled the public and jerked our government into launching a quite unjustified– and completely tragic– invasion of Iraq. People who instituted waterboarding and other forms of torture, disappearances, and international renditions… People who argued that in 2006 Israel should be “allowed” to continue its unjustified bombardment of Lebanon– for 33 whole days– or its equally unjustified bombardment of Gaza in 2008-09… And all those people have been allowed to walk away quite freely. They are in our midst at think tanks in Washington DC. They have the blood of so many innocents on their hands.
(This “urge to punish” is not, it turns out, omnidirectional in America. It very much depends on politics– and money. If you are poor and can’t afford a decent lawyer, you are 1,000 more times more likely to be on death row than if you’re a well-paid lobbyist, lawyer, banker– or Elliott Abrams.)
A state– any state– is a fallible, human institution. No state has the right to designate for killing off the battlefield (or even, I would argue, on it… but let’s stick to off-battlefield killings for now) any human person, whether at home or abroad.
At home, the idea that a economically disadvantaged, slightly simple-minded person like Teresa gets designated for killing is an outrage. Abroad, the idea that there are young American men sitting in military bases far from any battlefield, armed with killer drones and lists of names of people who are to be killed, is equally an outrage.
Who compiles those lists of names? Based on what evidence? No-one knows! It is truly an international Star Chamber, and it should be abhorrent to us all.
There are– in all these cases– good, solid alternatives to state killing. Alternatives that will be more effective in protecting the lives of innocents. At home and abroad– state killing must stop.