Thou Shalt Not Kill

The execution of a prisoner at the hands of the state of Utah reveals our collective sadism. They tied him, a confessed murderer, like an animal and blew his heart out in a sentence similar to that in Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” the novel about the rebellious behavior of a monster who looked positively civilized in comparison to a society that was so very bureaucratic in the expression of its savagery. Anger accompanies the reaction of those who consider “an eye for an eye” to be the supreme formula for maintaining social order. Those who believe that murder can be justified and legalized celebrate their crime with enthusiasm. These are the same people who see their way clear to torture some criminal if the use of pliers, forceps, knives and whips could guarantee the saving of innocent lives. According to these who — whether they know it or not — long for the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the ends not only justify the means, they also demonstrate a country’s practical superiority — in this case, the United States — over Europe, the decadent. How sad it is that in an age such as ours, there are still some who can believe that murder can be at times gratuitous and at others selective, sometimes abominable and sometimes justifiable, by turns “good” or “bad.”

It’s not even necessary to frame an argument against these executions that with so many methods of extermination, this first-world power — admirable in so many other things — keeps company with such repugnant regimes as China, Iran, the Sudan, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. One’s own guilt cannot be washed away just because others do the same, nor is the sin made less revolting when shared by other nations that respect human dignity. The ferocity visited upon a given criminal diminishes us if we go beyond legitimate punishment to the practice of crude vengeance. It makes no difference whether we act alone, or we’re supported by a worldwide pack of hounds. If we murder the criminal, we multiply his aberration; we become no more than a bloody whip that does nothing more than add to the horror.

Neither is it admissible to talk about efficiency. Even though the death penalty has shown — through very clear and convincing statistics — that it is completely useless as a method for dissuading others from committing murder, it would be equally indefensible in the improbable case that the opposite could be shown to be true. We can say the same about the economic cost. It costs more to keep it going — with all its merry-go-round of lawyers, eternal litigation, appeals and so on — than it would to abolish it. Yet, even if we were to make the most of our resources by eliminating a given number of citizens every year, we would still be facing a foul-smelling practice. Murder, whether carried out by religious fanatics, raving lunatics, nationalist gun-wavers or butchers with legal sanction, should always be condemned and not because it hasn’t been condemned before, nor because the idea comes from the liberal elite or arises from a naïve pacifism. Rather, it should be condemned because by its practice, we lose our dignity, the morality that keeps us from sinking into the same swamp where the wolves howl.

The last-ditch argument that proponents of capital punishment usually throw at protestors brings mothers, children or significant others into the argument. “What if that murdered girl were your girlfriend? Would you be so magnanimous if we were talking about your family or friends?” In such a case, I myself would be the one to try to kill the murderer. Of course, following such a course of action, my behavior would be punishable by law, and I would have to answer for the crime before my peers and go to prison. In reality, those close to the victim are the least able to administer justice. The reactionary thing, explains Fernando Savater in an impeccable article dealing with the subject of life sentences, “… is to express a visceral and primal ‘reaction’ to a present occurrence.” Not due, he continues, “to an underestimation of the seriousness of the crime but to the fact that we place the utmost value on the dignity of the human being, even for those who, in the most disgraceful way, disregard that dignity and trample it underfoot. Putting a limit on punishment, as high as might be necessary, shows the social will not to exterminate one of its own kind, no matter what crimes may have been committed. Because this is the tragic condition in which we move and breathe: that the worst among us are, nevertheless, fellow human beings to their victims and to the rest of us. And the freedom that they employ for evil — for which they should and must be punished — is terribly and inseparably the sister to that which we hope — at times with an anguished effort — to use better.”

How disgusting then the idea that blood spilled must be paid in blood, the primitive idolatry of the gun, the red-hot iron that promises redemption to a witch by the scarring of her breasts, purification earned by burning at the stake, the gas chamber, the shot or injection of poison, the despicable guillotine and the hangman’s noose denounced by Azcona and Berlanga. This postmodern s—, rooted in the virus of absolutism that even makes enlightened conquests relative, condemns Voltaire for being meek and Martin Luther King for being a lamb, purges the sins of the world under the banner of Hammurabi and in the name of democracy, acts against it. I am filled with fear at the vengeful among the ruins. Those who sterilize societies through whips, beatings and driving others to their knees. Those who fix everything by spying out the faults of others in pits made clean by law. Those who associate with men who slaughter. Those who confuse humanity with stupidity. The surly. The pure. Those violent monitors of societal peace. The guardians of cemeteries. Those who, motivated by a very legitimate revulsion at the crime committed, go forth in their lab coats and reproduce it exactly. Those who wash their hands before the rowdy mob. Those who celebrate a gunshot all in good fun while eating peanuts. Those among the pack of hounds who argue theory. Those who do not tremble. The infallible. The enraged. The vicious citizens who, believing themselves hardened and mature, free from the debilitating trap of reason, prowl around among enlightened necrophiliacs like Mao, Khomeini or Kim Jong-Il. Thou shalt not kill. Remember?