Posted on: Sunday, April 15, 2001
Execution witnesses: How many is enough?
Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16, has suggested that his execution be nationally televised, live.
Presumably there are many who would tune in, for reasons ranging from a sense of civic revenge to morbid curiosity. It was McVeigh, after all, who killed 168 people in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has sensibly resisted such a modern-day public spectacle. The standards of civilized society should apply here, not the whims of a mass murderer.
As the New York Times put it, public telecast of McVeigh's execution would show "the very kind of act — the taking of human life — for which McVeigh is being executed." Such a broadcast, the Times added, "would appeal to the basest instincts of the viewing public, and would inevitably coarsen society."
Nevertheless, the Federal Bureau of Prisons allows the families of victims to witness executions. Since only a handful can witness McVeigh's final moments in Terre Haute, Ashcroft has provided for a closed-circuit telecast to a site in Oklahoma City for other relatives wishing to attend, thought to number about 250.
Ashcroft is right to take measures to ensure that telecast is not intercepted or rebroadcast — prudent and reasonable measures given the extraordinary circumstances.
How to limit witnesses to executions is one of the least of the many problems presented by the death penalty.
Unlike many other capital cases, there appears little doubt that McVeigh delivered the explosives-laden truck to the Murrah Federal Building — he has said as much. In referring to children who perished in the blast as "collateral damage," he has obviously foregone any popular sentiment for clemency.
But we oppose the death penalty for many reasons, not only because of the embarrassingly large number of Americans who have been sentenced to die only to be exonerated; nor only because of the lopsidedly large proportion of death row inmates who are poor and not white; nor because the United States is almost the last among advanced nations to allow this brutal practice.
The death penalty at once lowers society to the level of the convict being executed and ultimately arrogates unto society a role for which it is profoundly unqualified.
But today the death penalty is the law in most states, and with McVeigh's execution, the federal government is poised to resume capital punishment after a hiatus of almost 40 years.
The practice of the death penalty, outdated as it is, is rife with ancient rituals. Just as it is the right of the families of victims to witness executions, so it is the right of the condemned to utter a last statement.
Few murderers have more convincingly earned the ultimate punishment. Still, we blanch at the pain McVeigh's final words are likely to bring those witnesses, and we regret the forum that capital punishment affords him.
Better that he should spend the rest of his natural life speaking to a lonely cell. For this, no witnesses are needed.
