Grief

I have dream conversations with the dead.  This afternoon as I slept, it was with Joe, now dead for eight years.  It was as real as if he had been sitting across the table from me, dominoes in play.  

Sometimes the conversations go back more than thirty years to my father, drinking Seagrams Seven disguised in a carton of milk.  

The dreams are always pleasant and exciting while I sleep and then unsettling when I wake up; they wake me up.

"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."

Joe talking to me with an accent and grammar, now nearly extinct, that was once on both sides of Red River, with an understanding of a hard scrabble life I never had to experience.  

The grief by a mother who had lost a son as described by the preacher:  "But her hope drew a veil before her sorrow, and though her grief was great enough to swallow her up, yet her love was greater and did swallow up her grief."

And as the doctor, the cracked archangel, says, "...the long habit of living indisposith us for dying.

Kennedy v. Louisiana: I agree.

Kennedy v. Louisiana.  This is the case that told Louisiana they could not execute a man convicted of child rape.  I have finally, and somewhat belatedly, waded through the 65 page decision and am no ready to toss my two cents on the scale.  I would have voted with the majority and prohibited the execution, but I may have given my own concurring decision.  Not that my opinion matters much, but since I get to give it for free, why not?

Let me first, though, describe my friend who while waiting for the bar results and impoverished, worked in a chicken factory in  East Texas.  I never saw the place, but she described it as thousands of chickens in all stages of hunger, drugging, narrow confinement and slaughter.  It was twenty years later and she would not eat a chicken.

I will confess that I view every new Supreme Court decision through images of thirty plus years of watching the hunger, drugging, narrow confinement and slaughter of human beings.  Not only do I lack the desire to eat them, I just don't see much point in their confinement and slaughter anymore.

So why not kill child rapists?  I don't dispute the proposition that rape can be a more depraved crime than  murder.  Rape can destroy a life just as effectively as a bullet in the brain.  Most of the sexual predators I have represented were childhood victims of rape.  It is much like those horror movies in which, once bitten by the vampire, you become one.  

Moreover, a lot of murders are not particularly depraved.  Anecdotally, at least, they make the best trustees.  The murderess who is chosen to be the nanny to the warden's children is part of prison lore.  My dear old dad requested a parolee as a care-taker and, believing the lore, asked for a murderer.  I ended up putting him in a nursing home instead, but the sentiment was there.

A lot of crimes are more depraved than murder.  Bhopal for instance.  AT&T in Chile.  IBM in Nazi Germany.  Asbestos companies.  The Pinto gas tank.  The War in Iraq.  

So, for me, the proportionality argument does fall flat.  But I have other and I think better arguments why the decision was correct.  More later.

They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild

Pax Christi is a Catholic Peace Organization. We have a meeting Monday, April 28 at 7 pm in the conference room at the St. Mary's Parish Office, 1300 E. Los Ebanos Blvd. The Office of State Representative Eddie Lucio III report to Pax Christi representatives that Rep. Lucio will be present to review death penalty issues. This is open to the public and we encourage you to come. Your presence will not be taken as an indication that you agree with the views of Pax Christi. I will make a presentation with a nifty power-point presentation and my usual good-humored acceptance of people who disagree with me.

I have been practicing jury selection questions about the death penalty with my friends in hopes of getting myself ready for a trial. The responses (from those people who did not simply run and hide from me) have been surprising both to me and the ones I was questioning. In hypothetical questions, people who viewed themselves as anti-death penalty voted for death and some who viewed themselves as favoring the death penalty in the hypothetical questions opted for life without parole. There also seems to be little correlation between views on the death penalty and other political views. There are a lot of pro-life conservatives and pro-death liberals.

Carefully formed intellectual constructs about the death penalty are blown away even when a hypothetical question is posed informally. I am not sure any of us really know what we would do if truly faced as a juror with the decision to kill or not to kill.

So I will offer a hard case for the conscientious objectors among us. (I pray that if the moment of truth every arrives for me I would still find myself among that group--but who knows?) Hard cases are legion. This one is from today's news:

The Birmingham News announced the death by pancreatic cancer of serial killer Daniel Siebert this week. Siebert had been on death row for 22 years and had been one day from death last October, but was granted a stay because of the challenge to the means of lethal injections.

He murdered with slow strangulation and had five victims in Georgia including his girlfriend, a student at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, and her two young children and another woman in the apartment complex where they lived. He confessed to another 13 murders nationwide.

Even while on death row, Siebert had been uncommonly odious. He made sexually exploitive and sadistic drawings that were peddled for money on a website devoted to what it called "Murderabilia." This brought a call from the Alabama legislature to find a way to stop the trade for profit of death row drawings.

The children of a victim issued a statement and expressed disappointment that Siebert had died of natural causes before execution.

What am I to make of this?

The law calls the response retribution, and there have been times when I have thought that this was the only argument for punishment that was irrefutable. A desire for vengeance--this, I have experienced and can understand.

My fantasies and sometimes dreams in my sleep of retribution, vengeance against someone who had wronged me (many fewer now that I am getting old) always involved an act by my own hand. Gun, knife, strangling. My imagined wrongdoers to whom I owed a righteous vengeance were always rivals I feared. Another lawyer, maybe, or a politician. Some of those people became my friends as years passed. Maybe my own fear that I have the potential for violence may have been a factor in moving me to a philosophical position of non-violence.

And of course those philosophical world views that we develop for ourselves may or may not survive the anger in the heat of the moment. My Dear Old Dad used to warn me about pacifists: "Be careful, those guys are killers." I am not sure if this was just his love of the paradox or he had some basis for the belief. He claimed he and other surgeons entered the field as a way to direct sadistic impulses--a socially acceptable way to cut people. I can imagine the pacifist who reacts in this way to control violent impulses. Something like the person who decides to become celibate to avoid being a sexual predator.

Why though, wasn't the life of misery and the horrible death of Daniel Siebert satisfying to victim's children? Twenty-two years on death row. One inmate describes the experience like this:

We are kept in constant confinement, locked in-cell all day long - except for the five days a week we are allowed one whole hour outside (in another, slightly bigger, cage). Cell temperatures are kept cold and breezy by powerful forced-air vents, yet permissible clothing is limited. All meals are served in-cell, on a filthy tray shoved through a slot in the door. Showers? For us, it's three times weekly. As for visiting, we are limited to two hours per week, with added physical restrictions: all death row visits take place in a 4' x4' separation booth, behind a barrier. (All this after prisoners' family, friends and attorneys' drive many hours to reach this remotely-located prison.)
This from a Robert Buehl incarcerated in Pennsylvania.

And then death by pancreatic cancer, normally a relatively rapid death (months of agony), but an especially painful death, even under the best of conditions with morphine and hospice care. And from what I know of prison medical care, I suspect Mr. Siebert's care in Alabama was less than ideal. (If I knew the choice was lethal injection or pancreatic cancer for me in an Alabama prison, I may well be too afraid of the cancer pain. Like those people who jump to their deaths out of a burning building).

The victim's children reported they did not have a sense of satisfaction from this end to Daniel Siebert.

Would an execution have actually been better, though? I don't know.

I do believe that we who choose to defend those accused of capital crimes (either in or out of court) must be willing to face the worst of cases and be willing to face the suffering caused the victims.