Capital Punishment

The death sentence is under the spotlight once more. The focus has been drawn there recently by the plight of convicted Utah killer Ronnie Lee Garnder. His requested method of execution: firing squad.

Much can made from that. Gardner himself says that there's no mistakes with the method, and that's why he selected it. Yet that excuse appears far too simple. Lethal injection has not proved ineffective so far. So we are left to little more than conjecture. Why should a convicted felon choose a loud and abrasive method of death over something much cleaner, and at least arguably easier on him?

Republican Sheryl Allen of the Utah legislature complains that such a method of carrying out the sentence distracts from the penalty. There may be more sympathy for the murderer than the victims. She has a point; the emphasis on the matter does change according to the method of carrying it out. The firing squad seems particularly brutal. Indeed, barbaric. Any sympathy for the victims or their families surely is lessened by that.

If Mr. Gardner's point is to show us the real brutality of such measures as capital punishment, well, to be frank and fair, what difference does it make by how one dies at the hands of a (presumably) just society? But is that his real intention? Does he have a perhaps masochistic reason for the option?

Conjecture, yes, no matter how we view the issue. Capital punishment is one of those questions which leave a bad taste any way you interpret it. Society has a right to protect itself and that right may at times entail taking the life of someone completely recalcitrant. Yet it is only right to ask whether we are becoming animals ourselves if we keep up with the old eye for an eye standard.

It is a mess and that is that. The real and true hope here is that Mr. Gardner's victim and his family are in a position and mind frame of willingness to forgive if the man really wants forgiveness, and that Mr. Gardner himself is willing to meet his fate with the right mentality. If he is merely grandstanding, he will not help himself (or others) regardless. If his victims, attorney Michael Burdell and his family, are not willing to forgive, then what lesson is left?