Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Bad News (Maybe) for the Pro-Execution Lobby
Is there such a thing as the pro-execution lobby? Why not call a spade a spade?
There are a lot of qualifications to the twisted tale, which is why the "(maybe)" hedge in the title of this post. But a story in today's NY Times tells of a courageous, or at least certainly independent-minded, prosecutor in St. Louis who has re-opened a case which, in theory, was put to rest with the 1995 execution of a convicted murderer. It seems that the man executed may not have been on the scene of the crime after all. Whoops.
Again, qualifications: Just about everyone connected with the case is either dead (one way or another) or serving long sentences in prison for other crimes. And the case's original prosecutor doesn't (unsurprisingly) believe there were any fatal flaws in the case. (At least, flaws fatal to anyone other than the defendant.)
But still...
Not having experienced it myself, I surely don't know how difficult it must be for family and friends of a capital crime's victim not to have closure (as the phrase has it). But I can imagine the pain, and I can imagine the overpowering urge to lay retribution upon the body and soul of whoever it was that committed the deed. The question which so many people seem to overlook, though -- and it's not just an intellectual theory, a thought exercise -- is: What if this person is not the one who committed the deed?
Unless I saw the crime with my own eyes, in broad daylight, I simply could not convince myself "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Person X is absolutely guilty and therefore deserves to die via electrocution, lethal injection, the gas chamber, whatever. Eyewitnesses talk themselves into believing one "fact" or the other which may or may not be true. Police make mistakes, as do prosecutors. Defendants often have a chip on their shoulders or exhibit other character traits which do them no good in the jury's eyes. Defense attorneys are quite capable of fouling up their clients' cases, either through incompetence or via manipulation by the prosecution or the court system itself.
Anyone who refuses to admit to these possibilities really needs to do some soul-searching. This includes the victim's loved ones, difficult though it must be.
I've had unhappy occasion recently to learn of the psychological (Jungian, I think) concept of projection. I'd heard the term, even used it before, without being 100% sure what it meant; to my mind, it was associated with psychoanalysis -- the tendency of the patient to view the therapist as a father figure, say. They would thus be said to "project" their image of the ideal father onto the next nearest person.
This notion wasn't that far off the mark, as it happens, but it was too limited. It seems (assuming you buy into this theory, of course) that we are projecting all the time, onto one person or another. What we're projecting onto them is indeed an ideal image, but that needn't be a good image; we can project onto others images of the ideal villain, for instance. All that's necessary is that the person be just villainous enough (or good enough, as the case may be). From then on, any slightest behavior which emphasizes the accuracy of the projection is inflated in our minds; any behavior which argues against the projection's accuracy is dismissed or ignored. The projection becomes more "real" than the person onto whom we're projecting.
I'm no psychologist, Jungian or otherwise. But it doesn't require too great a stretch to imagine that some of this kind of projection might take place in the minds of the families of violent-crime victims. Frustration, rage, grief -- it all fills the soul. It fills the soul to such an extent, indeed, that if the sufferer is to survive psychologically at all, she must channel a lot of her psychic energy outwards -- onto the man accused of raping her sister, or the woman on trial for stabbing her father, and so on. Whether or not the accusation is actually true becomes almost secondary to the simple availability of the accused.
Hence, the death penalty. "But me no buts!" a college roommate used to exclaim when I'd try to get a word in edgewise to his tirade du jour. You've gotta sympathize with those whom a victim has left behind or who are responsible for caring for what's left of a victim in the wake of a violent crime. You've gotta sympathize, you've gotta understand, but you don't gotta like -- let alone agree with -- the effects.
There are a lot of qualifications to the twisted tale, which is why the "(maybe)" hedge in the title of this post. But a story in today's NY Times tells of a courageous, or at least certainly independent-minded, prosecutor in St. Louis who has re-opened a case which, in theory, was put to rest with the 1995 execution of a convicted murderer. It seems that the man executed may not have been on the scene of the crime after all. Whoops.
Again, qualifications: Just about everyone connected with the case is either dead (one way or another) or serving long sentences in prison for other crimes. And the case's original prosecutor doesn't (unsurprisingly) believe there were any fatal flaws in the case. (At least, flaws fatal to anyone other than the defendant.)
But still...
Not having experienced it myself, I surely don't know how difficult it must be for family and friends of a capital crime's victim not to have closure (as the phrase has it). But I can imagine the pain, and I can imagine the overpowering urge to lay retribution upon the body and soul of whoever it was that committed the deed. The question which so many people seem to overlook, though -- and it's not just an intellectual theory, a thought exercise -- is: What if this person is not the one who committed the deed?
Unless I saw the crime with my own eyes, in broad daylight, I simply could not convince myself "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Person X is absolutely guilty and therefore deserves to die via electrocution, lethal injection, the gas chamber, whatever. Eyewitnesses talk themselves into believing one "fact" or the other which may or may not be true. Police make mistakes, as do prosecutors. Defendants often have a chip on their shoulders or exhibit other character traits which do them no good in the jury's eyes. Defense attorneys are quite capable of fouling up their clients' cases, either through incompetence or via manipulation by the prosecution or the court system itself.
Anyone who refuses to admit to these possibilities really needs to do some soul-searching. This includes the victim's loved ones, difficult though it must be.
I've had unhappy occasion recently to learn of the psychological (Jungian, I think) concept of projection. I'd heard the term, even used it before, without being 100% sure what it meant; to my mind, it was associated with psychoanalysis -- the tendency of the patient to view the therapist as a father figure, say. They would thus be said to "project" their image of the ideal father onto the next nearest person.
This notion wasn't that far off the mark, as it happens, but it was too limited. It seems (assuming you buy into this theory, of course) that we are projecting all the time, onto one person or another. What we're projecting onto them is indeed an ideal image, but that needn't be a good image; we can project onto others images of the ideal villain, for instance. All that's necessary is that the person be just villainous enough (or good enough, as the case may be). From then on, any slightest behavior which emphasizes the accuracy of the projection is inflated in our minds; any behavior which argues against the projection's accuracy is dismissed or ignored. The projection becomes more "real" than the person onto whom we're projecting.
I'm no psychologist, Jungian or otherwise. But it doesn't require too great a stretch to imagine that some of this kind of projection might take place in the minds of the families of violent-crime victims. Frustration, rage, grief -- it all fills the soul. It fills the soul to such an extent, indeed, that if the sufferer is to survive psychologically at all, she must channel a lot of her psychic energy outwards -- onto the man accused of raping her sister, or the woman on trial for stabbing her father, and so on. Whether or not the accusation is actually true becomes almost secondary to the simple availability of the accused.
Hence, the death penalty. "But me no buts!" a college roommate used to exclaim when I'd try to get a word in edgewise to his tirade du jour. You've gotta sympathize with those whom a victim has left behind or who are responsible for caring for what's left of a victim in the wake of a violent crime. You've gotta sympathize, you've gotta understand, but you don't gotta like -- let alone agree with -- the effects.
