Capital Punishment and the Drive to Re-Enact

[tim]

[CW: rape]

In my state, California, there's currently a proposition on the ballot to abolish the death penalty: Proposition 62, on which you should vote Yes if you're eligible to do so. You should also vote No on Proposition 66, whose goal is to make the process of state-sponsored murder more efficient. So it seems like it's a good time to think a little bit about the desire for capital punishment as a socially-acceptable response to trauma.

Racism and Capital Punishment

The death penalty persists in the United States is to punish and control people of color, primarily Black people. The legacy of kidnapping and enslaving Black people and using their labor as the foundation of a new state is one of the things that differentiates the United States from almost every other economically powerful nation, and capital punishment is another. Historically, the application of capital punishment to people convicted of rape is one of the most clear-cut instances of the disproportionate application of capital punishment to people of color. The specific case I address here is a case of rape and murder, so keep in mind the history of how capital punishment has been applied to Black men accused of rape even though this particular case was a white-on-white crime. While capital punishment advocates often claim that the death penalty should be reserved for the "worst of the worst" criminals -- and the case I'm about to talk about is just such an example -- in general, the application of capital punishment to white defendants is quite inconsistent, and understanding that helps us understand how "worst of the worst" arguments serve to obfuscate the irreducible racism of capital punishment in the US. While the occasional white death row inmate might help dissemble the racist goals of the death penalty, the thing that predicts where it will be applied most strongly is race, not the severity of the crime.

Of course, people who support capital punishment don't generally try to be overtly racist, so they enlist survivors of violent crime -- generally, white survivors, who other white people sympathize with -- to camouflage their real agenda. Moreover, many survivors of violent crime don't want the people who hurt them to be executed. Nonetheless, there are survivors of violent crime who willingly enlist in the pro-state-sponsored murder campaign, as well as family members of murder victims, and I mean to clear away the cobwebs (well aware as I am that other people have expertly documented the white supremacy that lies beneath.)

Acceptable Trauma Survivors and Revenge

Survivors make good camouflage because most people find it at least somewhat understandable why people would want revenge against people who hurt them or their loved ones in the worst possible ways (sometimes misleadingly called "closure"). The desire for revenge -- specifically the form of revenge that involves having the government murder somebody for you -- is considered within the realm of reasonable responses to trauma, even though there is no consensus among the public on whether or not capital punishment is good public policy (among experts on law and violent crime, of course, consensus exists, and that consensus is that it's bad policy.) And yet we might ask: why?

Recently I watched the documentary "The Cheshire Murders". Mega CWs apply if you decide to watch the movie; it goes into detail (perhaps more detail than is necessary) about a horrific crime in which a woman and her two daughters (one of who was 11) were raped and murdered. It's also a gripping story. Not surprisingly, the surviving family member, William Petit -- whose wife and daughters were murdered -- expresses desire in the movie for the two men who killed his family to be executed. Again: who wouldn't? We can all understand this kind of desire for revenge -- if you undergo a trauma like this one, an experience whose horror practically nobody can fully comprehend, you'd want to get back at the people who did it to the people you loved. And, of course, to you.

We find it acceptable that trauma survivors like Petit would demand capital punishment because their traumas are (as horrible as they are) singular, discrete, universally recognizable as harmful, perpetrated by strangers, and -- in this case and in many of the other most sympathetic cases -- committed by people who are in some category that is othered. Cases like this one are grist for the pro-capital-punishment mill because their victims are respectable, white, and privileged (how often do non-Black killers of Black people get executed?) Likewise, this case was convenient for death penalty proponents because it arose from a home invasion: middle-class white people who believe they're never safe are useful to politicians of both parties who ascend to power on a staircase made of "law and order". The perceived randomness of its targeting made middle-class white people empathize with the victims -- they felt "that could have been me", something middle-class white people generally don't feel about (for example) Black men murdered by police officers.

The murderers in the Cheshire case, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, are both sexual abuse survivors. It's almost impossible to say that without invoking volumes of scripts that get used against survivors -- the "if you're abused, you turn into a monster" trope that's, in general, non-evidence-based -- but in this case, it was true. The murders were the result of many systems breaking down: abusive families, communities' failure to intervene in abuse, failures on the part of the justice system to help rather than punish the murderers when they were convicted of lesser crimes. The severity of this crime like this makes it hard for even people who oppose the death penalty to think about systemic failure rather than killing monsters. It's easier to kill monsters than to look at your own role in a social system that creates them. (In this particular case, Hayes and Komisarjevsky were sentenced to death but not executed, because Connecticut abolished the death penalty after they were convicted but before they could be executed.)

As trauma survivors, we often re-enact our trauma in the hopes of assuaging it -- of living the story over again, this time with a better ending. This is far more likely to take the form of self-harm, or repeatedly putting ourselves in situations where others will abuse us, than anything else. Nonetheless, some survivors re-enact their trauma by assaulting, raping or killing somebody else. Other survivors re-enact it -- or attempt to -- more indirectly, through state-mediated killing. We consider the former unacceptable (correctly), but the latter acceptable. Why?

It might seem more logical to have the state kill the person who harmed you than to take our your pain on a random person unconnected to the people who did you wrong. But neither is an effective mechanism for dealing with trauma. It's likely that all people involved will still be living with PTSD at the end. I don't know of any evidence that executions actually bring about "closure" for survivors -- it's understandable to hope that something can, but everything I know about trauma suggests that there is never "closure"; at best, a process of learning to live with it.

So why do we consider wanting your abuser dead to be acceptable if you get the government to help you do it, while directly killing your abuser is unacceptable, and taking out your rage on an unrelated person is also unacceptable?

In none of those cases will killing someone relieve your pain. In none of those cases will killing someone kill the root cause of what happened to you. If people who do horrific things generally do so because something horrific was done to them (note that this is very different from saying that most survivors go on to commit violence against other people -- most of us do not), then what good does it to do kill the person who did the thing to you? You would have to find the person who hurt them, and kill that person. You can see where this is going. "An eye for an eye leaves the world blind" is a cliché, but it's also true in the abiding and uncomfortable way that some clichés are.

[Petit] said he believed the court had overstepped its powers and urged it to give greater consideration to the “emotional impact, particularly on victims and their loved ones” that death penalty cases generate. -- "Connecticut Death Penalty Ruling Stirs Painful Memories of 3 Grisly Killings" (New York Times article, 2015-08-14)

How does killing more people improve the emotional impact of a murder? Life without parole does foreclose the emotional satisfaction of doing away with a human life, but on the other hand, it removes the emotional burden arising from the decades of court hearings that are necessary to have somebody killed by the state.

And why do so many people consider it justice for Petit to get the executions he wants, while considering it horror for the killers to get what they wanted? In the latter case, the victims didn't do anything to the killers that would have provoked such an act -- how could anybody do anything to provoke rape and murder? Well... isn't that the point? In the US, the state uses murder as punishment everywhere there is capital punishment, and it uses rape as punishment everywhere there are prisons. I believe that it is moral to kill in self-defense, but killing somebody who you've already locked in jail, who is effectively helpless, is not self-defense; it does not address an imminent threat. Executing Hayes and Komisarjevsky wouldn't undo the harm they already did by killing their three victims, any more than the murders undid the harm done to Hayes and Komisarjevsky when they were young. In both cases, the violence serves an emotional purpose rather than a practical one. In both cases, the answer to "why kill?" is "because I believe it would make me feel better."

I think that what people really want to destroy when they want to kill -- regardless of whether they plan on doing the killing directly or having the state mediate it -- is the feelings that they have that seem impossible to live with. And yes, even the people who Cope Badly, who commit random acts of violence, are -- on some level, I think -- hoping that committing violence will stop the bad feelings. It doesn't, of course. And if it did, that wouldn't be an excuse. But most relevantly in the context of capital punishment, the kind of killing that's done in a cold-blooded way and that's supposed to happen at the behest of the democratic process: it doesn't work. Most of us recognize that murdering a stranger is neither a morally good nor effective way to cope with intolerable feelings. We need to recognize that capital punishment is neither a morally good nor effective way to cope with those feelings, either, and for the same reasons.

The law makes distinctions between premeditated killing (murder committed in cold blood, which the perpetrator planned out while in an emotionally calm state) and killing in the heat of anger. Both are punished, but the former is punished more harshly -- as it should be, I'd say, at least if we're going to punish people at all.

And yet when we support the death penalty, we support killing in cold blood. Executions are committed in the opposite of an individual, dysregulated, out-of-control mental state: it takes years, sometimes decades for somebody to go from capital conviction to execution. We think it's okay for the state to kill people because this killing is done in a premeditated way. By extension: it's okay for the state to enact the will of survivors (not every survivor, no, and yes, we know the state uses the will of survivors as an excuse rather than acting on it as a reason) because that introduces extra deliberation into the process. In fact, that's why we think that capital punishment is acceptable at all, while vigilante justice isn't.

How does that make sense? One of the reasons why in general, we punish premeditated killing more harshly, is that we believe it to be preventable. Never mind the paucity of evidence to support this belief; we claim to believe in deterrence while passing laws that do the opposite of deterrence: they mandate state-sponsored murder.

The desire to hurt the people who hurt you is a desire shared by probably everybody who's ever been hurt, and that needs to be talked about. But not all universal desires must be appeased. In the culture I live in, people seem to need monsters. We need to believe in the existence of bad people, because if there are bad people, there are people who can be punished. If other people are being punished, there are people we can point to and say, "I am not bad; they are bad." The terrifying possibility is that nobody is bad; that nobody deserves punishment. Terrifying, and completely true: we know because logically, if bad people are bad by nature, then punishment is neither deserved (since they didn't choose to be bad) nor effective (since it won't make them good); and if people have the freedom to behave well or badly depending on the circumstances, then punishment is unnecessary, since we know it doesn't cause people to behave better. We are so desperate to believe in monsters that we'll kill to maintain our belief. As far as monstrous acts go, I think killing people to preserve an abstraction is pretty far up there.

Moreover, wanting violent revenge is considered normal if you're a victim of a random crime by a stranger, but not if you're victimized over and over by a partner or family member. Country songs might suggest that sympathy for women who kill their abusive husbands is widespread, but juries are usually not so sympathetic. The song sung in response is often "You could have just left." Oddly, women trapped (financially, emotionally, child-custody-wise, or otherwise) in an abusive relationship seem to receive the least dispensation to exact revenge. It seems like being victimized over and over when you can't escape gets you cut less slack than being victimized once in an otherwise charmed life. Perhaps a widespread belief in meritocracy leads us toassume that people with good lives lead good lives because they deserve it, and victims of ongoing abuse by their spouses or parents somehow deserve the abuse. Or maybe it's the belief in the privilege of the family to normalize deviance, to grant absolution to what would be inexcusable if anybody else did it to you. How dare you want to hurt your parents, no matter how much they previously hurt you? That's the natural order of things, after all. We assume that victims -- or families of victims -- of violence committed by strangers deserve "closure" in the form of an execution, yet from survivors of repeated, inescapable abuse by their spouses or parents, we withhold even the small measure of closure that arises from another person saying, "I'm listening to you. I believe you."

Acceptable trauma survivors -- those who are victimized by people unrelated to themselves -- are supported when they wish to deal with their trauma by having the state kill people on their behalf. Unacceptable trauma survivors take violence into their own hands -- frequently against themselves, rarely against others. Honesty about the prevalence of violence and abuse requires empathy for all survivors, without granting any class of survivors special permission to potentiate violence. Breaking the cycle of abuse requires ending capital punishment and confronting our collective desire to punish. We can acknowledge that we are hurting while working as hard as we can to control our natural desire to hurt others in response, to show them what it feels like. We have to confront our collective desire for vengeance in order to be freed from the misguided hope that further bloodshed will heal us.

Thanks to Gwen, Jon and Ken for their comments on a draft of this essay.

---

Do you like this post? Support me on Patreon and help me write more like it.

Comments

[someonefromthewater]

Thank you for writing this.