Americans tell ourselves we value justice, but most of the time it just ends up looking like a lust for vengeance.
Case in point: The fast approaching execution date for the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzokhar Tsarnaev. One might have hoped, as this troubled young man’s trial played out last year, that his victims would take the high road, or at least recognize that life imprisonment is by far a more severe punishment than a swift and humane death. Nevertheless, his victims each took their turn addressing the court and expressing their desire to see Tsarnaev dead for his horrific crime. (And horrific it was — make no mistake.)
One can surely sympathize. If any of our loved ones met such a fate, we’d surely have murder in mind ourselves. But society is built upon the idea that the head — and not the heart or the gut — should prevail during such emotional times.
The question we’re here to answer is whether the death penalty would have played a similar starring role in the pointless and tragic deaths of Mainak Sarkar, Ashley Hasti and William Klug. Mainak Sarkar killed his wife, Ashley Hasti, in Minnesota, before driving to the UCLA campus and then shooting and killing professor William Klug. Then, he killed himself as law enforcement closed in.
No mere murder-suicide, then — a murder-murder-suicide. And there were allegedly even more names on Sarkar’s “hit list,” including another UCLA professor, who is today alive and well.
At a time when mass shootings feel more common than ever, and tempers are running hot, is there any reason to think Sarkar would have escaped the death penalty, had he not died by his own hand?
Justice or Vengeance?
It wouldn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics to imagine how this case would have played out.
An “active shooter” on a college campus? Two deaths under his belt? Yes — very, very guilty indeed, and worthy of execution. Except it didn’t play out that way. But in committing suicide, did he self-administer justice or vengeance? Do most Americans even care that there’s a difference?
Of course, the motivations, and even the words and phrases we use to label our murders can sometimes make a difference. For instance: Labeling the San Bernardino killers as “terrorists,” despite no evidence of formal ties to terrorist networks, felt like an entirely unnecessary step in an already tragic and uncomfortable series of events. Have we so reduced our collective vocabulary that we can’t fathom a large-scale tragedy that doesn’t fit a familiar narrative structure? Yes — they did appear to be “inspired” by bona-fide terrorists overseas, but neatly stamping and filing this case under capital-T Terrorism, while it might be comforting, absolves us of any responsibility for how things turn out. We don’t have to face the truth: That the San Bernardino killers were ordinary Americans.
And how about our national reluctance to come to terms with the institutionalized racism that ended the lives of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and 100 other unarmed black people in 2015?
We go to great lengths to label certain murderers as “terrorists,” certain black people as “superpredators,” and certain other violent offenders as “mentally ill.” This last one, among all the ways we play the Name Game during national crises, is among the most troubling examples.
Drawing Lines
Mental illness has become a political tool for whomever needs a scapegoat. When Republicans don’t want to face the truth about their complicity in gun violence, they chalk up America’s gun death epidemic as a “mental health” issue. But when it comes to drug use and abuse, the mental health argument is nowhere to be found. For them, addiction is a choice — not a neurological disease.
When Robert “Warrior for the Babies” Lewis was found “not fit” to stand trial for murdering an entire waiting room full of people in a Planet Parenthood clinic, on the basis of mental incompetence, he was awarded the somewhat charitable label of “insane” instead of what he should have been called, which was “Christian terrorist.”
Is this word game really constructive in any way? We twist the truth about drug addicts in order to shrug off responsibility for them. We protect religious traditions by allowing them to disavow the members of their ranks who don’t play by the rules.
Attempting to categorize and homogenize tragedy doesn’t feel like a great use of our time — no more useful, say, than debating whether a “mass shooting” constitutes four deaths or only three.
Also: No more useful than drawing some line in the sand between “murder” and “state-sanctioned murder.”
We cannot both condone and condemn killing. We cannot correct one injustice by adding to the ranks of the dead.
Here’s a final note here, this time to anyone who finds themselves on the “small government” end of the political spectrum. Take the time to ask yourself: If you don’t trust the government to oversee public roads, police stations, national forests and post offices, why on earth are you comfortable handing that same government the power to end the life of one of its citizens? Whether we call it “justice” or “vengeance,” institutionalized murder should make anybody’s skin crawl.
There will never be human-devised system that’s 100 percent foolproof, which is part of the reason why an estimated four percent of the United States’ executed defendants may actually be innocent. That’s an embarrassing and tragic margin of error, and why protecting oneself against capital punishment is a very real concern for people all across this country in cases where blame may have been misplaced.
Innocent lives can be claimed by any number of causes, institutions, industries or organizations at any time, without warning. But as soon as we get real about abolishing the death penalty, we’ll learn what it feels like to live in a country that removes weapons from its arsenal instead of stockpiles them.