McVEIGH

What is the just price for 168 murders?

The jury weighing convicted murderer Timothy J. McVeigh’s punishment has two choices: life imprisonment without possibility of parole or death by lethal injection. Except for those who oppose capital punishment for philosophical reasons, it is difficult to find many who think McVeigh should receive life imprisonment.

Callers across the talk-radio dial suggest different punishments for McVeigh, ranging from public crucifixion to drawing and quartering with tractors, from administration of pain-inducing nonlethal drugs to vivisection. An overwhelming percentage of Americans feel that executing McVeigh is simply not enough. The law’s prescribed punishment satisfies neither our sense of justice nor does it requite our desire for vengeance.

Assuming McVeigh receives the death sentence, his appeal is automatic. His case will likely take three years to move through appellate court, and a year or two before the U.S. Supreme Court completes its review. Although such appellate delays enrage many citizens, Americans tend to forget that most nations have outlawed capital punishment. Several years ago, for example, an Italian judge refused to extradite John Hawkins, an American apprehended in Sardinia, who was wanted for murder in Los Angeles. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti was seeking Hawkins’ death. The Justice Department was required to present the Italian court with a binding legal document, signed by the governor of California, stating that California would not seek Hawkins’ execution. Only then would Hawkins’ extradition be approved.

In part because of such world opinion, U.S. courts must appear fastidiously careful in handling McVeigh’s case. Should he receive the death sentence, McVeigh will be put to death in an uneventful manner at a rural federal prison. But what if McVeigh, the misguided patriot, does not express regret? For a deed as despicable as the Oklahoma City bombing, our justice system must not only find a penalty to fit the crime, but a penalty that does not violate the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Here, mythology provides an answer.

Myths are civilization’s object lessons passed down. McVeigh is guilty of more than murder and mayhem--he is also guilty of hubris. Only a pathological arrogance could kill children with nonchalance and claim the act was motivated by patriotism. And here we can draw a lesson from the ancient Greeks, who best understood the sin of arrogance and its consequences.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. For this audacity, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle ate away at his liver, starting afresh each day because the liver grew back during the night.

The object lesson is not the cruelty of the eagle eating Prometheus’ liver, but that the punishment goes on forever. It is a much more elegant punishment than pumping a needle and waiting for a TV monitor to flat-line McVeigh’s vital signs. The modern version of the Promethean myth is the “man in the glass booth.”

The phrase comes from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi death camps and executor of Adolf Hitler’ “final solution.” Israel’s hatred of Eichmann ran so deep that he was confined in a “glass box” during his trial. In that time before communications satellites, film of the “man in the glass box” was rushed to the airport each day and flown out to the world. What the world saw was a man, who had decided life and death for millions, sitting first angrily, then fearfully, and ultimately pitifully in “the glass box.” Eichmann is Israel’s sole execution in 50 years of statehood, and it was argued at the time that keeping him alive in the glass box was a more just punishment than hanging.

While McVeigh is not Eichmann, neither is he a run-of-the-mill murderer. He killed roughly the same number of Americans as did Saddam Hussein’s entire army during the Gulf War, and more than three times as many people as America’s record serial killer, Ted Bundy. When the guilty verdicts were read, McVeigh remained expressionless. During the prosecutors’ opening statements for the trial’s penalty phase, some jurors cried; U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch, a veteran of 23 years on the federal bench, teared. Defense lawyers bowed their heads. Throughout, McVeigh remained expressionless. Thus, an imperative part of McVeigh’s punishment must be to pit McVeigh’s will against that of his victims, and the nation that he sought to destroy.

Unfortunately, there is no legal mechanism for a continuing dialogue between victims and their predators. The vast majority of prisons are located far from urban centers; there is no incentive after sentencing for a prisoner to accept moral, as well as criminal, responsibility for his deeds. Quite the contrary. As most criminal-defense lawyers learn from their clients, the prison system is full of people who were either framed, had incompetent counsel or happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Under California’s “determinate sentencing” laws, an inmate knows on the day he arrives at prison what his release date will be. For murderers, third-strikers and others facing “indeterminate sentences,” parole dates are so far away, and release so unlikely, that within the prison culture, a prisoner would be considered stupid to burden himself with shame for the “accident” that caused his incarceration.

Should McVeigh receive life imprisonment, the moral voice of his victims and the nation will be stifled as soon as the prison door closes behind him. His death by execution is no alternative to this silence. It is strange indeed to think of capital punishment as inadequate.