-Caveat Lector-
<A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.2/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times
- Volume 3 Issue 2</A>
The Laissez Faire City Times
January 11, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 2
Editor & Chief: Emile Zola
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Eye For An Eye?
by Don L. Tiggre
On December 29, 1998, the Casper Star Tribune reported that the death
penalty is being sought against two men from Laramie, Wyoming who
allegedly tortured and killed a University of Wyoming student. The case
has caught national and even international attention because the student
was gay, and the murder is being used by some gay activists to push for
harsher legislation against so-called �hate crimes.�
The murder was particularly brutal, involving a gun-whipping and a
barbed wire fence. If the accused are guilty, it would certainly seem
that any mercy shown them would come at the expense of justice served.
But, what exactly will be accomplished by killing the killers?
The use of lethal force in self-defense is certainly morally acceptable,
and even productive. If would-be assailants had reason to fear that they
might pay for their aggression with their lives�right then and there,
with no chance of a good lawyer getting them off�it might well deter
them. Studies on guns and violence have certainly provided powerful
evidence that this is the case. But the use of lethal force against a
person already rendered harmless by incarceration is another matter. It
is questionable whether would-be murderers, people in a blood rage, and
psychopaths actually stop to consider their actions because the local
government racket has a death penalty for certain crimes.
It is also questionable whether a quick and painless death is really
sufficient payment for some crimes. Of course, there are crimes so
heinous that there is no payment that could ever be sufficient
(disarming entire populations and rendering them helpless before the
human predators among us comes to mind), but that is no reason to let
the criminals off easy.
If justice were served by revenge, perhaps punishment for crimes should
be handed out in whatever form of returned pain the families of the
victims think is fitting. The police could tie the murderer to a chair,
give his or her victims a satchel full of knives, pipes, hoses, bottles
of acid, and other interesting items, and let them have at it. Building
a coliseum for the exhibition of such retribution (televised nationally,
of course) would certainly bring home the point to people who are
premeditating their crimes. It might even beat out the Jerry Springer
Show in the ratings. But it would also diminish us all as human beings;
it would put brutality at the center of our culture, even more so than
it is now.
There is another �R� word that serves justice much better: restitution.
As with errant children, the best punishments are not those that simply
inflict pain or misery as a consequence of wrongful actions. The best
ones are those that set the wrong right as much as possible and,
hopefully, teach something. As noted above, there are some wrongs that
cannot be undone, but is it not better to repair the harm as much as is
possible than to just give up and let the wrong stand?
In this Wyoming case, for example, one bad thing seems to lead to
another. First there was an ugly killing. Now there is an effort to kill
two more people. In the future, the case may serve as a vehicle for gay
rights activists to push more aggression through the U.S. Congress in
the form of more punitive penalties for so-called �hate-crimes.�
Just think about that for a moment.
Not many of the most stupid laws currently being proposed can surpass
the foolishness of creating classes of politically incorrect crimes�hate
crimes. These necessarily create inverse classes of politically correct
crimes for which one can receive a lighter sentence. It also does
something new in western jurisprudence: it punishes people for having
unfashionable feelings. With the creation of special punishments for
hate crimes, Orwell�s Thought Crimes have finally made the transition
from fiction to fact. How ironic that it was not the old Soviet empire
that brought this to pass, but the supposed �land of the free and home
of the brave.�
While it seems unlikely that a drunk psychopath would stop to consider
the legal consequences of his or her actions, no matter what the law
was, it is easy to imagine that certain individuals with hatred in their
hearts could set out to stalk, capture, torture, and murder people of
their own race and gender. To the proverbial cold and calculating mind,
it might be reassuring to know which potential victims are valued less
by the state and make better prey.
It is not that I lack sympathy for the gay student, nor that I harbor
antipathy for homosexuals�I have a lifestyle that is fairly
�alternative� myself and realize what a glass house I�d be throwing
stones in if I did that. I just think we should ask ourselves if this
spiral of escalating aggression is really in our best interests.
In addition to the concerns for justice raised above, there is one other
overriding factor all advocates of self-government should consider: to
give the power of execution to the state is to unlock a Pandora�s box of
the most hideous contents. Once the state is given the power of life and
death�no matter how constrained its use of that power may be�it is also
given the philosophical fulcrum around which the greatest political
debate of our time hinges: the sovereignty of the individual versus the
supremacy of the collective. Sovereign individuals may be killed or
taken captive by acts of war, but if we give the sanction to kill
helpless individuals to a collective agency, we might as well surrender
the field of politics to the collectivists.
Political debates aside, once the state is given the sanction to kill
citizens, it will naturally enlarge upon that power, as it always seeks
to enlarge its powers. Even if the power is limited to the most brutal
and vile crimes, the principle has been established, and future
law-makers can change the definitions to include unfashionable crimes of
any sort�even Thought Crime.
Many people mock parents who �teach their children a lesson� about
hitting by hitting them. Is not the death penalty the same kind of
response?
Agreed: the lives of those who take lives are forfeit. But why waste
such forfeit lives by ending them? Why not use those lives to try to
undo some of the wrong, to try to make the world a better place?
Using such forfeited lives to make license plates doesn�t really undo
the wrong or teach much. But what if the rest of those lives were spent
on projects that fostered greater understanding and tolerance in
society? What if those lives were put to work and the proceeds given to
a trust fund that carried on work on behalf of the victims and their
families? Instead of ending a punishment with a quick death, what if the
lessons lasted a lifetime, to the benefit of the criminal and all who
might be impacted by the criminal�s learning over the years?
Whatever system of maximizing restitution is created, it will have one
great benefit: its punishment will not necessarily be permanent. Humans
are fallible beings, and even the best system of human justice is
susceptible to failure. If a person is imprisoned and put to work
righting the wrongs they have been found guilty of committing, and new
evidence is found that exonerates them, they can be set free and
restitution made to them. No desire for justice, or even revenge, can
possibly justify the creation of a system that can (and has, in fact)
sent innocent people to their deaths by accident. This one aspect alone
makes the death penalty (as administered by the state, not by the
intended victims at the moment of the attempted crime) incompatible with
the principles of freedom and non-aggression.
The possibilities are infinite, if we have the creativity and courage to
take on the responsibility to repair and teach, instead of reacting with
hatred and destruction.
Mahatma Gandhi once remarked that the result of an �eye for an eye�
policy is a world full of blind people. We should put a stop to such
primitive responses to crimes and open our eyes�while we still have
them�to the possibilities inherent in restitution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don L. Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful
thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table.
-30-
from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 2, Jan. 11, 1999
-----
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-----
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