Vengeance, capital punishment, cinematography

A woman sits unflinchingly upright in her chair, wiping her tears away while her mouth forms a stubbornly resolute smile.

Her name is Lisa. Her family was the victim of a shocking murder.

She is being interviewed about the death penalty for the people who have caused her so much hurt.

The interviewer, noted filmmaker Werner Herzog, quietly suggests, “Jesus probably would not have been an advocate of capital punishment.” He waits for her response.  
She seems to agree with his assertion but then adds, “But some people just don’t deserve to live.”

This scene comes from Herzog’s 2011 documentary “Into the Abyss”, which documents the people — both victim and perpetrator — involved in a Texas murder in the days before the execution of one of the convicted.

Though it is carefully constructed to not be partisan in its meditation on the subject, the things I saw in “Into the Abyss” reinforced and added new layers to my opposition of the death penalty.

The Supreme Court has ruled on capital punishment a number of times in the past, and each time it has upheld the constitutionality of its use, albeit with significant boundaries and caveats.

The obstacles on the road to the lethal injection gurney are numerous — unanimous juries, a multitude of appeals, calls for clemency, “humane” execution and execution dates set far into the future.

These factors all combine to make the death of a convicted person not only costly but essentially meaningless.

Since the death is so disconnected from the act that, to some, justified execution, the death does little to deter others from doing the same.

It does not take a possibly dangerous person out of the world any more effectively than a life sentence does, and it does not grant a possible chance at redemption.

These obstacles show that we are afraid of the death penalty, and we, on some level, realize how wrong it is.

In the end, the only justification that can be given for capital punishment is simple revenge. 

Revenge is not justice. It is simply anger, a base, personal, human emotion that must be restrained when thinking about issues of the public good.

That is the point of our justice system. It exists to strip these cases of their emotional impact and to find the facts of the case.

It then determines an appropriate sanction that benefits the society as a whole.

It does not always do this perfectly — far from it — but it is set up to work that way.

The unemotional logic of the system does not mean that such emotions aren’t important.

Indeed, the emotional effects of both crime and punishment are supremely important to the people involved and to the people around them.

Instead, the justice system acknowledges that anger and personal revenge re not appropriate emotions in the system.

Since the death penalty is simply revenge, we have absolutely no right to use it within the bounds of our justice system, and the Supreme Court is wrong in its rulings on the subject.

­— estahr@indiana.edu