At nine o'clock tonight, in the state where I've lived and played and loved for 18 years, a man will be executed. His name has always been inconsequential here. He is the Sniper. For a month in my daughter's tenth year, he terrorized us. It's hard to believe it all happened in the month of October 2002 because in memory it seems more like several months.
You had to live in the DC area that horrible month to know the impact the Sniper (and his young accomplice) had on us. Fear was a constant companion. We were told he was in a white box truck and suddenly they were everywhere. Pumping gas felt like Russian roulette. People crouched down by their cars or lay across the backseat while the gas was going into the tank. Exiting your car to go into a grocery store was like entering a combat zone, and many people ran rather than walked.
The impact on our children was enormous. They were just recovering from a plane flying into the Pentagon -- just miles from our neighborhood. Their psyches were already scarred by danger looming large and unexpected. Suddenly little ones knew the word "sniper." There was talk of canceling Halloween that year. My daughter's school bus pulled up as close to the entrance of her school as was possible and the children were told to run the short distance into the building. There was no outdoor recess. Softball games were canceled. The leaves turned red and gold but no one raked them.
I was on a business trip to Arizona when I got a frantic call from my babysitter that the sniper had shot and killed a woman at a Home Depot one mile from our home. My daughter asked me if it hurt to be shot. She asked how fast bullets go. She asked if the sniper would kill a child.
Tonight the Sniper will be strapped to a gurney and put to sleep. A man who valued human life so little will lose his own. It doesn't matter really, not to me anyway. He held us hostage in 2002 and he holds us still. My daughter had nightmares for years, and still is uneasy when she hears fireworks. October has never been the same since, and parents of trick or treaters still seem furtive and overly careful. He stole from our children their security and safety. He created a generation of children who know what it's like to expect danger at every turn and to see the constant worry on the face of their parents.
Tonight the Sniper will die, but he won't take with him the fear and the pain and the loss of innocence he leaves behind.
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We choose to betray the higher moral cause by advocating state sanctioned murder.
It may make some of you feel better. It may have given you closure. You may excuse it by using euphamisms like "putting him to sleep". Make no mistake about this: what the State has done is to commit Murder. It is barbaric and serves no purpose. Every serious peer-reviewed study published shows that capital punishment deters no one from committing these crimes. Putting a criminal through a capital trial and seeing that through the appeal process to execution is much more costly than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. It makes no moral, fiscal, nor legal sense.
But it makes you feel better. Is that what justice should be about?
Due to modern forensic techniques, including DNA analysis, we have come to realise that many innocent people have been sentenced to prison, and even to death. The death penalty is a very frightening tool, that should be used infrequently.
Having said that, given a situation where a person has intentionally chosen to be a mass murderer, and where there is no reasonable doubt that the right person has been found guilty, I am not upset about the punishment meted out to this man. I prefer to think of him as just one more victim of the D.C. Sniper.
But ... we as a nation diminish ourselves when we take a criminal's life and call it justice or closure. It's revenge, pure and simple, and it does us no good.
Nor is it a deterrent. I don't think it's a coincidence that in nations that long ago abandoned capital punishment, murder rates are much lower than in the United States. The same is true when you compare our own states. Both Texas and Florida, which execute more felons than any other states, have higher murder rates than every one of the 14 states with no death penalty statute.
And I agree with Margot that there is much to be learned by keeping killers alive and incarcerated. Imagine what we might discover if Timothy McVeigh and other killers were alive and being interviewed and psychoanalyzed on an ongoing basis. New developments in brain scans – such as SPECT -- might help us understand if there was a neurobiological marker that contributed to their actions. Psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and criminologists could learn a lot by studying them from different angles. Executing them ends all these possibilities.
So, capital punishment is bad for our collective soul and our ethos. It's not a deterrent and appears to be counterproductive. And it denies us the possibility of obtaining information that might help us prevent future heinous acts.