
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 15, 1990                   TAG: 9006180189
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-15   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SAVINO SERVICE

CONDEMNED murderer Joseph Savino may not quite have understood what he was doing when he asked Gov. L. Douglas Wilder to open his pending execution to television coverage. Wilder himself, when he turned Savino down, was clearly correct that Virginia law does not give him that power.

All the same, Savino rendered a service to the commonwealth, and indeed to the people of the United States.

It is not a service that most people will thank him for. Despite widespread support for capital punishment, most people are likely to turn their heads in revulsion at the prospect of viewing the grisly deed.

That is, however, the point. Citizens who demand capital punishment ought, at the very least, to see what they're doing. And should be required to do so.

I make here no defense of Savino's crime, which was heinous and barbarous and certainly merits severe punishment in a presumably civilized society. He murdered his homosexual lover in Bedford County in 1988 and was not gentle about it. He pleaded guilty, and beyond the nominal claim that he had an unfortunate childhood makes no justification for his misdeed. He insists he will file no appeal against execution June 29 by the electric chair.

All of that is to one side, however. The central point is capital punishment itself. The act, however popular, is a glaring contradiction of civilized principles - with which even those who are most enthusiastic about it reveal, by their revulsion from the details of execution, that they are not wholly comfortable.

We do not know, in fact, why we exact capital punishment.

Most of those who claim crime deserves an eye for an eye condemn loudly and sanctimoniously - and usually on Sunday - revenge as an "un-Christian" motive.

Those who ask execution for Crime A do not believe it is deserved for Crime B, and vice versa, leaving a patchwork of American capital-punishment that makes Crime A a capital offense in one state and only a relatively serious felony, punishable by a term of imprisonment that is almost certain to be shortened, in another.

Many who support capital punishment most vociferously also defend legal means of appealing - and thus delaying - actual execution for so long that its relevance to the original crime has mostly been lost.

Self-styled "pro-life" advocates rarely extend their sympathy for the unborn to the condemned.

Few who believe capital punishment deters criminals or others from committing future similar crimes are willing to observe, or cause to be widely observed, the very thing upon which they base their argument of deterrence.

This last is the heart of the Savino appeal to Wilder. For if the systematic execution of evildoers is to serve as a warning of what awaits others tempted to the same crime, it can only do so by creating fear and revulsion in its intended objects.

To conduct executions as we now do, in virtual exclusion and with only a handful of witnesses, is ironically to shield the persons supposed to get the lesson from the point of the lesson.

By none of this do I mean to be facetious. I do not want to watch an execution myself, but I also do not want there to be any execution to watch. No statistic ever published supports the argument that execution deters. (The painter Hogarth graphically showed pickpockets busy at their trade amongst a crowd gathered to watch a hanging for pocket-picking.)

I am persuaded that capital punishment is a barbarous practice (now abandoned by most of the world) that only ends by coarsening the very society it is meant to protect. But if we must have revenge - and if we must, as we deceive ourselves, "deter" - then let us do so openly and publicly and as brutally as our lust for blood requires.

That's what executions are for.

by CNB