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

DATE: THURSDAY, February 17, 1994                   TAG: 9402190008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A16   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EYE FOR EYE

THE THIN VENEER of a "tough on crime" policy that made the death penalty acceptable to many Virginians was stripped away the other day in the General Assembly. Now we're down to it, the true basis for the practice, the ultimate appeal to our nature, the ugly underside of execution.

It is vengeance.

Nothing but vengeance would be served by an emotionally charged bill, passed by the House of Delegates, that would permit family members of murder victims to enjoy the spectacle of the murderer's execution by the state.

What next? Allow the victim's closest relative to personally throw the switch?

Yet only by a little bit does this barbaric legislation further dehumanize and demean a society that already sanctions government killings. Indeed, the bill is helpfully instructive by reminding us of the purpose of execution, reduced to its ages-old eye-for-an-eye foundation. The state simply acts as the agent of retribution for the aggrieved, a weapon of social blood-lust.

But this ought to be clear enough without another reminder. After considered this bill, the state Senate should waste no time defeating it.

Under current Virginia policy, a victim's family members are prohibited from joining the witnesses, required by law, at executions. In House debate it was argued that this policy unfairly denies them psychological "closure" for their grief and needed "healing."

But, pray, what kind of healing comes from watching a human being, possibly screaming, strapped into a chair until volts of electricity fry his brain? However violently and horribly the victim died, can his or her loved ones reconcile their sorrow and, yes, anger by witnessing and forever implanting in their minds the vision of another hideous death?

In the House debate, some opponents to the bill pleaded that even convicted murderers deserve death with dignity. No, some murders are so vile, so abhorrent, it can't be argued that their perpetrators deserve such consideration.

But the murderers' dignity isn't what's at stake here. It's the dignity of the victim's family, of society, and of the state officially acting on their behalf.

It is not pleasant that some people spend so much time defending murderer's rights (even claiming innocence for most of them!) while concerning themselves very little with the rights of victims. But we all should at least concede that executions don't serve deterrence. Nor do they protect society.

Punishment is in itself an important and legitimate response to intolerable deviance, especially for the most extreme and violent crimes of which murder is the worst. But setting up the state as an agent of personal, blood-thirsty vengeance diminishes society, and sends it close to the depraved depths of the murderers themselves whose needs, like our own, are not satisfied by killing.

Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994

by CNB