ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601050019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: The Back Pew
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
Another execution. Another faceless crime avenged with the death of another faceless criminal.
Walter Correll was scheduled to have been executed Thursday as retribution for the death of Charles W. Bousman Jr. of Wirtz, who was only 24 when he was murdered in 1985.
It seems oddly appropriate that an execution should be scheduled so close to New Year's. This is the time of year when we have just looked back, reflecting on the past 12 months. As tradition and our hearts dictate, it is also the time when we remember loved ones who died during the past year.
For Bousman's family, this New Year's celebration marked not a just year without him, but a decade. For them, he was not a faceless victim of crime. No doubt, their horror is as fresh today as it was 10 years ago.
That's the way it is with untimely death. The shock of it never really wears off. It is never truly forgotten the way most other pain is.
Our legal system then imposes, in cases such as this, a cruel additional penalty on the victim's family. The legal process of appeals goes on and on, meaning that the family must wake up again, yet another morning, with their loved one's name in the newspaper, his killer's fate still undetermined.
Grief, which otherwise might have started to become cathartic, is aggravated anew into a festering wound each time the case comes up for public consumption.
Such protracted procedures seem to me another argument against the imposition of the penalty. Would society not be as well served by life sentences without parole? Would victims' families not be better served by fewer, less dramatic legal appeals?
The crime Correll was a party to was heinous and, perhaps, unforgivable. How would I feel if he had killed my father or brother or, worst of all, my son?
No one who has never faced that reality can answer that question for sure.
But having lost a daughter in a medical accident related to a genetic disease she carried, I know something about the unpredictable violence of nature and human error.
When my daughter died, my wife and I might have chosen to sue the doctors and hospitals. We could have tried to make them pay for the mistake that took our daughter prematurely away from us.
Call us fools if you will, but we made a choice not to do that.
Several reasons came to mind.
We believed the doctors' assertions that they had not found any literature indicating the procedure they were performing was a high risk for children such as our daughter. We believed the doctors had done their best.
Secondly, we felt no need for vengeance. Maybe some kind of liability settlement from their insurance companies and black marks on their professional records could have made the doctors involved feel worse. I doubt it.
And, finally, no award of cash or reprimand could have brought our daughter back to us. We had no desire to infect the process of our grief with the soul-eating virus of revenge. We needed closure on her death to move ahead with our grieving.
I'm not suggesting we were any more noble than those who do, justifiably, sue doctors for malpractice.
I do suggest that reciprocal revenge makes a bitter tonic for a broken heart. And, in these cases, it cannot possibly bring back the dead.
In the case of murder, of course, society must protect itself from continued danger. While placing a murderer in prison for life may constitute a continuing hazard to other prisoners or guards, society as a whole can be reasonably well protected from further violence.
Society needs not stoop to the imitation of its offender to mete out justice.
Walter Correll's execution, in accord with the nature of our legal system, understandably may bring some resolution to the enduring grief of the family of Charles W. Bousman Jr.
Yet, our continuing insistence on a life for a life seems to be making our society no safer, no more moral, than we would be without such a policy.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB