Futility of death penalty

By John M. CRISP

Tribune News Service

Maybe our society should congratulate itself occasionally on how much progress it’s made in the last half-century toward equality and individual rights, especially for women, racial minorities and LBGT.

Or maybe self-congratulation isn’t called for just for doing the right thing. And some of our steps in the right direction have been timid and tentative.

Nevertheless, good things have been done. Yet our ambitious, magnificent experiment in democracy, freedom, human rights and the progress of civilization is hampered by our reluctance to abandon a practice that we share only with repressive countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran: the prerogative of the state to put citizens to death.

For many this characteristic of American life is largely invisible. Twenty states have abolished the death penalty already, and many of the others haven’t executed anyone in decades.

Even in my home state, Texas, which is the nation’s most active death penalty state, an execution doesn’t draw much attention. Every month or so a short article, buried in the B-section of the newspaper, announces that another criminal has been put to death. Even in Texas, executions are generally beyond the public’s notice.

But a couple of Associated Press articles, literally adjacent in my local newspaper last week, provide the occasion to consider the practice of capital punishment in America in the 21st century.

Murderous father

If you were looking for someone who deserves to be executed, John Battaglia would be a good candidate. In 2001, Battaglia murdered his 9-year-old and 6-year-old daughters with gunshots while his ex-wife listened on the phone. The older child, Faith, begged for her life before he pulled the trigger. And, indeed, last week a district judge in Dallas set an execution date of Dec. 7.

On the other hand, three defense psychiatrists testified at his trial that he has bipolar disorder, which distorts his sense of reality, and he reportedly suffers also from narcissistic personality disorder.

The article just above Battaglia’s reports the case of Sheborah Thomas, who faces capital murder charges in Houston for drowning her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter in the bathtub. Apparently, the children fought back, struggling for their lives, but she held their heads under the water until they died.

To say that a mother who could commit such a crime is mentally unstable seems redundant. In fact, Thomas’s attorney says that she has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression.

Don’t mistake this column for an effort to generate sympathy for Thomas and Battaglia. On the other hand, anger doesn’t feel like the right response, either. How about futility, in two versions?

The first is the futility of the principal argument in favor of capital punishment, the idea that it serves as a deterrent to crime. Both Battaglia and Thomas already live in an active capital punishment state, and it’s impossible to believe that crimes based in mental instability like theirs could be deterred by the threat of execution.

The second futility is the one we feel when we try to give people like Thomas and Battaglia what we think they deserve merely by killing them. We’ll never succeed as long as we’re limited by the “cruel and unusual” language in the Constitution.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.