Determined, page 35
In the press conference afterward, media witnesses varied in describing him as seeming arrogant, defeated, aged, or commanding the scene; one reporter appeared to believe that McVeigh had written the poem; they all struggled to flesh out the story, noting the number of times he took a breath at some juncture, the color of his shirt, the length of his hair; differing opinions were offered as to whether the curtain was green or bluish green.
Outside the prison, 1,400 reporters had been on-site for three days. The event was catered by a local meeting-and-event firm, their first execution. For $1,146.50, reporters were given a padded chair, a writing table with a cloth skirt guaranteed to be changed daily, chilled bottled water, phone service, and transportation around the prison grounds by golf cart. The hoi polloi reporters unwilling to pony up the money made do in tents without chairs, electricity, or phone lines. A Washington Post reporter, either sheepish or gloating, admitted in his coverage that his paper had sprung for three deluxe packages.
Four thousand feet away from the reporters were the prison grounds reserved for protesters, two separate areas for the anti–death penalty attendees, numbering approximately a hundred, and the handful of pro-death celebrants, driven to the spot on two different buses; no transportation here for ambivalent protesters. Prison authorities wanted to avoid the circus of vulgarians that had accompanied Bundy’s death; protesters were allowed a protest sign, a candle with a windscreen, and a Bible. Other than some jeers from the pro–death penalty protesters, the crowd was quiet and dispersed peacefully. Justice had been served.[32]
* * *
• • •
We’re at loggerheads. There’s no such thing as free will, and blame and punishment are without any ethical justification. But we’ve evolved to find the right kind of punishment viscerally rewarding. This is hopeless.
Maybe not, though, as this chapter has shown an additional type of evolution. Frenzied mobs, intoxicated with conspiracy theories, slashing, stabbing, burning hundreds to right a supposed wrong. A huge mob spending four hours watching a man be slowly torn to pieces by horses, in order to right a wrong. Twenty thousand people watching someone be dropped through a trap door with a rope snapping his neck, another act of righting a wrong. Hundreds gathering to celebrate news that a wrong has been righted with an electric chair. A handful of people, outnumbered ten to one by death penalty opponents, gathering for news that a wrong has been righted by someone being quietly overdosed.
What accounts for these transitions? The replacement of violent mobs with mobs watching officials being violent is obvious, part of the centralization of power and legitimizing of the state, the first steps toward a criminal trial reified with a “The State of Whichever versus Jones.” The transition from drawing and quartering to a quick public hanging? A standard explanation is that this reflected reformist pressure.[*] The shift from public execution to electrocution behind prison walls? This revolved around whom the killing was being performed for. Sociologist Annulla Linders of the University of Cincinnati has argued that this was another step in the state’s quest for legitimacy—instead of taking its approval from a mob of observers often threatening to lynch the person if the state didn’t do it for them, legitimacy was now coming from the approving presence of a handful of distinguished gentlemen quietly observing the event. In other words, acquiring this new source of legitimacy outweighed the moral rejuvenation of the mob, obtained by reminding it viscerally about who was the Man. Electrocution to lethal injection? With the U.S. in the ever-dwindling club of death penalty countries, with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Iran, it seemed prudent to switch from a method that could cause the person’s face mask to explode in flames to something (ideally) resembling euthanizing an elderly dog.[33]
From our perspective, the transition can be framed much more informatively. At some point, authorities showed up and said, “Look, we know it’s great fun for all of you to get to slaughter lepers and Jews, but the times they are a’ changing, and from now on, we’re the ones doing the killing, and you’re just going to have to get your pleasure from watching the person be tortured for hours.” And then the transition to “And you’re just going to have to get your pleasure from watching us take a minute or two to kill someone by hanging.” And then to “You can wait outside, and we’ll tell you when it’s done. We’ll even let journalist witnesses tell you about the gory parts of electrocuting someone,[*] and that has to be sufficiently pleasurable.” And then on to “Get your pleasure from knowing that we’ve killed the person, albeit relatively peacefully.”
And with each transition, people got used to things.
Not always, not quickly, sometimes not ever, of course. Every crowd celebrating the news of some criminal’s execution inevitably produces a quote to the effect of how the condemned is getting an easier death than he deserves, after what he put his victims through. And that must feel just searing in its injustice. There were probably people in the crowd who felt that Damiens was getting off easy for sticking a penknife into the king.
So there are always people who feel like there was too little retribution. Importantly, retribution built on perceptions of free will does help some victims reach the unreachable state of “closure.” One sticky way to respond to that is to question whether acts of retribution, reframed as compassion for the bereaved, should be a “right” of victims or their families. An easier response is to point out the well-documented but not widely known fact that closure for victims or their families is mostly a myth. Law professor Susan Bandes of DePaul University finds that for many, the execution and the accompanying media coverage are retraumatizing, impeding their recovery.[*] A surprising number reach the point of actively opposing the execution. Social workers Marilyn Armour of the University of Texas and Mark Umbreit of the University of Minnesota studied family members of homicide victims in their two states, the former leading the way in executing prisoners, the latter having banned it more than a century ago. They found that from the perspectives of health, psychological well-being, and daily function, the Minnesotans fared significantly better than the Texans.[*] Moreover, a recent, first-of-its-kind national survey of victims of violent crime reported, by a wide margin, a preference that criminal justice focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution, and that expenditures be increased for crime prevention rather than incarceration.[34]
Those victims and families who do favor retribution and beefing up of prisons may actually be looking for something very different and rarely stated. In justifying the death penalty, William Barr, attorney general for both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, wrote, “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” What he is really saying is that a government is morally obligated to enact the strongest possible manifestation of its culture’s values in that realm—whether drawing and quartering or quarantining.[35]
We can get a sense of this by taking the evolutionary arc from burning lepers to overdosing McVeigh one step further. In July 2011, Norwegian Anders Breivik carried out the largest terrorist attack in Norwegian history. Breivik, a lump of narcissism and mediocrity, had tried and failed at a string of personas, with his ideology completely malleable and his failures always someone else’s fault; he had finally found his people among White supremacist troglodytes. Following the standard playbook, Breivik proclaimed that White, Christian European culture was being destroyed in his country by immigrants, multiculturalism, and the political progressives who supported it. He first set off a bomb near the office of the socialist-democratic prime minister, killing eight. He then drove twenty-five miles to a lake containing the small island of Utøya; on it was a summer camp for a youth organization associated with the Labour Party, an organization that over the decades had produced a string of left-leaning prime ministers and one Nobel Peace Prize winner. Breivik, dressed as a police officer, was ferried to the island and spent the next hour calmly gunning down sixty-nine teenagers.
At his trial, he gave long, meandering rants about how his Christian European volk were being destroyed, claimed to be a knight in a confabulated modern Knights Templar, and gave pseudo-Nazi salutes. He was found guilty of the mass murder and given the longest sentence possible in Norway—twenty-one years.
Breivik was then deposited in one of Norway’s dens of funishment.[*] He has a three-room living space, computer, TV, PlayStation, treadmill, and kitchen (he was able to submit an entry to a prison gingerbread house competition). Amid some heated public debate, he was accepted by the University of Oslo to matriculate remotely as, unironically, a political science student.
Norway’s response to the slaughter? Exactly what Barr unintentionally implied. One survivor appraised the trial, saying, “The ruling in the Breivik case shows that we acknowledge the humanity of extremists too.” They continued, “If he [Breivik] is deemed not to be dangerous any more after 21 years, then he should be released. . . . That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles, and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed our society.” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who knew a number of the victims and their families, stated, “Our answer is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity but never naivety.” Norway’s universities accept prisoners as (remote) students, and in explaining his decision to offer the same to Breivik, the rector of the university said that they were doing so “for our own sake, not for his.” In the Norwegian version of Barr, survivors and families of the slaughtered were owed the knowledge that their nation had responded to their nightmare with the strongest possible expression of their values.
And what were the responses of the average Norwegian to the trial? The majority were satisfied with the outcome, felt it had preventative value and reaffirmed democratic values; perhaps as a measure of its efficacy, before the trial 8 percent wanted revenge, while after, only 4 percent did. And the response of Norwegians to Breivik himself? In his arraignment hearing, Breivik’s claim to be a (literal) knight of the indigenous Norwegian people was met with a wave of derisive laughter from the gallery. Breivik had posted a photo of himself in his Knights Templar outfit,[*] and one newspaper reproduced it under the sardonic, contemptuous heading “That’s How He Got His One-Man Army”; what he wore was described as a “costume” rather than a “uniform.” A pathetic nobody playing dress-up who could now be forgotten.[36]
With Breivik, Norway joined the ranks of peoples who have had to figure out how not to hate those who have damaged them terribly. When it works, it is awe-inspiring. It is also fascinating, seeing the culture-specific paths to this state employed by different peoples who have had a lot of practice. We saw that in Charleston, after the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre that left nine African American parishioners dead at the hands of a White supremacist whom they had welcomed in—in the days afterward, some of the survivors and their families publicly forgave him and prayed for his soul. “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,” said the daughter of one of the victims. “You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives you. I forgive you.” The sister-in-law of one of the victims faced the shooter and offered to visit him in prison in order to pray with him.[*] We saw a different cultural version of the same after another White supremacist opened fire and killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter was injured in the process and taken to a hospital to be cared for by a mostly Jewish medical staff; when asked how they managed that, Dr. Jeff Cohen, president of the hospital, said predictable things about the Hippocratic oath but then gave a more revealing explanation—the shooter, he said, was a confused man who was easily exploited by online hate groups: “The gentleman didn’t appear to be a member of the Mensa society.” And in the aftermath of Breivik’s attack, a survivor who had subsequently become deputy mayor of Oslo wrote to him, “It is my job to see that no one experiences the same social rejection that you did [experience]. Your fight against social rejection is the only fight we have in common, Anders.”[*] How have you managed not to hate this person? No one cited the frontal cortex or stress hormones. Instead, they found more poetic, personal routes to the same. Why don’t I hate him? Because he has a soul, whether it is soiled or not, and God forgives him. Because he is not smart enough to know that he’s been used and manipulated. Because, starting from childhood, he became embittered from loneliness, with a desperate need to be accepted and belong, and I am willing to call him by his first name and acknowledge that to him.[37]
We all are perched on an edge, with head-shaking disbelief whether we look back or forward. My guess is that most Norwegians view American criminal justice as barbaric. Yet at the same time, most Norwegians view it as unattainable and undesirable to consider Breivik in a context of there being no free will. The early part of his trial was dominated by the issue of whether he was insane, and the judges showed the same mindset critiqued in chapter 4 when, having decided he was sane, they concluded that he thus had free will, could have chosen to do otherwise, and was responsible for his actions. One commentator, who had moved beyond the Norwegians, wrote, “If Breivik’s actions on that fateful Friday were completely beyond any free will, then punishing him (as distinct from restraining him from further harm to the community) may be as immoral as our perception of Breivik’s criminal acts themselves.”
Meanwhile, Americans are perched on a different edge of disbelief. I’m going out on a limb, but I assume that most Americans would view a public execution, complete with twenty thousand gawkers, and mobs of them putting aside their hot dogs and lemonade afterward to fight over souvenirs, as savagery. Yet Americans were gobsmacked by Breivik’s trial, beginning with astonishment at how it opened with the prosecutors shaking Breivik’s hand. “Mocking Justice in Norway” was the title of a piece criticizing the national values that resulted in Breivik’s kid-glove treatment. One (British) criminologist began his piece by writing, “Anders Breivik is a monster who deserves a slow and painful death.” And on a different edge, no doubt some nineteenth-century professional hangman would be appalled by how justice is mocked by lethal injection, but would also think that drawing and quartering was a bit beyond the pale.[38]
The theme of the second half of this book is this: We’ve done it before. Over and over, in various domains, we’ve shown that we can subtract out a belief that actions are freely, willfully chosen, as we’ve become more knowledgeable, more reflective, more modern. And the roof has not caved in; society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan and that mothers of people with schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child.
But it will be hugely difficult to continue this arc, so much so that I’ve spent a lot of the last five years procrastinating over this book because it seemed like a waste of time. And because I am endlessly reminded about how far I personally have to go. As I noted, I’ve worked with public defenders on various murder trials, teaching juries about the circumstances that produce brains that make horrible decisions. I was once asked if I would take on that role working on the case of a White supremacist who, a month after attempting to burn down a mosque, had invaded a synagogue and used an assault rifle to shoot four people, killing one. “Whoa,” I thought. “WTF, I’m supposed to help out with this?” Members of my family died in Hitler’s camps. When I was a kid, our synagogue was arsoned; my father, an architect, rebuilt it, and I had to spend hours holding one end of a tape measure for him amid the scorched, acrid ruins while he railed on in a near-altered state about the history of anti-Semitism. When my wife directed a production of Cabaret, with me assisting, I had to actively force myself to touch the swastika armbands when distributing costumes. Given all that, I’m supposed to help out with this trial? I said yes—if I believed any of this shit I’ve been spouting, I had to. And then I subtly proved to myself how far I still had to go. On these trials I’ve worked on, the lawyer has often asked me if I wanted to meet with the defendant, and I’ve instantly said no—I would have to admit during my testimony to having done that, and it would compromise my credibility as a teaching witness impartially discussing the brain. But this time, before I knew it, it was I who asked these attorneys if I could meet with the defendant. Was this because I wanted to figure out what epigenetic changes had occurred in his amygdala, what version of the MAO-beta gene he possessed? Because I wanted to understand his personal case of turtles all the way down? No. I wanted to see close up what the face of evil looked like.[*]
Perhaps when done with the writing, I should read this book.
It will be hard. But we’ve done it before.
15
If You Die Poor
I was surfing the web, procrastinating to avoid doing some chore, and was looking at one of those sites where people ask a question and readers then weigh in. One asked, “After you’ve pooped, do you wipe front to back or back to front?” There was a long string of answers. Almost everyone said front to back, many doing so emphatically. Of those who said front to back, most cited their mother as the source of that advice. And there it was, someone in Oregon and someone continents away in Romania writing virtually the same exact unlikely response: “When I was a kid, my mother always told me that if I wiped back to front, I wouldn’t have any friends.”
I was thunderstruck. Were their mothers identical twins separated at birth? Had the Oracle of Delphi franchised so there were now also an Oracle of Portland and an Oracle of Bucharest? Why had both people given the same bizarre framing of advice about personal hygiene?
