Ramesh Ponnuru, writing at Bloomberg View would like to cleave the world in two. When Clayton Lockett tortured and killed his victem and then, for the better part of an hour, was tortured and killed by the state of Oklahoma, the“core” of the issue, wrote Ponnuru, is the abstract question of whether the state should kill when it doesn’t need to. All the rest—racial bias, innocent men, means of execution—sits somewhere else, on the periphery, far removed from the principle of the thing.
In short, Ponnoru would have us believe that there is a Platonic institution of capital punishment—one where there are no wrongfully convicted men, there is no racial bias, and executions go off without a hitch. Maybe it exists, that ideal institution.
It isn’t the one we have now.
Institutions are mirrors. They reflect back the people and histories that create them. We, sadly, are an imperfect people, and we have an imperfect history.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
In American imagination, the lynching era is generally seen as separate from capital punishment. But virtually no one was ever charged for lynching. The country refused to outlaw it. And sitting U.S. senators such as Ben Tillman and Theodore Bilbo openly called for lynching for crimes as grave as rape and as dubious as voting. Well into the 20th century, capital punishment was, as John Locke would say, lynching 'coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law.'
The youngest American ever subjected to the death penalty was George Junius Stinney. It is very hard to distinguish his case from an actual lynching. At age 14, Stinney, a black boy, walked to the execution chamber
with a Bible under his arm, which he later used as a booster seat in the electric chair. Standing 5 foot 2 inches (157 cm) tall and weighing just over 90 pounds (40 kg), his size (relative to the fully grown prisoners) presented difficulties in securing him to the frame holding the electrodes. Nor did the state's adult-sized face-mask fit him; as he was hit with the first 2,400 V surge of electricity, the mask covering his face slipped off, “revealing his wide-open, tearful eyes and saliva coming from his mouth ... After two more jolts of electricity, the boy was dead.
More to the point, we have an imperfect present. We executed Cameron Todd Willingham. We executed Troy Davis. For the better part of an hour, the state of Oklahoma tortured Clayton Locket to death.
Liberalism is dangerous. It’s radical. It’s prideful. It tells us that we can build a better world here and now, that we are called not to wait for heaven to appear but to make the world better now. We are idealists, I suppose.
The idealism of Ponnuru is of a different species. It closes its eyes and speaks soothing words; ours bares its teeth and growls.