Tomorrow night, on 11 December 2009, at Indiana State Prison, Matthew Eric Wrinkles will be executed for the triple homoicide of Debra Jean Wrinkles, Tony Fulkerson, and Natalie Fulkerson. He is guilty. He admits as much. But even the daughter of the Fulkersons, Kim Fulkerson, who was nine at the time of the murders, had this to say about the execution of Wrinkles:
It doesn't seem like it's justice to me.
I couldn't agree more.
Justice was classically defined by Plato as giving to each man his due. But what is due to a man who has savagely murdered three other people and left their children orphans? Is it death? I don't think so. There is clearly something sacred about the human person that gives them the right to life even when they have deprived others of that same right. And yet, capital punishment was viewed as necessary in order to keep society safe from them: there simply didn't exist the facilities necessary to imprison a man for the duration of his natural life. That is no longer true today. As Bishop Gerald A. Gettelfinger stated in his article in the South Bend Tribune:
Frontier justice became the standard for states to protect their residents from murderers by killing them. Frontier justice employs various means for killing criminals; they include hanging, firing squad, gas chamber or lethal injection. Quick justice utilized lynching outside the law. Death was the inevitable result. Society was protected.
It seems that we in the state of Indiana are still invoking frontier justice. Indiana is no longer the frontier. The state of Indiana is able to protect its residents from murderous criminals by separating them from society by sentencing them to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Indiana residents can be protected without executing criminals.
It is very difficult given modern technology to see anything but hatred and desire for vengence in the execution of criminals. And this is not how justice ought to operate, and especially not in the most prosperous nation in the world. There can be absolutely no room for institutionalized vengence in a criminal system that prides itself upon impartiality.
There is a reason why the Supreme Court has progressively struck down various methods of execution as cruel and unusual punishment up to the present day. There is a reason why we have always sought increasingly sanitized and subdued methods of executing criminals: we seek to assuage our consciences about this ruthless form of punishment. But all our efforts are to no avail because the cruel and unusual punishment of execution is death itself. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual, and it is impossible to administer it without sensing that we have somehow abased ourselves to the same level as the criminal himself.
The secrecy in which executions are held also belies our collective discomfort with what is happening in that chamber. As Bishop Gettelfinger put it:
Ironically, executions are now sanitized and are accomplished virtually in secret. A public act of the state of Indiana taking place behind closed and locked doors? Who is kidding whom?
If you live in Indiana, or even if you don't, you might consider a phone call tomorrow to Governor Mitchell Daniels of Indiana, whose office can be reached at (317)-232-4567. There is probably little hope for clemency for Wrinkles at this late hour, but let the governor know that you don't approve of institutionalized vengence against criminals.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." — Mahatma Gandhi