Eye for an eye

Written by Karishma Sundara Saturday, 21 November 2009 13:37

Karishma Sundara argues that the death penalty reflects revenge and not justice

October 2002 saw Washington DC and the neighbouring states of Virginia and Maryland gripped with fear and terror as, with no apparent rhyme or reason, thirteen innocent people were shot by an unknown person or persons.

A woman was killed as she sat on a bench, another was killed as she cleaned her van. A thirteen-year old boy was shot, as he waited outside his school and a man was shot while stopping for petrol. The attacks had no notable pattern.

A red herring left the panicked police searching for a white van, and they ultimately did find the assailants, but not in the van, which eyewitnesses had suggested could be linked to the attacks.

The attacker, whom the terrorised citizens and media had referred to as 'The Sniper', was in fact found on October 24 2002 in a blue Chevrolet Caprice, with his teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, at a gas station.
And on Friday November 11 2009, at 9.11pm, John Allen Muhammad paid for these crimes with his life, killed with a lethal injection for the murder of Dean Harold Meyers, one of the ten shot dead.
Many people feel that ‘justice’ has been dealt at last. A man who, without cause, had killed innocent people, targeting the young and old alike, has finally received his just desserts.

Yet how can we justify one murder by committing another? It is indisputable that what Muhammad did was horrific, but that does not give us the right to take away his life, in the almost childish ‘tit-for-tat’ method in which the death penalty seems to work.

Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran, and clearly a troubled man. Not all of us have been to war. Not all of us have seen the sights and heard the sounds of gruesome warfare, of people dying. People die on battlefields for their respective countries, while the governments who launch these wars sit back and comment on how pitiable it is that so many young lives have to be lost for their cause. Isn’t warfare too then, simply the politically accepted murder of innocent soldiers?

Regardless of what one might say, we still live in a brutal society. We may claim to have progressed over the years, yet at our very innermost core lies the barbarian, the animal, which man has always been and always will be. We will never stop warring. Yet we remain unable to see it is us who put men like Muhammad in the position they are in today.

When human beings change along the path of life, we chalk it up to experience, and circumstances. Why do we find it so hard then to understand that being in a warzone and living the horror - which most citizens of the world experience only through movies and news channels - can leave you with scars which may never fully heal? Muhammad’s ex-wife told BBC News that: "When he returned from Saudi Arabia...he was confused, puzzled, unsure of himself or his ability to do anything”.

His lawyer pleaded insanity, holding up brain scans, which showed malformations in his brain linked to schizophrenia, but the US Supreme Court ended all hope of a stay on execution by rejecting the appeal.
"A psychiatrist examined him and said he's paranoid and psychotic and delusional and gave many examples," said his lawyer Jonathan Sheldon, calling Muhammad "a martyr for everything that’s wrong with the death penalty".

A woman who was dining with her children in a steakhouse the day Muhammad shot a man dead in the parking lot outside was amongst the anti-death penalty campaigners who had been holding a vigil outside the prison. "It could have easily been me and my family," she said to the press. "But I feel that some of the money we spent killing Mr. Muhammad would have been better spent helping our veterans, who're coming home with scars that are not visible and causing them to do horrible things, just like what happened in Fort Hood this past week".

The world has a lot to learn from this woman. We can not forget the responsibility we have towards veterans. Horrible experiences leave them embittered, troubled, and change many of them in ways they perhaps never imagined they would. But nations will never stop warring, and even as veterans from Afghanistan return, will we be able to provide them with all the rehabilitation and support they need?
Or will we let them return to the world as troubled individuals who lived through unimaginable circumstances for the sake of their countries?

Muhammad was one such troubled man, one with an underlying medical problem. Yet by failing to impose the more humane life imprisonment in favour of the vengeful death penalty, we fail as citizens of the world. We fail as human beings.

Speaking to the Associated Press agency, the daughter of one of the victims said: "He basically watched my dad breathe his last breath…Why shouldn't I watch his last breath?"

Yes, what Muhammad did was incredibly wrong. No one is denying that. But what can be gained by putting him to death, rather than issuing life imprisonment to a man who had already spent seven years in jail, away from the public? Putting him to death cannot bring the victims of the attack back to life. It cannot return them to the world of the living and breathing. It will only send another to the land of the dead.

Muhammad is as much a victim as they are. The death penalty serves only one purpose: revenge. It doesn’t fix anything.

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