RUTHFULLY YOURS

What’s wrong with  how capital punishment is administered can be capsulized by two cases that have sparked national attention in the last week. The first concerns  the appeal by Albert G. Brown to halt his execution as he declined to choose a preferred method for lethal injection. Mr. Brown’s scheduled execution in 2006 was delayed after a judge found that the chamber in which this would have taken place was overly cramped and dingy, thus constituting cruel and inhuman punishment, something that would be news to many law-abiding apartment dwellers in New York.

Apparently it has taken four years for the state of California to renovate and redecorate the killing space as well as retrain its killing staff, but now that both are ready for prime time, the prisoner refuses to decide whether he wants a single drug injection or a three drug cocktail. Who knew that failure to select from the menu could be grounds for appeal? Mr. Brown’s crime was perpetrated thirty years ago when he abducted, raped and killed a fifteen year old girl.

Flash forward to the Connecticut trial of Steven J. Hayes, one of two ex-convicts accused of killing a mother and two daughters after invading their house, beating the father, tying him up with duct tape and throwing him in the basement. Both the mother and the eleven year old girl were raped before they were killed. The mother had been strangled and the two girls had gasoline poured over their bodies and outside their rooms before the killers set fire to the house and fled. The details of this case are so shocking that jurors had to be warned about the evidence they were going to see and even the defendant apparently had a night-time seizure after the testimony was heard and shown in court.  The state intends to ask for the death sentence.

Crimes such as these are so heinous that listening to their depiction causes ordinary people to shudder and recoil in horror. But once criminals are convicted and remanded to the justice system, the tables turn and we seldom hear the details of  their crimes. Instead we hear about the injustices of our penal system, our legal system and now our prison architect and design teams. The enormity of a criminal’s torture of innocents is subsumed by our  concern for his legal rights as a convicted murderer. Justice is turned on its head as we forget the victims and concentrate all our attention and efforts on the criminal’s well being.

The newspaper account of Albert G. Brown dignified him with the addition of his middle initial but said nothing about the status of his victim’s loved ones, left to grieve forever after Albert chose to rape and murder their teenage daughter, sister, friend. We didn’t read exactly how Albert tormented his young victim or how he brutally murdered her.  We can be certain that more money has been spent on Albert G’s health and legal representation than was ever spent trying to help the victim’s survivors. At every court appearance and in every newspaper account of their cases, we should be forced to listen to the details of what Albert G. and the thousands of others on death row have done to deserve their sentences. Perhaps we’d restore the balance of reason in worrying less about the size of our execution chambers and more about the plight of victims, their families and what the lopsided nature of our criminal justice system reveals about our society.