At 8:14 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Monday, Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection. The usual motley crew of protesters that gathers for such an event was not present this time around--barely a hundred lonely souls who valiantly cling to their belief that all human life is sacred made it to Terre Haute, Indiana.
And that is a real shame.
I do not say this because I oppose the death penalty or because I feel that McVeigh's life should have been spared. I say this because the execution of Timothy McVeigh was the perfect opportunity for a frank and straightforward debate of capital punishment. But that debate never materialized. Instead, it became a media event with continuous coverage of a large, gray building and detailed accounts of a mass murderer's final moments. I seriously fail to see how offering to watch the execution on pay-per-view would have been much different than what actually took place.
So much for thought-provoking news coverage--by 8:40 a.m. an unknown reporter from Oklahoma City was already on CNN (with the mandatory "BREAKING NEWS" caption at the bottom of the screen) nervously reading from the notes she feverishly took during the execution. I cannot recall her words exactly, but I can tell you that she told us nothing of real value. Since McVeigh had apparently robbed her of a good story by refusing to shout or scream or repent, this reporter decided to describe how he briefly stared at each member of the media seated in the first row, one by one. She then proceeded to tell the world that when the first injection came McVeigh's gaze was directed at the ceiling, where it remained focused until he stopped breathing, his heart stopped beating and his skin began to turn yellow.
Give me a break--what sick mind would actually want to hear such details?!! Plenty of people keep complaining about offensive lyrics in music and violence in R-rated movies--yet where are the screams of outrage when such a detailed play-by-play of an execution can be heard on TV or radio?
I can now see why the Spanish Inquisition put on such a popular show in the Middle Ages; watching an execution gave the inquiring masses what their boring lives lacked--genuine suspense. I cannot help feeling that had the courts allowed greater access by the media someone would have set up a live Internet feed. Even with the court orders, federal authorities have already admitted that a determined-enough hacker could have spliced the feed and obtained a video of the execution. Whether such a recording will ever surface remains to be seen.
But it wasn't just the execution that bothers me--the days preceding it were just as bad. If you take a look at the headlines from newspapers across the nation you'll see that somewhere along the line, McVeigh's execution stopped being a question of values and turned into an exciting countdown. What will he say last? Will he repent? Will he scream? Will he curse? Will he try to fight? Will he show any emotion? Will the red telephone ring in the last second? The inquiring minds want to--have to--know!
And since McVeigh was already gaining the status of a celebrity, the networks could not resist capitalizing on his potential to attract viewers and listeners. What was the end result of such attention--a native son whose superb Army training apparently never taught him to distinguish between a government and its people departed this world with a blaze of media coverage usually reserved for important heads of states, monumental religious leaders or other influential figures in world history.
But beneath all this there still lies a wasted opportunity for an important discussion.
Timothy McVeigh was white, rational, guilty and possessed a superb legal defense team. There was no racial bias in his sentencing. His crime was deliberate and well-orchestrated. There was no doubt about whether he used a weapon of mass destruction to murder 168 people. His multi-million defense team did not doze off during the trial. Simply put, if there was ever a fitting test case to determine to what extent our nation should uphold the sanctity of a single human life, this was it.
So here was an opportunity to bring to the forefront of our discussions the essential question of whether our society is morally justified in killing a man who committed such a heinous crime?
As long as this nation remains more interested in how a mass murderer was executed rather than why he was executed, there will be no progress on the issue.
Marko Djuranovic is a Trinity senior and former health & science editor of The Chronicle.
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