Something We Cannot Accept

By LANCE MORROW

After the sentencing, a black bystander outside the courthouse in Jasper, Texas, told a reporter, "I am not in favor of the death penalty. But in this case, I will make an exception."

There are any number of Americans who would make an exception for John William King, the feral white man who chained a black man, James Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck last year and dragged him along a rough country road that skinned him alive and dismembered him. To object to putting King to death for the deed requires a saintliness I do not possess. In one sense, King's case is almost a moral free ride. My conscience would remain untroubled by some other death sentences, but John William King's execution will seem especially just and fitting--and, though it is ghastly to say so, a rather handsome, pivotal American moment.

What happened in Jasper stands slightly to one side of the usual argument about capital punishment. It mobilizes different issues of justice. Here, racial payback overrides the familiar philosophical dilemma presented by executions.

The jurors, in any event, did their best to avoid large issues. They imposed the death penalty, it seems, on practical grounds, as if King's execution were an urgency of public health, like disposing of an incurable case of rabies. If sentenced to life, King would probably kill someone else in jail, the prosecution reasoned--another black, or a Jew perhaps, so lively and irrepressible boils his hate. He displays no shadow of remorse, and even in the Jasper jail, awaiting trial, he managed to get hold of an 8-in. knife. The jury did not find it hard to conclude that, among other reasons to execute him, he is simply too dangerous to go on living.

Besides, no one doubted King's guilt; no danger here of running up against the strongest argument opposing the death penalty: you may execute the wrong man. He's the right one, all right. Few will weep when the injection stops King's heart.

But after the melodrama, after the white devil disappears offstage, snarling like Cagney, a scruple (call it A.C.L.U. logic, a schoolmarm in the mind) begins to wave its little hand in the back of the hall. Easy cases make bad law, or bad principle. The powerful emotional sway of this one is unsettling.

I confess that I have puzzled for years over the death penalty. At times I have defended it, at times argued against it. I am thus only half civilized--and to make things worse, am not even sure on which side civilization lies. If I were a state's Governor, I would have to choose one or the other on certain midnights of the year when executioners awaited my go-ahead. As it is, I have the luxury to persist in ambivalence, going case by case, preserving the option of the noose.

A way of understanding Jasper may lie in these questions: Can capital punishment possibly be civilizing? Might it be sometimes indispensable? Human nature, without a social contract, leads people to pursue and punish murderers in their own way. The social contract restrains man's impulse toward rough justice. The contract states: Our authorities, acting under law for the community, will find the killers, try them and punish them. Implicit is the promise that the punishment will be sufficient to satisfy the need not only for moral satisfaction and justice but also for some measure of emotional satisfaction, a catharsis by--to admit it--legally ritualized revenge. A public hanging used to be a celebration of justice. The catharsis may have barbaric roots, yet by paradox is an essential civilizing instrument.

But race skews any discussion of capital punishment in America. Arguments against the death penalty focus on the disproportionate number of blacks on death row. What does Jasper give us? Something astonishing: the spectacle of a vicious white sent to death row--for killing a black man. Hence the high-fives among blacks outside the courthouse. The natural jubilation is philosophically inconsistent, of course. It is difficult to argue that whites should be executed but blacks should not. What celebrating blacks really mean is something simpler: it's about time.

The promising novelty of Jasper is that for a moment, it aligns the black social contract with the white social contract. That is all that racial justice is ultimately about: the equality of the contracts. In the past they have been two different documents, with very different protections under the law.

The state of Texas under the old social contract would not have executed the white man King for murdering the black man Byrd. (To have done so, in fact, would have violated the white community's contract with itself.) Whatever misgivings arise from the fact of execution itself, the jury's decision declared a happy change in the social organism. One white juror made the argument that King required the death sentence because the community had to show that the murder was "something we cannot accept." If there was encouragement to be taken from Jasper, it lay in her use of the word we.