(Original version of Hoya-column, February 10th, 1998. The Hoya is a campus newspaper at Georgetown University in Washington DC)
 

The world was much amused last week by the latest episode of the soap-opera "Penn Avenue 1600". But the world was less amused by the latest chapter of an appalling US government practice, the practice of bureaucratized, rational murder of citizens in the name of the American people, as in the case of Karla Faye Tucker.
One German journalist termed the Texas execution of Tucker "the American death". In Germany, capital punishment is considered to be nothing but a populist and cynical proposal. There were times in German history when we had perfected the death machinery. One of my greatgrandfathers was an ardent Nazi, while his brother-in-law, the father of my grandmother, became a victim of the holocaust. My family's history has brought me to the conclusion that it is a totalitarian trait of government to take somebody's life, spilling blood on every hand involved, and on all who watch in silence. I love America, but your president (SFS 68), many members of Congress and the honorable members of the Supreme Court are part of an enterprise that I call McMurder Constitutionalized.
What do I mean by that? While the business of death is naturally a messy one, and the end of all rationality, the US has succeeded in codifying irrational revenge so much that every step on the way to hanging, gassing, shooting, electrocuting, or injecting poison is precisely prescribed and rationalized. Producing a dead pile of human flesh, fried in the case of electrocution, is as clinically clean as producing a Chicken McNugget. Bureaucratization, as the German sociologist Max Weber had already observed at the beginning of this century, has resulted in constructing a machinery of laws, courts, appeals and the final solution that formally functions rationally, but produces irrational, inhumane results. Every step on death row is legally purified, and every judge, lawyer, governor and executioner is stripped of his personal responsibility. Karla Tucker's death became only inevitable "in the name of the (ambivalent) people".
Why? There is the rational argument that McMurdering costs society less than a life sentence. That is cynicism at its best, and betrays the value of human dignity that is constitutive of every liberal democracy. And as a matter of fact, an execution is more expensive. Another rational argument is that it deters potential murderers. Quite the opposite is true. There are many studies that actually show homicide-rates increasing after the practice of McMurder, and decreasing where it was abolished. It is logical: where the government has no moral inhibition to kill, it serves as bad example. All you need to do is "take the law in your own hands", a practice for which Americans traditionally show a lot of understanding.
Talking of morals, McMurder advocates love to point to the Old Testament where an eye is taken for an eye, and a life for a life. But the historical practice of the Jewish people differed from this ontological command, as Georgetown Rabbi White can tell you. A death-penalty could only be administered when a panel of 23 judges decided so with an exact two-votes majority. Since such a majority is an impossibility, the death penalty was a legal fiction. Catholics in search of advice can turn to Johannes Paul II, who in his Evangelium Vitae asserted that "not even a murderer looses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this." He proceeded to welcome the movement to abolish capital punishment as a sign of hope for a culture of life.

Not only are there no good arguments for the death penalty, even thouse who do not principally oppose it, such as the American Bar Association, believe the practice is so flawed that it should be stopped for now. McMurder may legally be kosher, but practically it is an absurdity that includes racism, lawyers sleeping through trials, politically exploited executions, and hairsplitting on legal matters, including the issue of admitting crucial evidence a few hours after the set deadline. And of course, it involves innocents being killed. Said now retired Supreme Court Justice Blackmun when "conceding that the death penalty has failed": "I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death."
The Rehnquist Supreme Court has reversed the move towards heightened review standards of the preceding Burger Court: "Let's get on with it," Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his campaign to limit appeals by death-row inmates. 1995, Congress passed a crime bill that further limited capital appeals and sought (successfully) to increase the number of the executions. And when Bill Clinton ran first for president, he, too, gave the nod to an execution fitting his campaign strategy. McMurder is a constitutionalized business in this country.
Not long ago, the European parliament voted to condemn Russia and the Ukraine for violating the commitment to the parliament to suspend executions, which is a pre-requisite for membership in the Council of Europe. Third-world countries such as Namibia and Nicaragua have abolished the death-penalty. The US, commonly viewed in Germany as the first among all western nations, remains the illustrative member in a club of killer-countries with such members such as Iraq and Nigeria, McMurdering at a rate that leaves about three more human beings dead until you read my next column in two weeks.

Christopher Gohl