Deathwatching

We all want our outrage expressed at particularly heinous murders. For some the only way they imagine this being done adequately is by the imposition of a death sentence.

In a democratic state where the populace feel as these folk do, the convicted person is usually confined in some way prior to execution. Of course the possibilities for exercise of the power that gives the state over the person are several.

Should we authorise the state to torture a person in captivity if that person has tortured his or her own victim?
Should we authorise the state to remove parts of that person’s body if that person has removed parts of the body of his or her victim?
Should we authorise the state to recreate the conditions of the original murder as closely as possible so as to replicate the experience of the victim for the convicted person?

Whatever our feelings about just deserts, our state has determined it will not do these things. In fact our state labels such retaliation, barbaric. We even find the symbolic retaliation of amputation carried out in Saudi and other Moslem nations hard to take.

But on what grounds does the state not do these things? Out of kindness to the convicted person? Only partly, but that’s not the whole story. I think it is so because our culture seems to think that causing another human being to suffer indignity disgraces us. The reaction to the events at Abu Ghraib are a recent example of this. Were we horrified because we were thinking of the feelings of the prisoners? Possibly. But I think we were much more ashamed to be associated as Americans with the Americans who carried out those actions. We just didn’t think that doing those kinds of things were consistent with the image we’d like people to have of Americans.

In this sense, human rights are also symbolic. They have to do with a dignified restraint of the state and its respect for the dignity of citizens no matter what they have done. The state giving a person due process, a qualified attorney, an opportunity to appeal his or her sentence, a “humane” death; all these gifts indicate a state which is magnanimous, and which has respect for the rights of all citizens. It has to do much more with honor than with retribution.

While private individuals may feel beside themselves with outrage and horror, full of desire for vengeance and revenge, we have, as a group, decided our state will deal with these matters. But I suspect our trust in our state to manage things on our behalf would be seriously undermined if it didn’t respect the human rights of even the worst of us.

Thus I would say that respecting the human rights of another person is not about kindness or compassion or forgiveness necessarily, but about allowing that person to be dignified. Because the state could choose not to so easily, and by choosing this it can stand on the moral high ground and refuse to create events such as the original murder in which someone’s rights and dignity were simply thrown aside and thus his or her humanity denied.