Basic instinct.

Last month, the State of Connecticut executed serial killer Michael Ross, resuming capital punishment after a forty-five-year hiatus. Ross, who strangled eight teenage girls, raping most of them, in the 1980s, spent his last months resisting legal interventions on his behalf, and some consider his death a state-assisted suicide.

I live in Connecticut, and with regard to the death penalty I'm a somewhat conflicted abolitionist. At a recent forum in Hartford I listened as an ecumenical panel of activists articulated fervent opposition. A Jesuit called for "rejecting the culture of violence and death and accepting the humanity of Michael Ross." A rabbi cited the celebrated case of Wilbert Rideau, the murderer-cum-jailhouse journalist whose reformation resulted in "significant contributions to society." A United Church of Christ minister recounted her visits to a female prisoner convicted of murder, and wondered philosophically, "How are we different?" Finally, a lawyer in the audience, a middle-age woman, spoke vehemently on behalf of Michael Ross, "this compassionate man whom Connecticut is trying to kill." Ross, she said, wept in court over the pain of the families whose daughters were "lost."

I found myself bristling. To my ear, the lawyer's plausibly Christian message failed to acknowledge that it might be justifiably difficult for many to summon much compassion for a murderous sexual sadist. Overall I sensed in the room an implicit disdain for taking the anti-death-penalty argument out to people in the larger society who weren't already persuaded--disdain, even, for those people themselves. So I asked the panelists, don't we need to fashion persuasive arguments for precisely those people--especially in a state like Connecticut, one ambivalent about the death penalty? "No," the Jesuit answered. "Rational arguments are not enough. What we need is a new way of living."

But it was left to another panelist to make the culture-of-death argument in a more compelling way. Rabbi Herbert Brodman, a fellow at the Yale Divinity School, cited the European history of execution as bloodsport, and I recalled the gruesome descriptions in Peter Ackroyd's book London of a crowd at a beheading deriding the executioner who dropped a severed head with raucous shouts of "butter-fingers!" "The temptation to reinstate the death penalty must be resisted," Rabbi Brodman warned, "or else we risk reverting to the savagery of another age."

There exists, of course, a lengthy list of arguments against the death penalty: its ineffectiveness, arbitrariness, and expense; its entanglement with poverty and racism. To me the rabbi's words brought home the more basic choice we face. Which human voice do I choose to make mine--the war cry of vengeance, or the murmur of forgiveness? Death-penalty advocates unfailingly insist that a vicious murderer like Michael Ross hasn't earned our forgiveness. Forgiveness is not simply a reward, however, but a dynamic encounter. This is the leap that death-penalty proponents don't, won't, or can't make. Executions aren't merely about the person we execute. They're about us, and whom we choose to be.

I thought about this as I read accounts of Michael Ross's execution. Observers at the lethal injection included a number of victims' relatives. As the poison flowed into his veins, Ross gasped and shuddered, and one of the witnesses taunted loudly, "Feeling some pain, huh?" Of Ross's decision to forego a deathbed statement, another family member snarled to a TV reporter, "He didn't even have the balls to say anything."

My point isn't to harangue the family members--quite the opposite. If Ross had raped and murdered my daughter, I would surely feel the same temptation to snarl and taunt; it is deeply a part of my nature. But is it the part I should nurture? Outside the prison on the night Ross was executed, a school-aged girl held up a sign, "Ross Deserves To Be Sauce." Such brutal sentiments link us to that gruesome tradition of execution as spectacle. They represent a giving-in to a deep and uncivilized satisfaction.

The myth of redemptive, retributive violence is profoundly anti-Christian. But it has deep roots in human nature, and we shouldn't simply lament it as some deformation of the benighted. The Christian choice, on the other hand--namely, a vision of God's love and of the potential for redemption of every human soul--is radical precisely because it can be so profoundly counterinstinctual. The UCC minister urged Jesus' "ethic of love" over an "ethic of retribution." Can the ethic of love include a Michael Ross, who raped and murdered little girls for pleasure? The question poses a large challenge.

Our moral intuitions are deeply social, guided, perhaps even at their core, by the impression of whose company we want to keep, of whom we want--and don't want--to act like, be like, and sound like. Feeling some pain, huh? I am keeping that taunting voice in mind, because I know it is partly my own voice; and because its very existence implies a countervoice, one whose softer and forgiving tone calls me on where I hope to follow.

Rand Richards Cooper is a film critic for Commonweal.