The thirst for revenge: trying to understand capital punishment.

How can people be in favor of capital punishment? Good question. Those of us who are thoroughly convinced that capital punishment is morally wrong, find it difficult to understand how we can differ from the majority of our fellow Americans. Alas, most Catholics, brush off the teachings of the pope and their bishops, and favor the death penalty.

In order to understand what's going on here, I've taken to some hard listening to death-penalty advocates. I want to penetrate this different moral universe. Admittedly, I'm not pursuing a disinterested intellectual inquiry. I'm motivated by the Machiavellian desire to persuade and change attitudes. I don't know if I'd go so far as to run focus groups, but it does seem important to understand what guides and fuels the convictions of one's opponents.

I've concluded that few people decide their position on capital punishment by calculating which rational arguments produce the better case. Instead, the debate over the death penalty appears to be a conflict of deep-seated, emotionally saturated moral principles in which utilitarian considerations play a minor role.

Those in favor of the death penalty aren't moved by arguments that capital punishment actually costs the state more money than life imprisonment, or by the findings that indicate that it doesn't deter murder or violent crime. For that matter, those against the death penalty don't hold to their convictions because it's financially cheaper or an ineffective deterrent.

More to the point, advocates of capital punishment will admit that some innocent persons have been, and will continue to be, wrongly executed, and yes, black defendants in certain states will be condemned to die in greater numbers than white defendants. These facts are considered unfortunate, unavoidable flaws in the system, but still an acceptable price to pay.

To get what? I think the basic appeal of the death penalty is that its advocates believe that only by taking a murderer's life can true justice be served. It's not so much an eye for an eye, as it is that certain criminal atrocities against the innocent demand the symbolic blood offering of the criminal's life. The act of execution, however cruel, gives symbolic witness both to the importance of the victim's life that is lost and to the community's absolute rejection of crime.

Certainly, bloodshed offered in reparation appears to perform a ritual function for some families of victims. The signing of a restored death penalty bill in New York was celebrated by Governor George Pataki with parents whose policeman son had been murdered. The speeches claimed that making the death penalty legal again was a fitting public memorial to all those unjustly slain.

And just how many of these public memorials and executions have taken place in our collective history? Within living memory we have seen semipublic firing squads, hangings, and guillotinings. A century or two before that, condemned persons were hung and disemboweled while still conscious. Or torn into four parts; or stoned, burned, or buried alive; or impaled, flogged to death, or thrown into boiling oil; or hung up in chains (or on crosses) to rot in torment. Huge crowds, including children, attended public executions.

Another symbolic undercurrent to be reckoned with in the thirst for the death penalty is the need for purification of the corporate body. Listen to the rhetoric of disgust. These criminals are vile animals, inhuman scum who don't deserve to live. They've forfeited their rights; the world will be far better off without them.

To smash and destroy impurity is an ancient impulse; hunt heretics, pull down pagan altars, pulverize idols, or even, a la Cromwell, shatter stained glass windows--let no polluting presence abide in the land.

Perhaps, too, collectively killing the transgressor makes a community feel less anxious and more in control of the uncertain dangers of fate. Surely it can strengthen solidarity--even if in a perverse way. Forget the rowdies who drink and raucously celebrate executions outside the prison walls; they and others like them will turn up at any exhibition or blood sport without any inkling of what they're about.

But to probe motivations in the deathpenalty debate opens your own position to the same treatment. Could it be that your sympathy with criminals and rebels is related to your rebellion against your authoritarian father, teacher, priest? Do you have a problem with advocating moral accountability? Or perhaps your congenital temperamental timidity--read cowardice--makes you unwilling to face the fact that justice must wield a terrible swift sword. Mmm. Maybe, but it's unlikely to be the main point of a protest against capital punishment.

I think the moral force of the position against the death penalty comes from the conviction that it is logically and morally contradictory to kill in order to punish killing. By enacting a state-mandated, cold-blooded destruction of a human life you've lost the moral struggle and witness against murder. You imitate the murderer and thereby let his dedication to violence, cruelty, hopelessness, and death's final solution win the day.

Moreover, the horror of mistakenly executing an innocent person looms as too perilous a moral risk. As my father always said (who could be pretty authoritarian at times), "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person be punished." I agree wholeheartedly, but find it difficult to defend the moral intuition fueling this conviction. Either you feel its fire or you don't.

Life sentences without parole should protect the community and fully affirm free will and moral responsibility for an agent's actions. Sure, some pathetic souls don't know what they do when they commit crimes, but many persons are fully aware and freely choose evil. They should be punished. But those criminals who ask to be executed should not be allowed to pursue their death trajectory, any more than those choosing homicide, suicide, euthanasia, or abortion should be allowed to kill at will. Always and everywhere, killing encourages killing.

In order to help break these cycles, the Mercy Sisters of Brooklyn have mounted a unique campaign against the death penalty. You sign a petition, but you also send in a notarized statement: If you're murdered, you don't want the law to seek the death penalty in your case. I don't want a person strapped into an electric chair for electrocution or held down for a lethal injection as my memorial.

And can't we make the case for others that it is far better to affirm a victim's life by an affirmative act: to refuse to take a life in retribution, to give another a future. If nothing else, life imprisonment gives hope of a criminal's repentance; many murderers have come to suffer grievously over the cruelty of their violence and wrongdoing. Human compassion for all, even for those twisted evildoers with little empathy, models the kind of behavior we need in order to flourish in human solidarity.

As for ridding the world of the impure and morally guilty who violate human norms, this impulse of moral disgust should be suppressed. Not only do such impulses tend to get out of control (usually in a racist direction), but in reality we all do share a common membership in our all-too-fallible species. Each criminal is born of woman. The difference between the worst of us and the best of us is enormous, but may not be a completely unbridgeable chasm for those with imagination and compassion. So what kind of people do we want to be? Choose life.