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Both supporters and opponents of the death penalty can cite ample horrors to justify their positions. Even the cleanest execution—and an appalling number are not—is so revolting to see that witnesses commonly vomit and faint. Electrocution is relatively swift, though the victim's flesh sometimes burns while his eyes strain out of their sockets. With cyanide and the rope, it sometimes takes five minutes for the dying man to fall totally unconscious, and usually 15 minutes before he is pronounced dead.
The principal case now before the Supreme Court chillingly demonstrates another kind of horror. By all the evidence, Ernest James Aikens Jr. is a brutal and remorseless killer of at least three people. He beat, raped and stabbed to death two women, one of them a neighbor in her 60s, the other five months pregnant. He also shot a homosexual who had picked him up on the road. Psychiatrists have unanimously pronounced him fearfully sane and unlikely ever to be rehabilitated.
Advocates of the death penalty argue that an Aikens —or a Manson or a Speck or an Eichmann—must be cut out of society. If these people are usually poor, friendless or from a minority group, it is because that is the sort of person who commits such crimes. Whatever the reasons for the crime, say those who favor the penalty, it is irresponsible ever to give a mass murderer a chance to go free. Abolitionists point out that life sentences could be imposed without possibility of parole, or that parole need never be granted if the prisoner is not rehabilitated.
Maintaining a man in prison for the rest of his life is doubtless costly—consuming tax dollars that might much better be spent on schools or hospitals—but it may cost the state even more to execute a man because of the extra care that courts take in capital cases. When Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller commuted the sentences of all 15 men on the state's death row before leaving office two years ago, he saved the state an estimated $1,500,000, considering the cost of fighting probable appeals.
So the arguments spin on and on, and the more each side insists on the rationality of its argument (what can be more rational than a discussion of the costs?), the more one is drawn to agree with Clarence Darrow, who observed a half-century ago that "questions of this sort are not settled by reason; they are settled by prejudices and sentiments or by emotion." Perhaps that is true of any great issue, but it is particularly so here. Underlying the debate over capital punishment is a central conflict within every man—the conflict between a desire for vengeance and a wish to honor life. It is no answer to say, as some do, that man can sanctify life by killing those who kill. Nor is there any real answer in the elegant argument of Jacques Barzun, who claims that prison existence so debases and brutalizes life that the death penalty is more humane. Even if that were true, the choice of death ought to be made by the prisoner, not by the state.