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McVeigh's case gives the country a chance to confront more clearly the issue of why America, alone among Western democracies, puts people to death. Is capital punishment meant to benefit society or provide comfort to the victimized? On the question of whether capital punishment deters crime, McVeigh doesn't shed much light; there's no deterrence value in executing a zealot (true believers, after all, want to die for the cause). But deterrence is always murky; there's no proof capital punishment discourages crime by anyone other than the criminals who get executed. Death-penalty proponent Glenn Lammi, chief counsel of the legal-studies division of the Washington Legal Foundation, admits that "there are no convincing studies" tracking the relationship between the death penalty and the crime rate, because isolating one variable in a sea of factors (poverty, gun availability, alcohol use, policing techniques) is beyond our abilities. In a 1995 poll, 67% of police chiefs said they did not think the death penalty deters homicide.
If faith in deterrence is dying (and faith in rehabilitation is virtually dead), belief in retribution is alive and well. Death-penalty foe David Bruck calls retribution "the only moral reason for punishment. It's our way of expressing our common beliefs in what's right and wrong." The question is what form retribution should take. At its most elemental level, retribution blurs with revenge. "Some animals deserve to be put off the face of the earth," explains Richard Brill, a retired government cartographer in Denver. But there's a distinction to be made between revenge--a hot, deeply personal desire to hurt the malefactor--and retribution--a statelier and more carefully considered decision to uphold the values of society.
At its most elevated level, as in the writings of the philosopher Walter Berns, this position assumes real moral weight. "Capital punishment," writes Berns, "serves to remind us of the majesty of the moral order that is embodied in our law and of the terrible consequences of its breach... The criminal law must be made awful, by which I mean awe-inspiring, or commanding 'profound respect or reverential fear.' It must remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings." Which is to say, some animals need killing, if only to remind the rest of us animals how to live. By this standard, state executions evince more reverence for life than prison sentences that treat murder as something punishable by a lifetime's worth of weight lifting and bad TV.
As usual in this debate, the two sides, both convinced of their essential rightness, talk past and around each other. Abolitionists like Bruck argue that life without parole is in some ways more retributive than death, not only because the convict has to accept his punishment for the rest of his days but because "it makes us more morally energetic about punishment. We wake up each morning to punish some more." And the death sentence, abolitionists believe, implies that certain individuals have lost the right to call themselves human, an idea that runs counter to the Founding Fathers' vision of inalienable rights that can neither be taken away for bad behavior nor awarded for good conduct. Those rights, says Amnesty International deputy director Curt Goering, "apply to all of us--even the worst. And in the end, they protect us all."
Or at least most of us.