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The guilty verdict they had awaited for two years, an Oklahoma City survivor said last week, "wasn't enough." Would the death penalty be enough? For a crime this extreme, can anything be enough? The survivors know that "closure" is a cruel hoax, that the hole McVeigh created in their lives can't be filled by court proceedings, verdicts, even executions. Perhaps that is why a surprising number of them emerged this week to say they oppose death for McVeigh and believe they will heal faster if he is spared. No research indicates that survivors are more "satisfied" or that their anguish is lessened when the murderer is put to death. "What [survivors] are doing when they look for someone else's death is to deal with the crime and punishment," says Pat Bane, executive director of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. "Instead, they need to deal with their loss and grief. That is where they find closure."
One of the dirty little secrets of the death penalty, says Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is the way it "aggravates the suffering of people it's supposed to protect." Because capital punishment presents death as the target, the defendant "wins" for as long as he avoids execution. "We create a recipe for enragement and frustration," Zimring says.
Alabama has been doing doing its bit to hit the target. The state implemented measures to speed up execution of some of the 153 people on death row, even threatening to set execution dates for those who have not completed their appeals. So far this year, the state has put just four men to death, but even with such limited numbers, there is a no-big-deal sense to the proceedings. "We keep it real low-key," says veteran corrections officer Charles Bodiford.
Last Friday at 12:10 a.m., it was Henry Francis Hays' turn to die. His execution was cause for some self-congratulation in Alabama because, unlike most of those who have been put to death before him, Hays is white. What's more, he is the son of a Ku Klux Klan leader who, the prosecution said, ordered him to lynch a black as a "show of strength" in 1981, after a jury failed to convict a black man accused of killing a white police officer. Hays and a friend snatched 19-year-old Michael Donald off a Mobile street, then beat, cut, strangled and strung him up. Sixteen years later, with Donald's older brother Stanley watching intently, Hays was strapped into the bright yellow chair inside Holman Prison in Atmore, Ala. Asked for his last words, a repentant Hays mouthed "I love you" to Stanley Donald, made a thumbs-up sign and died when the first high-voltage cycle slammed into his brain.
At that moment, "I believe my brother did a flip in heaven," said Donald a few minutes later, but he wasn't feeling so pleased. After 16 years of waiting, he said, "justice was not done tonight. There is no such thing as closure," he mused. "I would rather have had [Hays] in a ring one-on-one for 15 rounds and whipped him the way he whipped my brother."
Outside, in the impenetrable Alabama night, nobody had bothered with a protest.
--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, Sylvester Monroe/Atmore, Andrea Sachs/New York and Richard Woodbury/Denver, with other bureaus