Mind of an Outlaw (53 page)

It is, of course, not hard to find volunteers. For that matter, police officers will appear from everywhere on the day of the execution, and happy to be invited. To be there is a mark of status. It is also no surprise that a good many people have applied for the firing squad, all perfectly willing to pull a trigger as part
of their duty to society. Of course, they have been refused. How could the state devise a psychological test that would protect society from the volunteer rifleman who might be a psycho himself? Only one conclusion is possible: State employees must pull the triggers. They cannot, however, be correction officers from the prison, or the convicts, listening to the gossip of the guards, might ferret out their identities. They must be state police instead.

Of course, the authorities also have to protect the firing squad from any feelings of future guilt. Ergo, they decide that one of the five riflemen will not draw a bullet but a blank. Then, goes the theory, nobody on the execution squad will know if his gun has fired a real round. Considerately, nobody wonders where you would find a skilled rifleman who does not know by the kick of his shoulder stock whether he has fired a real round. In the event, Gilmore’s heart was certainly pierced by four bullets placed close enough together to be covered by a fifty-cent piece.

Any state of our union about to have an execution will have to confront some unaccustomed and large operations. Hundreds of press and media people are going to fly into the state capital. Demonstrators opposed to the execution will mass by the dozens, the hundreds, or will it be the thousands? One does not know in advance for what to get ready. It is the kind of panic that tempts state authorities to call in federal authorities for crowd control. Meanwhile, television cameras are going to be everywhere. A central obscenity soon dominates. It is that none of the locals, not even the children, escapes the knowledge that one man in their midst is going to be dead, and the state itself will be the killer. That proves more compelling than murder in the next neighborhood. Criminal slayings are horrible, but comprehensible. We all have a touch of murder inside us. There is, however, something repulsive, but withal riveting, about the state executing a man. That is like hearing of a human who walks around with a steel heart. You could not take your eyes off him. Today, we have a man behind bars who is absolutely alive but will be a
corpse tomorrow. He is breathing eternity itself. Unless the law gives a reprieve.

That is the next possibility that attends all executions. Reprieve. It always sparks a circus of lawsuits. One legal intervention starts to jump on the back of another. To the courts, it is horrendous. Lawyers begin to look like charlatans and judges like clowns. Every safeguard written into law serves as fodder for a new headline. “
YOU
’
RE ALL COWARDS
!”
GILMORE TELLS COURT
. In the name of carrying out the law, the law seems ready to fall apart.

Then the hour of execution arrives. None of the press will see it, but no matter. They wait outside in hundreds of cars and vans that jam the prison parking lot. Through the night they start their motors to keep warm, and nip at the firewater in their flasks. If you cannot get drunk after freezing through a January night waiting for a man to be shot, when can you booze it up? The man was unknown six months ago, one more con with half his life in jail, now out on parole and getting into anonymous scrapes. By this night in January, he has become one of the best-known faces in the world.
Time
magazine, in the roundup at the end of the year, put his picture on the same two pages with Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn and Miz Lillian, put it there with Betty Ford and Mao Tse-tung and Henry Kissinger. What a deterrent!

To be fair, this was no ordinary execution. Gilmore was asking to be shot. Over and over, week after week, he had been saying that he preferred execution to life imprisonment. The question of capital punishment was being underlined in royal purple ink. So long as a man did not want to be killed, society could feel compassion and commute the sentence. But Gilmore was saying I do not want your compassion. Life imprisonment is not life. It is the misery of my body and the death of my soul. In public, he was virtually saying, and in private, in his letters, he was actually saying: I want to die so my soul can live.

Gilmore was thereby making a political statement. Society, he was declaring, has no rights over me. It only has power. It can kill me, but I will not allow it to tell me how I must live the rest of my life. He was striking a blow in favor of capital punishment. To
liberals who believe society has some claim to determine the nature of your life, but no rights over your death, Gilmore was reversing all the signals.

Now the courts were in the shadow of another paradox. Suits were being brought to keep this man from his own execution even though he had asked for it. That made capital punishment the undeclared defendant. Society may have no right to carry out a death sentence, became the argument. In part, that was reaction in advance to the obscenity of the oncoming act. “We didn’t tell you how we touched everything,” a columnist, Bob Greene, would write after the press was allowed in the execution chamber. “We didn’t tell you what we did to the death chair itself—the chair with the bullet holes in its leather back … didn’t tell you how we inserted our fingers into the holes, and rubbed our fingers around, feeling for ourselves how deep and wide the death holes were.” Obscenity, however, was not only in the aftermath but in the concept itself. For who, finally, went the liberal argument, had the right to be an executioner? Prosecutors and judges were not free of guilt nor pure of motive. Politicians were certainly not elevated above corruption. Yet they were also public officials. None of these people had the right to decide whether a prisoner should or should not live. Indeed, government officials often pushed for a death penalty because polls indicated it would hurt them politically if they didn’t.

All the same, Gilmore had put the liberals in a quandary. He wished to die, and that was his private right. Yet, if it were suicide he desired, then, decided the liberals, pure suicide was what he should choose. He must not call on the state and all the machinery of the state to be his accomplice. There were more than five hundred men on death row in the fifty American states. Gilmore’s death might encourage other states to go back to capital punishment after a hiatus of ten years in which no one had been executed. That moratorium, obtained by a few landmark cases in the Supreme Court, had to be kept. The prevention of capital punishment was a line of defense against the taking of life by the state for other reasons. If government officials grew accustomed to committing judicial murder, it would eventually—went the
reasoning—seem less unnatural to execute people for political crimes. Kill yourself if you must, said the liberals to Gilmore, but take some pills, or cut your wrists. Keep the state out of it.

Gilmore, however, had his preferences. He would escape if he could. That was the best of the choices. But if he couldn’t, he would accept execution, so he said. And if the courts gave him an unwanted reprieve, then and only then would he commit suicide. But in his mind, and he declared it often, suicide was the least attractive alternative.

For one thing, it was demeaning. It was not the same, went Gilmore’s unstated argument, to do it yourself or have others do it. That was equal to the difference between announcing “I am wrong” or telling you “They say I am wrong.” That was a clear difference. On reflection, there might be another.

For to die alone, by one’s own hand, could take courage, but not so much as he would need to meet the hour of death in front of others. That would be an extreme test. Think of the terrors an actor must go through on first night if a play depends on his performance. Add the courage it will take to be prepared to step forward at the final curtain and stop four bullets with one’s heart. That is an impossibly romantic role. Of course, Gilmore felt his life would begin with his death. “I lived a stupid life,” he could have been saying. “Let me at least die well. That is the only way to redeem my pride.”

It was in the whole tangle of these thoughts that I began to stammer on that television morning talking to Phil Donahue. “Yes,” I said, “maybe we need a little capital punishment,” and knew it was hopeless to explain. Capital punishment was embarrassing for the state, I could have said, and a meaningless punishment for ninety-nine out of a hundred men on death row—they had been there too long. Yet I also thought that once in a while, as a special solution, if a man or woman wished to die at the center of the stage, full of vanity, pride, and even some sense of atonement, well, that should also be a human right—to choose the most dramatic death possible, rather than the most delayed. If one believed in a soul that endured beyond one’s body, the manner of one’s dying might be the most important act of life.

All the same, the real question was still unanswered. Could capital punishment ever be justified when the condemned did not wish to die? Society, Ed Koch was still there to say, had a “right to demonstrate its sense of moral outrage against particularly heinous crimes.”

Well, that, on further reflection, also begged the question. Such a remark assumed that society was good, whereas society might actually be in danger of breaking up. It could be clearer to say that society had not a right but a
need
to express its outrage. Maybe the grim truth was that society—this screaming gaggle of us all—was simply not large enough, generous enough, compassionate enough, no, not Judeo-Christian enough to tolerate a world where no killers were destroyed for their deeds. In that case, the abolition of all executions might be equal to extinguishing some last vital instinct of revenge. We might all sicken thereby a little further.

There are crimes, after all, which make one sick with rage. I saw a letter the other day from a woman whose two brothers were killed in a store. They had gone in to buy a bottle of liquor for a family celebration and had the misfortune to be caught in a stickup. They were tied together in a back room and stabbed until they died. The killers were captured on leaving. Got off with small sentences. They had “the most expensive lawyer in town.”

One thinks of all that means, of all the ways in which money buys a piece of protection in every layer of society. What frustration we feel at the way morals and money lose their sharp edges in relation to each other. Society is afloat in a sea of corruption, so say we all, but there is also the instinct to flush it out. So occasionally, as part of that impulse, we look for a scapegoat. We have a profound need to find a murderer we can execute. His deed may be less horrible than the crime of the man next to him on death row, but by the particular local circumstances of the law, he is the man we have chosen to execute. Living amid all the blank walls of technology, we require a death now and again, we
need to stir that foul pot. Needless to ask why we must learn over and over again that execution by the state looses a stench deeper than murder on the street. As the Greeks taught us, a country without a theater that dares to be profound is a weak society. So, unconsciously, we hold to the idea of capital punishment against all civilized arguments. Yes, like Greeks in the amphitheater viewing tragedy, we need—once in a while we need—an aesthetic upheaval that will be deeper than anything offered by our daily television and our money-laundered morals. That packaged entertainment and those flabby morals are the tranquilizers of all our suppressed insanity. So we face a frightful equation. Maybe we are not punishing the murderer so much as we are serving medicine to ourselves. Maybe a little capital punishment is better for society than a lot of repressed insanity. For when no one is killed by the state, then perhaps there is nothing to restrain all that is ready to fly loose in ourselves. In that case, capital punishment is a deterrent, but not for killers. It deters the common man from the impulse each day to become a little crazier.

That may be the nerve of our collective itch to get officials to commit murder for us, to demonstrate, that is, “our sense of moral outrage at particularly heinous crimes.” We need the official bloodbath to restore ourselves to the idea that society is not only reasonable, but godlike.

That is cynical reasoning. A call for a little capital punishment. It is tonic to the average man’s morals and good theater for all. Put in such words, the thought is vastly offensive.

Yet my instinct still tells me there is reason to it. Capital punishment may be one of our last defenses against the oncoming wave of the computer universe. Execution is irrational and ugly, it is uncivilized, it is wasteful of time, money, and emotion, yet it has one saving grace—it is primitive. It is a tribal ceremony. I tell myself it is historically true, it is overpoweringly true, that wars increase in scope as we grow too civilized. It is yet to be demonstrated that nuclear warfare is not the final expression of civilization. But if that is so, then our tribal ceremonies are part of our salvation, for they slow the speed with which we overcivilize ourselves right into our doom. It is frightening that we do not find it
as hard to live in a world that liquidates millions as we do to confront the enormity of death when only one person is dying. That is a primitive ability. To look death in the face. Primitives do not have to surround the last hour with a hospital and its terminal machines.

Primitives, by our measure, may live like savages, but, compared to us, they go to war like angels. That is because they know more about the meaning of a single death. They know that one fatality can enlarge everybody who lived around the dead man, those who loved him and those who felt hate. Primitives go into battle with hideous cries, yet, so soon as the first warrior falls, the war, by convention, is over. The gods have spoken, and the issue has been decided. One death has become as vast in its significance as the sky. Indeed, for the primitive, there is no need to kill another until this death has been contemplated down to the last lay of the moldering bones.