Last month, Utah prison officials took a death row prisoner named Ronnie Gardner to a specially designed room, strapped him tightly into a chair, and draped a black hood over his head. By a prearranged signal, a group of five volunteer executioners aimed their Winchester rifles at a target placed over his heart, and opened fire.
Ronnie Gardner's choice to die by firing squad pierced what Albert Camus called the "padded words" with which we have smothered and hidden capital punishment in our society, preventing us from seeing clearly what it "really is" and honestly debating its legitimacy. "The firing squad, please," came as close as humanly possible to showing the nation, and the world, what Camus described as "the machine" of the death penalty, making us "touch the wood and steel" of it.
The truth is that many of the ugly realities of capital punishment are still covered up in our society, described with euphemisms that make the death penalty seem deceptively palatable. We understandably focus on the terrible crimes that capital defendants have committed, but we refuse to examine the origins of their violence. Thus, we are still a nation that largely ignores the plight of desperately poor children, does little to alleviate the suffering of those who are traumatized by neglect and abuse, and turns a blind eye toward underfunded, incompetent, and sometimes callously cruel juvenile institutions that frequently do more harm than good to troubled and vulnerable young people. Instead, we rise up in indignation when one of these profoundly poor, chronically ignored, and badly mistreated children grow up to become, as Ronnie Gardner described himself, a "nasty little bugger," only then paying much attention, with many clamoring for the death penalty to be imposed.
By Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leading expert on capital punishment and the author of Death by Design; The Huffington Post,July 27, 2010
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