A frustrating look at death penalty

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF AMERICAN CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

By Franklin E. Zimring

Oxford University Press, $30, 250 pages

REVIEWED BY BRUCE FEIN

As terrorist slaughters of innocent civilians capture headlines, it is altogether fitting that a commanding figure in academia, Law Professor Franklin Zimring, sallies forth with “The Contradctions of American Capital Punishment,” a book addressing capital punishment.

What should be done with the likes of Osama bin Laden and his satellite murderers who keenly relish wholesale homicides to further their morally nauseating quest to exterminate human rights and democracy and to enslave women as a tribute to male sexual depravity? What punishment is commensurate with Iraq’s reptilian Saddam Hussein’s countless crimes against humanity? Should unrepentant Zaccarias Moussouai, on trial for conspiracy to perpetrate the September 11 abominations, face execution if convicted?

Whether anything less than capital punishment for unspeakable crimes would cheapen the lives of the dead was a question confronted after World War II. A resounding “yes” was the answer at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, and reinforced by the conviction and execution of Adolph Eichmann at Jerusalem. Who could visit Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the Holocaust Museum yet lecture a Holocaust orphan that the death sentence for Herman Goering (who circumvented execution by suicide) was morally disreputable? And have you ever seen Amnesty International or the American Civil Liberties Union waving placards protesting the execution of Japan’s Hideki Tojo?

Mr. Zimring brings considerable credentials to the capital punishment debate: William G. Simon Professor of Law and Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also earned the coveted laurel of criminologist within professional circles, which adds gravity to pontificating about crime and criminals.

The criminologist, however, exasperates all but death penalty scourges in his latest authorship. He scampers away from the question of whether the death penalty is ever justified, and, if so, under what circumstances. His North Star is that the death penalty is a barbaric vestige of America’s historical fascination with lynching and vigilantism in the South.

Mr. Zimring accepts uncritically Caesar Beccaria’s critique of the death penalty as ” … the war of a nation against a citizen … It appears absurd to me that the laws, which are the expression of the public will and which detest and punish homicide, commit murder themselves, and in order to dissuade citizens from assassination, commit public assassination.”

But the absurdity lies with Beccaria’s analysis.

Every civilized legal regime justifies killing in self-defense or in defense of others. Suppose at the tourist filled Lincoln Memorial a police officer spots a dozen suicide bombers hoping to better the instruction of their soulmates in Palestine. He shoots and kills all 12 and is bemedalled by President George W. Bush. Doesn’t it seem more apt to describe the policeman’s alertness to duty as self-defense than assassination?

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