[Nancy Savitt is a partner with Aftab & Savitt, a commercial and litigation boutique in New York and Paramus, New Jersey. She was a U.S. Attorney in New York.]
Should the government be in the revenge business? That is one of the questions raised by Dead Man Walking. In it, Sean Penn plays a man convicted of murdering a teenage boy and girl after brutally raping the girl. The film is set in his last few days on death row, just before his execution. His spiritual advisor, a nun (played by Susan Sarandon), speaks with both the convict's and the victims' families in her attempt to perform her duties. The movie makes its best case for the death penalty in those discussions between the nun and those families. But those same scenes point up most starkly our discomfort as a society with being in the death business.
As a society, we have taken justice out of the hands of the families of the victims and placed it in what is supposed to be an impartial system. Vigilantism is outlawed. Yet it is probably easier to exact the ultimate revenge for a criminal act in the heat of fury than after a dispassionate, drawn-out series of judicial proceedings.
Our criminal justice system is supposed to serve several purposes: deterrence, rehabilitation, punishment. Most people agree that the death penalty does not deter crime. No one has the temerity to argue that it is rehabilitative. Thus we are left with two options: One, it is necessary to kill these people for our own safety; or two, these are revenge killings. In the first group are those who pose a risk to society, who kill without thought or conscience and who admit that if released they would kill again. We can justify imposing the death penalty on such people as a kind of societal self-defense.
But revenge?
As a nation, we find it hard to kill -- that's why there are so few murders among us. With the legitimized institution of killing enshrined in our nation's death penalty statutes, it seems the only way we can get past our inborn abhorrence of taking human life is to demonize the killers. They are not human. They are not like us. They are depraved, totally evil creatures, beyond redemption, and they deserve to have their lives cut short.
Thus in Dead Man Walking the parents of the slain teenagers refuse to acknowledge that they are even the same species as the man who killed their children. He is not human. He is not even an animal -- he is a "monster." They are disgusted that the nun has been spending time with this -- this thing -- and they're fearful, too, recognizing perhaps that if he has a human face, it will be harder to wish for his death.
The audience sees that human face through the eyes of the nun. It is rarely sympathetic. But when his mother shows the nun his childhood pictures, they are eerily similar to the ones of the murder victims, with the same open, innocent look. The point is made: This man is not evil incarnate. He is a human being, just like his victims.
When the criminal is personalized, our society finds it harder to take a life. The case of Susan Smith, the woman who drowned her children last year, illustrates this point. Most of the country clamored for a death sentence. Yet a jury of people who knew her refused to condemn her to death, even for her heinous crime.
The ending of Dead Man Walking also suggests that very little changes after an execution. The murder victims are still dead, but now another family has lost a child. What is the point?
