15. Execution Eve
Tonight America is – once again – going through a grotesque cliff's-edge, will-they-or-won't-they drama involving a celebrity prisoner. Ann Althouse reminds us of Tookie Williams' crimes, which were about as cold as murder can get.
This story repeats itself every few years in the America mass media, but much less frequently than executions take place. Why do we (or "the media" that caters to us) care so much about one prisoner about to be executed, and so little about the rest of them?
When a case reaches a certain nearly-hysterical level of publicity, the public gets some sense of the experience of a sentencing judge. The crime is long past. The victim exists only in photographs and words, no more real than the solemn, doomed soldiers staring out of Civil War portraits. The judge never met him, and never will, and his death cannot have made any difference to the judge's life.
But the convicted murderer stands before the judge as a person. Murder makes its victims two-dimensional, but the convicted murderer still has the light in his eye, the characteristic way he holds his head, his gestures, his voice, his words. The killer always has a complexity denied the victim.
When publicity reaches the saturation point with the sick drama of execution eve, we are made to think about a person whose vitality makes him so much more interesting than those who vitality he extinguished. But then the needle is inserted, the drip is started, and the third dimension is taken from the killer, too.
Joel Jacobsen
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