Syringes and Halos: The Battle of Capital Punishment

Throughout the years I've struggled with my position on various issues. As new information becomes available, as I become more educated on these matters, as I learn to decipher propaganda from truth, my belief system is altered. Such is the case when it comes to the very controversial issue of the death penalty. With evidence and emotion thrust on the balance, which becomes more weighty? Which guides our minds or stays our hands, especially when we hold in them another's life?

I must admit that my stance on the death penalty changes depending on which side of my brain is engaged at the moment you ask for my opinion. If the left brain is tapped into, the analytical side of the mind, I can say whole-heartedly that I am against this ghastly act. Almost every point brought to the debate can be logically argued into opposition of the practice. From a moral standpoint, the hypocrisy of the "eye for an eye" mentality is painfully obvious: to kill someone for killing someone doesn't resolve the matter and only leaves the justice system as guilty as the convicted. From a sociological perspective, some may argue that such an extreme consequence as capital punishment will dissuade potential convicts from committing crimes. Unfortunately, several studies have demonstrated that the death penalty does not deter tomorrow's criminals from becoming exactly that. Crime is no higher or lower in states without or with the death penalty, respectively. From an economic perspective, some believe that it would cost tax payers less money to execute someone than to pay for them to remain in prison without the possibility of parole. This is also untrue. Given the legal costs of the numerous appeals processes made available to convicted killers, the manpower invested in reviewing appeals cases, granting or denying retrials, appealing to higher courts, etc., the cost of living on death row for the sometimes decades-long movement, and the actual cost of the execution, sustaining a death row convict is far more strenuous on our wallets. The total amount? Roughly $3.5 million. The cost of housing and feeding an inmate for life? Approximately $700,000-900,000.

There are few logical arguments proposing capital punishment left to stand on, but the most compelling opponent is the ever-looming concern that we may just kill an innocent person. With the development of advancing technologies that can quickly exonerate a wrongfully convicted criminal, such as DNA-testing, many death row inmates have been set free just shy of a devastating fate. Who knows how many more never quite made it to the appeals court and never will. One recent story is that of Troy Davis. Convicted of shooting and killing an off-duty police officer in 1989, Davis was sentenced to be executed. In spite of a conviction based on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of seven eye witnesses who later recanted, claiming the police department pressured them to finger Davis, it seemed nothing could save him. Following the typical harrowing path of appeals and denials, little hope was left. After the Supreme Court refused to stay his execution, Davis was killed on September 21 at 11:08 EST, while crowds of supporters stood outside the prison and cried.

Now, engaging the right side of the brain, the emotional realm, we come to a different story. When looking at the broader perspective of things, it's easy to analyze and rationalize why murderers should be allowed to walk this earth, even if it's in a 10X8 foot cell. But when the focus zooms in on individual cases, emotions take hold of the reigns and it's a wonder we don't expel them. Hearing the specifics of any heinous crime against humanity, premeditated, cold-blooded, remorseless, heartless murder is enough to elicit the strained painstaking scream for justice. When I read of the murder of Samantha Runnion, I couldn't ask for anything less. A five year old girl playing with a friend in her yard, just feet away from her front door, snatched up and stuffed into the backseat of a car. She was taken to a barren field, raped and then strangled to death. The murderer, not quite finished, posed her body in posthumous seductive poses for child pornography photos, then dumped her naked body on the side of a highway. Recently acquitted of child sexual abuse charges, Alejandro Avila kidnapped Runnion just months after his release. With her DNA in his car and his DNA under her fingernails, Avila was convicted and sentenced to die. He still sits on death row.

Also executed the same night as Davis was Lawrence Brewer, a white supremacist who was convicted of murdering a black man in what could be called one of the most horrific hate crimes in the history of Texas. James Byrd was walking home one night and crossed paths with Brewer and two of his friends. Though details as to what happened next become hazy, hours later, the sheriff's department was deployed to find a mass on the road that was initially mistaken for animal road kill. A decapitated body missing a fair amount of appendages and flesh lay bloodied on the pavement. Byrd had been tied to the back of Brewer's pickup truck with logging chains and dragged behind the car for more than three miles on rough asphalt. Brewer and his friends were found and arrested that same day with Byrd's blood still on them.

There are many more cases where one could argue that execution was justified: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, Saddam Hussein, all criminals with little chance of remorse or rehabilitation. There are many more cases best left to guess as to whether they are truly guilty and truly deserving of losing their lives. Entangled in my corpus callosum, I've yet to find a happy medium in between the two. So for the time being, I leave it at this: when it comes to logic, be it finances, morals, society and the wrongfully convicted, I say let them be, but when it comes to pure convictions with absolutely no doubt of guilt and horrific murders on their blood spattered hands, emotionally I scream light the bastards up.

To the Sound of Trumpets

Nine years. For nine years we have been fighting this supposed war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. For nine years we have been losing our soldiers, losing our money, losing face to the rest of the world. For nine years we have been terrorizing the innocent people of these countries trying to find a multitude of rats in bunkers, mountains, and deserts. And after nine years of killing what is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of civilians, sometimes mistakenly, sometimes intentionally, the army is finally realizing that our soldiers are not well.

Today, Peter Chiarelli, a top army official, argued that soldiers need more time at home in between deployments in order to recuperate before being shipped back to the front lines. They usually get a year off for a year's deployment, with a minor break in between lasting about two weeks, almost like a typical job we have here at home. Of course, we don't spend the year killing and trying not to be killed. And if a year off hardly seems sufficient to piece together their shattered nerves, it's not, which is being proven time and time again.

The toll of this war is turning our weather-beaten soldiers into cold-hearted psychotic killing machines, as first evidenced by a 2007 video leaked by Wikileaks showing trigger happy soldiers celebrating the accidental killings of four civilians. Carrying cellphones and cameras that were somehow mistaken for AK-47s and grenades (yeah, I don't get it either), the soldiers opened fire amidst cheers and trash talking like they were playing a Wii game on their living room couches. They laughed as one body was mangled by a tank that ran over it, and opened fire on another group of civilians trying to rescue a survivor, riddling their van with bullets and hitting two small girls inside. The sudden realization of the children's presence yielded the icy response, "that's what happens when you bring kids into a warzone". Another incident is a highly publicized criminal proceeding where a number of soldiers killed innocent civilians and kept body parts as souvenirs, and a more recent trial has come to light after a soldier admitted to raping a 14 year old Iraqi girl and killing her and her family because he "didn't think of Iraqis as humans".

The outrage that these attacks have elicited from the world and from me is almost immeasurable, and it's so easy to point fingers, to curse and spit and damn them to Hell, but are we pointing the fingers at the right people? Thrust into an establishment that has only recently encouraged soldiers to seek mental health services (despite existing threats of dishonorable discharges and labels of weakness), fighting for a government that worries more about how many soldiers are killing others than about soldiers who kill themselves when they return home, and having the Us versus Them mentality hammered into their heads every waking moment of every day, it's amazing these men and women last as long as they do.

In Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book, On Killing, he discusses the multiple psychological casualties of war which, from the civil war to the present, haven't changed much despite developing technologies and the abandonment of guerrilla and trench warfare. Fighting fatigue, many soldiers fall into confusional states of dissociation where they depersonalize from their environment and can suffer from manic-depressive episodes. A prominent syndrome of the state is that of Ganzer, where the soldier will become silly and make jokes, trying to ward off the horrors of war, but in a delusional state that is overwhelmingly morbid. One such soldier fighting in the Korean war had retrieved the severed arm of a North Korean soldier, using it as a puppetry prop. He carried it around waving it in other soldiers' faces, calling it Herbert, and even pretending to pick his nose with one of the fingers. Sadly, this psychotic behavior did not land him safely in a mental ward, but on a double shift of guard duty, and today, only when this behavior becomes deadly such as in killing civilians and keeping "souvenirs" does it warrant attention. The dissociative properties of the confusional state also account for the dehumanization of victims that makes it easier for soldiers to kill, whether it be their targeted enemy, or innocent camera toting civilians and adolescents.

Given the prolonged time periods of service, multiple deployments, watching strangers die, watching friends die, and a war that has actually gotten worse, it's no wonder these people are losing their minds. Many war vets throughout history have come home to PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, destroyed personal lives and obliterated mental health. Nowadays, they develop these issues before leaving their barracks. Swank and Marchand (1946) found that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98% of soldiers became psychiatric casualties. The other 2% escaped the fate only because they were found to already be unstable with "aggressive psychopathic personalities" (did I really just do an APA citation in my freakin' blog? What have you done to me grad school?!). So with our soldiers serving upwards of 90 days of continuous combat and no sign of our government slowing this fight, we will no doubt have many more horror stories of murder, torture, and mind-numbing stomach-churning morbidity to come.

But it is important to keep in mind, however, that these soldiers were not sick to begin with. These are not deranged antisocial personalities who come into the army with the perverse desire to kill. Romanced by promises of honor and the idea of serving their country and saving another, the harsh reality of war hits hard, and, disillusioned, their better judgment and morals dissipate in favor of basic survival needs and paranoid delusions about who their enemies are and how to deal with them. War makes people crazy, then we give them a small vacation and ask them to come back and do it again. And again. Then possibly once more. So no, Mr. Chiarelli, they don't need more time off, they need this war to be over. They need to come home. They need aftercare, they need therapy.

Voltaire once wrote "it is forbidden to kill, and therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets". Likewise it seems appropriate to write that all psychotics are locked away to protect society, unless they're zipped into fatigues, then they're given guns and asked to serve their country.

Side note: I can't write a blog about the army without at least mentioning our small triumph of the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, but in spite of the success, I can only say to you now, dear gaybugs, stay home, not every right we're afforded needs to be exercised.