The Debate Over Capital Punishment: Facing the Death Penalty
Dublin Core
Title
The Debate Over Capital Punishment: Facing the Death Penalty
Subject
Death row
Executions (Administrative law)
Giarratano
Mello, Michael
Description
McCarthy anayzles the flaws of executions in death row. Talking with soon to be victim of exectuion, Giarrantano, among others, McCarthy lays out how complicated the legal use of executions are, and how many people think rather too quickly when favoring it ignorantly.
Creator
McCarthy, Colman
Source
The Washington Post
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1989-09-03
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
2 JPGs
300 DPI
Language
English
Coverage
Mecklenburg, VA
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
When I visited Joseph Giarratano in early June in a state prison in Mecklenburg, Va., the sustaining life force in his death-row cell was a typewriter. It had the sacredness of a chalice, from which he drank of hope. Giarratano, convicted of killing two people, but whose guilt I and a fair number of others who have studied the records of the case see as open to grave doubt, is a gifted writer. He has produced articulate legal briefs on behalf of fellow prisoners, and his disciplined efforts are keeping with the view of Justice William Brennan: “Writing…is not an egotistical act. It is a duty. Saying ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind’ is not self-indulgence-it is very hard work we cannot shirk.”
Giarratano occasionally sends me some of his essays. Their quality matches his “The Pains of Life,” one of 16 essays in this valuable collection of perspectives that examines the effects of legalized killing on both the condemned and those involved in the judicial watch. Giarratano, along with C. Michael Lambrix, one of the more than 300 death-row prisoners in Florida, and Willie Darden Jr., who was executed in Florida on March 15th, 1987, are the three voices from within the walls. The outsiders, including attorneys, criminologists, historians, a philosopher, a journalist and a minister, tell of their personal involvement with the condemned or offer their assessments of what governmental homicide means at the time when death rows hold more than 2,200 people- a record- and are sent more than 200 citizens a year.
Collectively, the authors are ones whom many Americans dismiss or ridicule for misplacing their sympathies with criminals, not victims, or for leading the soft-on-crime lobby. That image is as hollow as the disproven notion that capital punishment is a deterrent. The authors’ sympathies are with justice and compassion, neither of which has been on display when murderers kill or governments kill murderers. “As I see it (though others will disagree)” writes Watt Epsy, the Alabama historian who has documented some 15,780 legal executions, “no murderer is so heartless and cruel as the society that executes him. No individual murderer confines the victim to restricted quarters over a sustained period of time, or arranges things so that the person to die knows the manner in which death will come and the time at which it will arrive, hoping against hope for the magical reprieve, stay, or commutation that might prolong his life.”
In his essays Giarratano, who is 32 and has lived 10 years on death row, writers of conversations with cellblock guards, “most of whom avoid the subject of my death, the possible deaths of the men around me, and their own role in this death ritual. There are a few who avoid my eyes and say “Joe, it’s not my doing. I don’t want to see you die. There are other people who deserve it more than you.’ Many find it easy to avoid the subject, since they will not be the ones who actually pull the switch- they will only escort me to the death house and let their co-workers take over.”
Giarratano’s phrase, “this death ritual,” touches on what may be the only explanation for 70 percent of Americans-according to Gallup-favoring executions. In their essay, Elizabeth Purdum and J. Anthony Parades, anthropologists at Florida State University, compare the rituals of death in U.S prisons with the sacrificial killings of the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the 16th century. The Aztec’s believed that killing prisoners maintained universal order and the government’s well-being. Purdum and Parades argue persuasively that a similar view prevails today. A “groundswell of support for capital punishments in the United States,” they argue, “springs from the universal ancient human impulse to do something in times of stress, even if it is only ritual…In the face of all the evidence that capital punishment does no more to deter crime than the bloody rituals of Tenochtitlan did to keep the sun in the sky, we must seek some broader, noninstrumental function that the death penalty serves…Modern capital punishments is an institutionalized magical response to a perceived disorder in American life and in the world at large, an attempted magical solution that has an especial appeal to the beleaguered, white, God-fearing men and women of the working class. And in certain aspiring politicians they find their sacrificial priests.”
Most of America’s state killings occur in the South. Nearly all of the executed have been poor, were victims of violence themselves and had pre-conviction lawyers who were inept. It is the judicial system’s rank unfairness that helped motivate Michael Mello to represent death row citizens. In his essay he recalls working for a man who was executed in May 1986 after the Supreme Court, five minutes before the electrocution, voted five to four to deny a stay: “I will never forget the waves of helpless rage that washed over me as the clerk of the Supreme Court read me the orders [of denial]. It would have been easy-too easy- to blame the Court as an institution…Instead I found that the real target of my rage was myself: a participant in the system of legal homicide…Was I serving to legitimate the system by helping to provide sanitized executions, executions with the aura of legalism and therefore the appearance of fairness?”
In the months before Willie Darden was electrocuted in Florida, I encouraged a number of my students at the University of Maryland to write to him. He answered their letters faithfully, and no student failed to have new slants about capital punishment. Darden wrote to them much the same message he offers here: “We execute for the traits of the person found guilty. If the person is black, uneducated, poor, outspoken, slightly retarded, eccentric, or odd, he stands a much greater chance of being executed than do those convicted of even worse crimes than he. Juries find it hard to convict one of their own, so middle-class whites are rarely in our ranks…Most, if not all, of the humans on death row have souls that can be made clean through love, compassion, and spirituality. However, to acknowledge this threatens our ability to execute, as we must dehumanize before we can kill in such a predetermined fashion.”
The only lack in this collection of essays is the thinking of a murder victim’s family. Marie Deans would have been ideal. She is a Richmond, Va., women whose mother-in-law was murdered by an escaped prisoner. Deans not only fought the death penalty in that case but regularly visits death rows for her Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons. Few are more enlightened on the madness of killing for punishment than Deans, and few have gone as far beyond the myth that executions bring solace to the victims’ families.
A growing literature- from Robert Johnson’s Condemned to Die, to The Death Penalty in America by Hugo Adam Bedau- offers alternatives to thinking and acting violently about punishing murderers. This work stands with the best of what’s been written. It represents the best of those who have seen the worst.
Giarratano occasionally sends me some of his essays. Their quality matches his “The Pains of Life,” one of 16 essays in this valuable collection of perspectives that examines the effects of legalized killing on both the condemned and those involved in the judicial watch. Giarratano, along with C. Michael Lambrix, one of the more than 300 death-row prisoners in Florida, and Willie Darden Jr., who was executed in Florida on March 15th, 1987, are the three voices from within the walls. The outsiders, including attorneys, criminologists, historians, a philosopher, a journalist and a minister, tell of their personal involvement with the condemned or offer their assessments of what governmental homicide means at the time when death rows hold more than 2,200 people- a record- and are sent more than 200 citizens a year.
Collectively, the authors are ones whom many Americans dismiss or ridicule for misplacing their sympathies with criminals, not victims, or for leading the soft-on-crime lobby. That image is as hollow as the disproven notion that capital punishment is a deterrent. The authors’ sympathies are with justice and compassion, neither of which has been on display when murderers kill or governments kill murderers. “As I see it (though others will disagree)” writes Watt Epsy, the Alabama historian who has documented some 15,780 legal executions, “no murderer is so heartless and cruel as the society that executes him. No individual murderer confines the victim to restricted quarters over a sustained period of time, or arranges things so that the person to die knows the manner in which death will come and the time at which it will arrive, hoping against hope for the magical reprieve, stay, or commutation that might prolong his life.”
In his essays Giarratano, who is 32 and has lived 10 years on death row, writers of conversations with cellblock guards, “most of whom avoid the subject of my death, the possible deaths of the men around me, and their own role in this death ritual. There are a few who avoid my eyes and say “Joe, it’s not my doing. I don’t want to see you die. There are other people who deserve it more than you.’ Many find it easy to avoid the subject, since they will not be the ones who actually pull the switch- they will only escort me to the death house and let their co-workers take over.”
Giarratano’s phrase, “this death ritual,” touches on what may be the only explanation for 70 percent of Americans-according to Gallup-favoring executions. In their essay, Elizabeth Purdum and J. Anthony Parades, anthropologists at Florida State University, compare the rituals of death in U.S prisons with the sacrificial killings of the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the 16th century. The Aztec’s believed that killing prisoners maintained universal order and the government’s well-being. Purdum and Parades argue persuasively that a similar view prevails today. A “groundswell of support for capital punishments in the United States,” they argue, “springs from the universal ancient human impulse to do something in times of stress, even if it is only ritual…In the face of all the evidence that capital punishment does no more to deter crime than the bloody rituals of Tenochtitlan did to keep the sun in the sky, we must seek some broader, noninstrumental function that the death penalty serves…Modern capital punishments is an institutionalized magical response to a perceived disorder in American life and in the world at large, an attempted magical solution that has an especial appeal to the beleaguered, white, God-fearing men and women of the working class. And in certain aspiring politicians they find their sacrificial priests.”
Most of America’s state killings occur in the South. Nearly all of the executed have been poor, were victims of violence themselves and had pre-conviction lawyers who were inept. It is the judicial system’s rank unfairness that helped motivate Michael Mello to represent death row citizens. In his essay he recalls working for a man who was executed in May 1986 after the Supreme Court, five minutes before the electrocution, voted five to four to deny a stay: “I will never forget the waves of helpless rage that washed over me as the clerk of the Supreme Court read me the orders [of denial]. It would have been easy-too easy- to blame the Court as an institution…Instead I found that the real target of my rage was myself: a participant in the system of legal homicide…Was I serving to legitimate the system by helping to provide sanitized executions, executions with the aura of legalism and therefore the appearance of fairness?”
In the months before Willie Darden was electrocuted in Florida, I encouraged a number of my students at the University of Maryland to write to him. He answered their letters faithfully, and no student failed to have new slants about capital punishment. Darden wrote to them much the same message he offers here: “We execute for the traits of the person found guilty. If the person is black, uneducated, poor, outspoken, slightly retarded, eccentric, or odd, he stands a much greater chance of being executed than do those convicted of even worse crimes than he. Juries find it hard to convict one of their own, so middle-class whites are rarely in our ranks…Most, if not all, of the humans on death row have souls that can be made clean through love, compassion, and spirituality. However, to acknowledge this threatens our ability to execute, as we must dehumanize before we can kill in such a predetermined fashion.”
The only lack in this collection of essays is the thinking of a murder victim’s family. Marie Deans would have been ideal. She is a Richmond, Va., women whose mother-in-law was murdered by an escaped prisoner. Deans not only fought the death penalty in that case but regularly visits death rows for her Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons. Few are more enlightened on the madness of killing for punishment than Deans, and few have gone as far beyond the myth that executions bring solace to the victims’ families.
A growing literature- from Robert Johnson’s Condemned to Die, to The Death Penalty in America by Hugo Adam Bedau- offers alternatives to thinking and acting violently about punishing murderers. This work stands with the best of what’s been written. It represents the best of those who have seen the worst.
Original Format
Newspaper
Contributor of the Digital Item
Jaster, Matthew C.
Student Editor of the Digital Item
Dickinson, Terra
Files
Citation
McCarthy, Colman, “The Debate Over Capital Punishment: Facing the Death Penalty,” HIST299, accessed July 12, 2026, https://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/129.