I came late to the Casey Anthony case. I have avoided any comment over the past week since a jury of her peers issued a not guilty verdict. I am not going to focus on the rightness or wrongness of the verdict in this post. Though I do find the people standing outside the courthouse with signs yelling baby killer to be pathetic. The thing that I care about in this case is that the defendant’s lawyer, Jose Baez, took his opportunity in the spotlight to make a compelling statement against the death penalty:

“I think that this case is a perfect example of why the death penalty does not work and why we all need to stop and look and think twice about a country that decides to kill its own citizens. Murder’s not right no matter who does it, whether it’s a ritual killing or someone becoming a victim in a drive by shooting. It’s disgusting and I think, if this case gets any attention, it should focus on that issue, that we need to stop trying to kill our own people.”

What’s your best guess as to whether Mr. Baez’s statement jumpstarted a national conversation about the death penalty in America? I’ll give you three guesses. Since this was the lead attorney’s first statement immediately after the verdict was handed down, you would have thought that the media and the public would have at least pretended to discuss the death penalty. You would of course be wrong. Alas the substance of his words only garnered cursory coverage and scant public comment. Why is this?

The answer, I think, is that Americans are particularly wired to support “rough justice.” I don’t know where this comes from but I just know that it is. In writing about the electric chair at Indiana State Prison, Etheridge Knight (1970) muses about the condemned man:

“I wonder if he realizes that he has become some kind of sacrificial lamb, soon to be strapped onto a weird altar/throne so that the blood lust of a barbaric society will be quenched. I wonder if he knows that even if he does not die in the Chair he will still have served his purpose. Because when the newspaper headlines gloated: MAN SENTENCED TO DIE IN ELECTRIC CHAIR — That somewhere in the dark/bright regions of this society’s mind it projected his death, walked the last mile with him, and licked its lips as he died in eye-bulging agony. So the question of capital punishment is merely rhetorical. It was never meant to deter crime, and the people who are pro-capital punishment on those grounds are hypocritical liars. No matter how sophisticated their argument, they are — in their souls — “eye-for-an-eye” fundamentalists.”

There seems to be something in the DNA of the country that makes us susceptible to accepting state-sanctioned killing of our people. It is hard not to become despondent about our fellow citizens when we focus on the people outside the courthouse in Florida who still insist that Ms. Anthony deserves to die. Yet… We learned just this week that my state of Illinois has officially closed down its death row. This came after a long and sustained campaign against the death penalty led by people like my friend Alice Kim and many others. Their efforts show that it is possible to persuade our legislators and the general public about the injustice and inhumanity of the death penalty. We have to hold both realities in our heads at once. On the one hand, many Americans seem to be “eye-for-an-eye” fundamentalists as Knight puts it and yet we also know that another (perhaps smaller) group of people are calling us to our better angels. In honor of those who continue to struggle to eradicate capital punishment in the U.S., I want to share an image from my photographic collection. These are negatives depicting a protest against an execution at San Quentin in 1960. La lucha continua!