Killing McVeigh

Vengeance, not justice, will be televised with the execution of the convicted Oklahoma City bomber.

By Bruce Shapiro

Feb 24, 2001 | "Memorials do not take away the pain," President Bush told the families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing this week. "They cannot fill the emptiness. But they can make a place in time and tell the value of what was lost."

Bush is right. After five years, it does honor to the victims of Oklahoma City to dedicate a museum to their lives and stories.

Yet in a macabre dance, federal prosecutors and Timothy McVeigh are together ensuring that the man who drove that truckload of fertilizer to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building remains center stage.

Two days before Bush traveled to Oklahoma City, McVeigh announced that he is ready to be executed on May 16. The only difference between McVeigh's own death wish and prosecutors' plans to execute him is that McVeigh wants his death broadcast nationally and prosecutors want a closed-circuit telecast to an invitation-only audience of his victims' family members, some 250 of whom have signed up for the privilege.

The debate shows why any thought that McVeigh's execution represents closure is badly mistaken. Instead of recalling McVeigh's victims or encouraging violence prevention, the press and pundits are talking about how big the crowd will be that gets to watch McVeigh have poison dripped into his veins. Instead of fading into the anonymity of life behind bars, McVeigh is able to keep himself on the front page, to turn the chronicle of his last months and the video record of his death -- whether closed circuit or telecast -- into a martyrdom for the militia fringe.

Far from encouraging closure, McVeigh's impending death sentence is stimulating a morbid yearning for a return to public executions, a practice mostly abandoned since the 19th century. Federal prosecutors say they have ruled out any public telecast -- although the Freedom of Information Act would probably ensure the release of any video record of McVeigh's death eventually.

With McVeigh this week announcing that he would forgo even a symbolic appeal for clemency to President Bush, the drumbeat for a public execution is accelerating. In the New York Times, for instance, poet and essayist Thomas Lynch writes not of McVeigh's victims but of the public's "unabridged right" to watch McVeigh die. Lynch calls public broadcast of the execution "a vaccination against madness and inhumanity."

This is not a proposition supported by scholarship. To the contrary, a growing number of psychologists believe that broadcast images of killing help desensitize viewers to their own moral qualms. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist, former Army ranger and respected scholar on what makes it possible for people to kill, has written that television and movie audiences easily learn to associate images of inflicted death with "entertainment, pleasure, their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar and the close, intimate contact of their date."

And what they remember, even when the bad guys get their just deserts, is not the law but the vengeance: Indeed, Grossman says, the bombing itself exemplifies this "new cult of vengeance." Now McVeigh sees his own execution as just another exercise in vengeance against a corrupt system.

Next Page: McVeigh's reveling in his execution may sicken many already in doubt about capital punishment

• View blog reactions