Killing as "closure"

John Ashcroft says the closed-circuit TV broadcast of Timothy McVeigh's execution will help victims heal. But will what they see look too brutal -- or not brutal enough?

By Kerry Lauerman

Apr 14, 2001 | It was a curious moment, on Thursday, when Attorney General John Ashcroft -- demonized by Democrats during his confirmation hearings as a hardhearted politician -- stepped away from his role as our top law enforcement official to play national therapist.

Ashcroft had traveled to Oklahoma City, he told us, to meet with survivors and family members of victims in the 1995 bombing, to "hear their stories and to try to understand their loss." The visit yielded an idea to remedy some of their unimaginable pain: Set up a closed-circuit TV system in Oklahoma City to let them watch the May 16 execution of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh in Terre Haute, Ind., several hundreds of miles away. The private broadcast, Ashcroft said, "can help them meet their need to close this chapter in their lives."

Ashcroft's speech expressed the popular rationale for letting people witness an execution: It brings "closure" and "emotional healing" to a victim's family and loved ones. Nobody talks about the dark side: the primal desire for revenge and retribution, the catharsis many hope will come through an old-fashioned, eye-for-an-eye punishment that fits the crime.

But while Ashcroft and others insist the closed-circuit telecast of McVeigh's execution won't open the door to more widely broadcast public killings, some experts disagree. "For all practical purposes, the cat is out of the bag," says Austin Sarat, the author of "When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition." Executions were public in this country until the 1930s, when states finally sealed them off behind a prison curtain, Sarat says, because of the "emergence of a sort of Victorian sensibility. It was considered unseemly."

Clearly, McVeigh's execution will be the most widely viewed in over a century, with selected bombing victims and representatives from the media (10 of each) watching from the death chamber's front row, and an additional 1,100 qualifying to watch by remote from Oklahoma City. The question now becomes: How will they feel about what they see?

Will it be brutal enough to satisfy the desire for retribution some victims feel? Perhaps not; the relative sterility of lethal injection has had an anticlimactic effect on witnesses who feel that the punishment -- even death -- still doesn't match the crime. In fact, should the modern execution ever make it to TV, the most shocking thing might be its utter banality.

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