Poison Gas

 A few weeks back, I wrote a reflection on the news that Alabama had just executed a man by nitrogen gas (the first time such a method has been used in the U.S.). Since then, the New York Times has published a longer piece describing exactly what happened in the execution chamber, as Kenneth Smith fought for life, and gradually succumbed to asphyxiation. For 22 minutes, he reportedly protested and struggled. Then he expired. The universe for him ended; and it has continued since for all of us. 

Smith received the consolations of a spiritual advisor, who was with him in his last moments. This reverend deserves all our respect and admiration for being willing to minister to the most lost of sheep, at precisely the moment when the rest of the community had turned its back on him. Yet, it is not in the power of prison chaplains to save people's bodies from execution. They lack that authority. All they can do is try to comfort them in their affliction. 

And so, the spiritual advisor was allowed to offer Smith last rites, an anointing of oil—but then he was forced to stand witness—powerless, helpless—as the state strapped a mask onto Smith's face and proceeded to suffocate him with nitrogen. Confronted with such a spectacle, I am reminded of Thomas Hardy's suitably vitriolic epigram (and I can't help but resonate with its pessimistic message): "After two thousand years of mass/ We've got as far as poison gas."

The reasons why we should stop doing this as a society—stop executing people, that is to say (whether by poison gas or other methods)—are manifold. But the simplest and clearest is the one Clint Eastwood's character offers in Unforgiven: "it's a hell of a thing to kill a man." To end the life of a person who is still breathing, still thinking, is to take away all possibility of what that person might do or be. It is to annihilate a consciousness—and with it, a whole world. 

In my previous post about this execution, I quoted Orwell on this subject of capital punishment as a means of destroying worlds. After witnessing a hanging, when he was serving in the colonial police, Orwell came to realize what he called "the unspeakable wrongness [...] of cutting a life short when it is in full tide." The reason, he writes, is that to kill someone means ending the universe as they know it. The universe for the rest of us may continue, but it will now be with "one mind less, one world less."

It's an observation that other philosophers and thinkers have made before. I'm quite certain it's in Schopenhauer someplace. And I found it again in Wittgenstein, in revisiting the Tractatus this past week. The idea is simply that, for each of us, the world as we know it begins and ends with our own lives, with our own minds. And so, to destroy a mind, to end a life, is to annihilate a world. "[I]n death," Wittgenstein writes at one point: "the world does not change, but ceases." (Ogden trans.)

Oh, we can say that this is pity wasted on the wrong man. We can say that Smith's world—Smith's universe of consciousness—was not one worth preserving. We can say: look at what he did; look at the suffering his actions caused! And all of that is true. But, look too at the love he expressed for his family in his last moments, as the Times describes. Look at the tears his wife shed for him before his death. Hear her words after watching his execution: "Where’s love and forgiveness?"

There is a poem by Stephen Crane that comes to mind, in which a punishing spirit stands watch over the grave of a purportedly "wicked man." A woman approaches the grave, but she is turned away. The spirit forbids anyone to lay flowers on his grave, for he is, after all, a wicked man—and it cannot be denied that Kenneth Smith, too, was a wicked man; or at least a man who did a very wicked thing. But the woman protests: "Ah, I loved him." 

And so Crane asks: "If the spirit was just/ Why did the maid weep?" And so we should ask ourselves. If the state was just—if the community was just in exiling one of its own members and ordering his execution—why were there tears shed at his killing? Why did his wife cry? Why was everyone there so troubled and distraught? Why did it lodge so deeply and painfully in the minds of all the witnesses that they say they will never forget it? 

If the law of capital punishment is so just—why do we weep?