Reprieve

 The Associated Press reported yesterday on a case from Oklahoma in which the governor's last minute clemency spared the life of a death row inmate, Tremane Wood, just hours before he was slated for execution. 

This last-minute act of clemency is surely to be applauded. But a gruesome twist in the story came when the inmate—shortly after learning that his life would be spared—reportedly collapsed in his cell due to "dehydration and stress." He had to be rushed to the medical unit, where the same state government that had been set to kill him mere hours before now strove (successfully, as it proved, for now) to save his life. 

The incident is a visceral and appalling reminder of the incredible psychic stress and agony a person must be under in the hours before they are scheduled to be killed. I'm certainly glad the governor acted at the last minute to spare him, of course. But this clemency cannot erase the incredible cruelty of the fact that our society put him in that position in the first place—that we told him to expect his imminent death; and that this caused him such (understandable) anxiety that he nearly died from the stress of it. 

I am reminded of the incident from Dostoevsky's biography—which inspired passages in The Idiot and elsewhere—in which the czarist government decided to spare his life, after originally sentencing him to death for his political activities—but not before staging a mock execution to make him think that he was about to be killed. 

There is a grotesque cruelty, in short, in any government that claims for itself the power and right to kill its citizens—even if it spares them at the last minute. Indeed, the clemency in such cases becomes merely another illustration of arbitrary power. Whereas a just and accountable society would surely not put people on death row in the first place. 

The radical poet of the 1930s Harry Alan Potamkin—reflecting on the experience of an IWW activist friend of his who was railroaded on bogus charges—but then granted clemency after languishing in prison for seven years—wrote of that species of "terrible cruelty which could imprison and torment for years men born free, and then with a complacent gesture of freedom think that all is forgiven. The gallantry that slays and then forgives!"

Some of that same spurious "gallantry" was on display in Oklahoma yesterday. 

I'm likewise reminded of the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, in a poem I've quoted many times before, but which remains for me the most powerful indictment of capital punishment I've ever read. 

He wrote of the mental image that haunted him, of the men sitting on death row, being readied for the electric chair—"their trousers slit for the electrodes / and their hair cut for the cap"—all because of the "unconcern of men and women / respectable and respected and professedly Christian"—who allow them to languish there. 

Tremane Wood's life was spared because some people—including the victim's family—who, in an act of inexpressible nobility, called for his reprieve—did show some Christian concern and charity. But how many other people are facing the same fate on death row right now in this country because of the "unconcern" of so many others? 

Our society (rightly) does not allow judicial sentences of flogging or torture. We do not put people on the rack or dislocate their limbs or scar their backs with the cat-o-nine-tails. And good for us. 

But—for some reason—we still allow our prisons to inflict the ultimate violence of deliberately snuffing out a person's life. 

Perhaps we like to delude ourselves that capital punishment is not "violent." The method of lethal injection can make it seem sterile, clinical. We tell ourselves it is "painless," unlike those other cruel and unusual punishments of yesteryear listed above. 

But Tremane Wood's story puts the lie to that comforting narrative. The agony and humiliation of expecting your death—of knowing that the government of your society intends to kill you—is itself violence. In his case, it was a violence that almost killed him—that led him to collapse in unconsciousness mere hours after learning that his life would be spared. "Dehydration and stress," his captors tells us. 

I can only imagine!