The Sacrificial Rite

 An appeals court in Texas yesterday issued what appears to have been an utterly baffling and cruel decision. The trial court had reopened a capital murder conviction involving a woman accused of killing her daughter. The judge in the lower court found that the prosecutor's office had withheld exculpatory evidence, and that the woman was actually innocent. 

Yet, the appellate judges reversed him. 

In our legal system, the trial court is supposed to be the finder of fact. Higher courts are only supposed to overturn their interpretation of the factual record if they made a clear error. Nevertheless, the appeals court here apparently felt so sure of her guilt they found it necessary to keep this mother of twelve on the railroad to the execution chamber. So for now, her death sentence still stands. 

It is apparently so important to five judges on the Texas court of criminal appeals that they end this woman's life that they are not even willing to defer to a state prosecutor's office that now freely admits that they made an error in their original case; nor to a state trial judge who has concluded as a matter of fact that the condemned did not actually kill her child. 

What is to be concluded from this but that they care more about the finality of killing someone on death row than they do about whether she actually committed the crime she was convicted of? 

It would seem that there are still judges in our society who embrace the Maistrean or Baudelairean principle that the death penalty is a kind of ritual blood sacrifice that our society must make, regardless (or perhaps because of) the innocence of the victim. As Stephen Holmes paraphrases de Maistre's attitude: "All known cultures assume that the innocent alone can atone for the sins of the guilty."

In thinking about this appeals court, I am reminded of Hugh MacDiarmid's words: they stand for all / The hypocrisy, falsity, and callousness of the Law, / The infernal sadism that hauls to the scaffold a poor woman sick at both ends [...] 

It's hard not to think here of the case of another woman accused of killing her children that has dominated the headlines all summer: that of Lindsay Clancy in Massachusetts. Generally, I have resisted following the details of this case, despite the relentless coverage. I don't regard myself as competent to weigh in on the crucial psychological question of whether she was sane at the time of the alleged acts. 

Her case is also very different from that of the woman in Texas, as the factual question in her case doesn't seem to hinge so much on whether the alleged acts really occurred, as on her mental state at the time. 

But I certainly can't join in the mob mentality that wants to destroy her, either way—mostly because I think, regardless of her state of mind, she has already inflicted on herself the worst penalty that any parent can possibly endure. Why would anyone be obsessed with punishing her still further, unless it is out of some "infernal sadism" or some atavistic sense of archaic rite of the type we just discussed? 

Of these mothers accused of the unthinkable—of bringing on themselves their own worst pain—one can only repeat what Bertolt Brecht wrote in his poem on "the Infanticide, Marie Farrar" (Hays trans.): 

You who bear pleasantly between clean sheets

And give the name "blessed" to your womb's weight

Must not damn the weakness of the outcast,

For her sin was black but her pain was great.

Therefore, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn

For man needs help from every creature born.