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Here's the story, repeating itself again and again:
Child is horribly damaged by a grownup. Child grows up to be an adult psychopath. Adult psychopath commits heinous and gruesome
murder. Anguished loved ones of murder victim call for murderer to pay with his life. Murderer is sentenced to death and is
executed. Hours after the execution, a reporter asks loved ones of victim if they feel relief or closure. Loved ones declare,
Yes, the killer deserved a worse death than he got, but his death was justice and they can now start to feel some closure
and vindication and move on with their lives. Reporter runs the quotes in a dramatic story, immediately after the execution,
about the clash between the pro-execution vigil by loved ones of the victim and the anti-execution vigil by death penalty
opponents. Reporter never again contacts or speaks with the loved ones of the victim, who disappear from public view.
Months or years pass. The loved ones find that their suffering has not eased as much as they hoped. They discover that in
fact the killing of the murderer has brought them little lasting peace. They learn, often in therapy, that the closure they
seek has more to do with their own relation to the world than with any revenge they gain against others. They eventually come
to feel that the killing of the murderer never lived up to its billing as the powerful healing act they had hoped for, and
that their long-term healing was in fact enabled by other things entirely. If a reporter were to call them now and ask, they
would tell the reporter all of this.
But the reporters do not call. They are now busy interviewing loved ones of more recent murder victims who proclaim, with
fresh and dramatically quotable grief, how they can feel the beginnings of closure, they really can, after yesterday's or
last week's execution of the murderer.
The latest version of this doubly tragic repeating episode appeared in this week's newspapers as the story of Wednesday's
Florida execution of Danny H. Rolling, who carried out a series of grisly rapes and murders of Gainesville college students,
including one in which he severed the victim's head and placed it on a shelf. In his confession, Rolling spoke of being sexually
abused by his father and spending much of his life adrift. Reporters quoted loved ones of the victims as saying they have
long awaited the justice of Rolling's death and now look forward to closure and peace following his execution.
How long will this cruel charade go on?
How long will lazy reporters continue to report spectacular murders and executions chiefly in the present tense, as breaking
news events and quotations of the moment, instead of as the true unfolding events they are, in which damage begets damage
and in which the false healing of revenge yields to deeper healing over time? How long will journalists keep feeding us the
same banal "sicko commits atrocity, grieving family applauds grim justice" story, a narrative bereft of the wisdom that countless
clinicians and long-term grief survivors can offer: that the temporary gratification of lethal payback does little to address
the true wounds inflicted by a murder? How long will most headline-motivated newspaper and TV accounts ignore the real stories
of psychopathic murders -- stories of psyches laid to waste by childhood trauma or by physiology -- and the real stories of
grieving families -- people whose grief often evolves as they learn what revenge can and cannot bring?
How long will this thought-free reporting, and the public ignorance it nurtures about the true nature of psychopathic murder
and of healing, continue to incubate the self-defeating rage of successive new crops of revenge-hungry families whose venomous
grief can be harvested for a few days' or weeks' worth of news drama? Not that reporters are the only guilty parties here.
How about the politicians who milk the "death penalty is a deterrent to murder" myth, in the face of long-standing clinical
evidence to the contrary, for the sake of political capital? How about the pastors who preach the wickedly destructive gospel
of retributive murder from the pulpit?
And how about those grieving families themselves who channel their immense grief into a desire to repeat the fundamental abomination
that caused their pain: murder? After all, not all agonized families of murder victims choose to follow this bitter and vengeful
course. Many make much deeper, and universal, expressions of grief. To be sure, it is hard to blame some grief-crazed loved
ones for morally sagging under the pressure. And yet, are they not responsible, too, for the manner in which they hold their
hearts at such times? Is it not in our deepest crises -- the times when we are most vulnerable to acting out wickedly -- that
who we choose to be matters most? And if we, as more or less intact adults who have the good fortune to have not been horribly
damaged early in life, choose reciprocal murder as our moral answer to such crimes, what does that say about us?
I remember a newspaper photograph of a relative of a murder victim who held a vigil outside the prison during the murderer's
execution. At the moment of the murderer's death, the relative pumped his fist in the air in satisfaction. For me, that photo
said it all: One monster -- a self-made one -- celebrating the death of another.
© 2007 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 10/27/06)
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