His Crime, And Ours: Against The Death Penalty For Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

A streetside memorial to the victims of the Boston bombing.

HonorSociety.org just published my newest article on their blog roll. You can read the full text below, or access the original article here. This time, I wrote about the recent sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Naturally, I took issue with the sentencing, as guilty as Tsarnaev may be. Towards the end, I contrast the way people responded to the three deaths Tsarnaev was responsible with the some 150 deaths caused by Chris Kyle in Iraq. If I were still writing the piece, I might have noted the similarities not only in this regard but also in the way both Tsarnaev and Kyle perceived themselves. Kyle thought he was waging a life-and-death struggle that would determine whether America was saved from hordes of marauding jihadists by taking part in an invasion of a country that never attacked the U.S., while Tsarnaev imagined himself and his brother to be the ones who would avenge the death of hundreds of  thousands of Muslims killed in America's wars by blowing athletes and bystanders at a sports event to smithereens. As countless others have said, in the War on Terror, messianic delusions abound on both sides, and in very few places is this as apparent as in the cases of the American Sniper and the Boston Bomber.

                                    His Crime, And Ours: Against The Death Penalty For Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Two years since improvised explosive devices killed three and wounded hundreds more at the Boston Marathon, the U.S. District Court for the District Of Massachusetts has sentenced 21-year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving perpetrator of the bombing, to death by lethal injection. Considering the way thousands across the nation intently followed on Twitter and television the massive manhunt launched by various law enforcement agencies after the bombs first went off, it was only natural that just as many would take to the Internet or media to announce their take on the verdict. Conservative Internet personality and once-in-a-blue-moon funny guy Steven Crowder took to Twitter to declare "If you don't think Tsarnaev deserves death, you're a pansy and beyond all hope," while Greg Gutfeld, host of Red Eye on Fox News and a generally-more funny guy, said "eat it, fans of #tsarnaev" and left it at that. However, it wasn't just conservatives howling for the bomber's blood. Recently-confirmed Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated that "the ultimate penalty is a fitting punishment for this horrific crime," a somewhat shocking statement from someone demonized/praised by Republicans/liberals as ultra-progressive, although perhaps no more shocking than the fact that her predecessor, the allegedly-equally-ultra-progressive Eric Holder, pushed for the death penalty in the first place. Leave it to death to create that sense of bipartisanship that we as a country so desperately need. Maybe John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi could put aside their differences and watch the execution together, live blogging it all the while for their loyal constituents. What a major achievement that would be for the American political system. All that being said, regardless of how popular across the political spectrum killing convicted criminals is, is it as "fitting" a punishment as Attorney General Lynch would have us believe? I would argue not.

Now, let's put aside the obscenely-high rate at which people who are sentenced to death are exonerated (in all too many cases, posthumously) and the well-documented fact that capital punishment has no discernible, much less negative, effect on crime rates. Tsarnaev is indisputably guilty of all thirty charges, including the murders of 8-year old Martin Richard and two others and usage of a weapon of mass destruction. Even his attorney, Judy Clarke, did not dispute these facts, which is why Tsarnaev's defense focused on why he was driven to such acts, not whether he committed them or not. "I'm not asking you to excuse him. There are no excuses. I'm not asking you for sympathy," she told the jury, and with good reason. There are no excuses for Tsarnaev's crimes, and he deserves no sympathy either. But by condemning him to death via lethal injection, are we as a society also not committing a crime that would turn a murderer into a victim, and thus, ironically, someone who deserves sympathy? In other words, is it possible, contrary to what Peter Falk says in an episode of The Twilight Zone, to murder a murderer?

As it turns out, many share or are otherwise amenable with this sentiment, with a significant number of them surprisingly being in Boston. According to Yahoo News, "a WBUR poll of Boston residents found that 62 percent of them favored a life sentence for Tsarnaev," a surprising number considering that Boston residents were the primary victims of Tsarnaev's and his brother's acts. No less surprising is the opposition of none other than the late Richard Martin's parents to the death penalty for him. If anyone could be said to deserve the satisfaction of knowing Tsarnaev met an untimely demise, it would be them. Yet they, direct relatives of a child murdered in cold blood by him, have no stomach for it. With this in mind, one can only speculate what sort of person would. 

Of course, it is not fair to cast aspersions on those who support capital punishment. Rather, we should return to the question of whether executing Tsarnaev is an equitable punishment or at least an effective deterrent to similar crimes. In this writer's humble opinion, it is neither. Pumping Tsarnaev full of deadly chemicals, well perhaps cathartic for some, won't bring any of his victims, the people most directly impacted by his actions, back. Nor is it clear that honoring those who had their lives taken by taking the life of the one who took said lives in the first place can be said to be honorable at all. As the saying goes, an eye for an eye makes the world blind. A cliche, yes, but a very insightful one at that. Then there is the matter of whether terrorists in general and Islamic extremists in particular, many of whom believe that Paradise awaits them after they die or otherwise are willing to die for the cause they are fighting for, will be deterred from committing their misdeeds by the threat of state-sanctioned killing. In fact, many might see it as a chance to become a martyr as well as a short-cut to a celestial reward, leading many to jump at this perceived opportunity. If any one doubts this, one only has to look at the thousands of fighters pouring into Syria and Iraq, encouraged by ISIS and other terrorist groups to join them in the chance that they will earn martyrdom at the hands of Syrian strongman Bashar Al-Assad and the combined airpower of the U.S. and it's allies.

Then there is the question of how people regarded Tsarnaev's acts compared to how they regarded similar acts committed by others. Having killed three and wounded over 200 others, Tsarnaev was rightfully subjected to opprobrium by Americans. Yet just a few months before his sentence was pronounced, many of these same Americans were in thrall to the wartime-turned-celluloid exploits of Chris Kyle, a U.S. Navy sniper who killed over 150 people while on duty in Iraq and, per his own admission, never batted an eye. When writing about whether he was concerned about the possibility that at the very least one of the people he shot didn't deserve to die, Kyle proclaimed, "Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad. When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them." The late Chris Kyle wasn't concerned with whether the people he killed were actually threats to the United States or himself; he was staunchly convinced of the threat posed by every single one of them, and reveled in their destruction right up until that fateful trip to the shooting range. In contradistinction, Tsarnaev, widely portrayed and perceived as an amoral extremist indifferent to the mayhem and bloodshed he wreaked, confessed to regretting his acts, at least if Catholic nun and final witness Sister Helen Prejean is to be believed. "He said it emphatically. He said, 'No one deserves to suffer like they did'," she relayed to the court. How strange that a man who killed over a hundred people without regard for their innocence is venerated as a hero in word and film while a man who killed three and subsequently recognized the wrong he did, revealing his potential for redemption, is condemned to a fatal fate. 

Let me be clear: Tsarnaev's guilt is beyond doubt. The offenses he committed are of the gravest nature and punishment is due. Perhaps that means life in prison, as some have suggested, perhaps it means something else, but it should not be death. As former Attorney General and peace activist Ramsey Clark once mused, there is a Latin saying that translates as, "I'm a man - nothing human is alien to me." Tsarnaev, far from being an implacable demon, is a human just like us. A wicked one, yes, but a human nevertheless. As we much as we be tempted to send him to the gas chamber, we must stop and ponder why we're so tempted to do so. Maybe then, we will recognize the impulse in all of us that made it possible for him to plant those bombs on that tragic day.