EDITORIAL Tucker death exposes system without mercy
Saudi Arabia is among the handful of nations that continues to
inflict capital punishment. Beheading is the favored technique. However, in
accordance with Islamic law, mercy is built into the system. The executioner,
sword raised, can be stopped even at the last moment: A word of mercy from a
family member of a victim, and the killing is halted.
By contrast, Karla Faye Tuckers execution earlier this month
in Texas revealed a merciless justice system. Mercy exists on paper all right,
but politics and the current mood of the country leave no room for it. That was
perhaps the most chilling aspect to the latest U.S. execution.
Gov. George W. Bush could have extended a reprieve up to the last
minute. Tucker had begged him to spare her life. All involved recognized she
was not the same drug-driven woman who had brutally pickaxed to death two
innocents 14 years earlier. No, Tucker had reformed, found Jesus in prison and,
by all accounts, was a model inmate, making contributions to the lives of other
inmates in prison.
Her plea for mercy had gone before the Texas Board of Pardons and
Paroles, a board that had never reprieved a single person -- and reportedly a
board that often did not meet when faced with a mercy request.
This woman was a menace to no one. Yet no one was arguing that she
be freed. Only that her life be spared.
Increasingly, we need the rest of the human family, those outside
our nation, to help us see and understand ourselves, to help tell us who we are
becoming as a nation, as a people.
The capital punishment debate has laid bare the injustice and
capriciousness of it all. The arguments have been made on these pages time and
again. The meaning of Tuckers execution had more to do with the absence
of mercy than the pursuit of justice. For if ever mercy were called for, it was
called for in this case. If Tucker could gain no mercy, then mercy is not a
part of the system. And absent mercy, the system is without humanity. If so,
woe to us all.
Tucker admitted her crime. She had asked for forgiveness. Shortly
before her death, she wrote Bush and the Texas parole board: It obviously
was a very, very horrible [crime] and I do take full responsibility for what
happened the night of June 13, 1983. ... I also know that justice and law
demand my life for the two innocent lives I brutally murdered that night. ...
My change, my transformation and rehabilitation was never meant to manipulate
anything or anyone. ... Allow me, through this change, to help others make
better choices and to change for the better also. I am truly sorry for what I
did. I will never harm another person again in my life, not even trying to
protect myself. I pray God will help you believe all that I have shared and
will help you decide to commute my sentence to life in prison.
It was not to be.
Not unexpectedly, many in the international community joined with
many U.S. citizens begging for mercy. Tuckers case received considerable
attention worldwide because, for one thing, she was a woman, the first set to
be executed in Texas since the Civil War, and for another, she had found
religion and friends in the born-again community and, furthermore, because by
every account the spunky and smiling Tucker had clearly reformed her life. She
provided a human face in an otherwise inhuman execution system.
The U.N. human rights commissioner, the president of Italy, the
European Parliament and Pope John Paul II were among the many who also pleaded
for mercy.
Following the execution, French Finance Minister Dominique
Strauss-Kahn started off a live radio interview by speaking out against it:
Yesterday evening, I hoped, like many others, that this great country
America, a country of liberty, would change. I have to say Im very
shocked that, in this day and age, highly developed and cultured countries can
continue to impose the death penalty.
The Spanish broadsheet El País condemned the
execution as a contemptible penalty. The Spanish newspaper El
Mundo suggested that Texas Gov. Bush, a Republican hopeful for the
presidential election in 2000, was forced to reject Tuckers appeal to
keep his presidential chances alive.
If Bush had shown clemency, going in the face of the Court
of Appeals, it would have forever remained on his [resumé] as an act of
faintheartedness, inappropriate for an aspiring presidential candidate,
El Mundo said in an editorial.
If correct, it speaks a frightening truth that goes well beyond
Bush and Texas. It says something quite unsettling about the nature of our
nation, about all of us.
National Catholic Reporter, February 20,
1998
|