Articles - From the Vicar

A few weeks ago Timothy McVeigh was executed under USA federal law for his part in the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma, a terrorist attack that killed over 150 people. Timothy McVeigh had never sought to deny his guilt and had callously described his victims as 'collateral damage' in his campaign against a federal government that he viewed with hatred. His final moments were relayed by closed circuit television to those relatives of his victims who had expressed a wish to see him die.

It is impossible to step into the shoes of those whose loved ones have been murdered. Yet even, perhaps particularly, in this most sensitive of areas Christians have a responsibility to make their voices heard. My own view is that in any society that uses the death penalty there is a risk of confusing a desire for justice with a desire for vengeance. A society whose penal system is based on justice recognises the need for punishment to have a retributive and deterrent aspect, but seeks to balance this with the equally important need to reform and rehabilitate criminals to the point where they can begin to lead useful lives. It is difficult to see how the use of the death penalty fits into such a system, although there will of course be cases in which it is not in society's interests for particular individuals to be released from penal custody. A society whose penal system is based on vengeance, on the other hand, is not especially interested in the reform or rehabilitation of the criminal. Instead it views punishment primarily as a means of assuaging victims' feelings of anger and pain through the use of penalties whose central purpose is retributive; in the case of murder that leads, logically, to the death penalty.

All of which brings me back to Timothy McVeigh. The widespread coverage that the execution received in the United Kingdom left me feeling deeply uneasy. The newspaper accounts of the details of his death by lethal injection, along with a television documentary timed to coincide with the execution, had a voyeuristic quality that had little to do with the responsible dissemination of information and served only to contaminate the readers and viewers. Atavistic instincts, in particular the desire for revenge, were fed with the red meat of the media's moral outrage: our common human dignity was diminished in due proportion. This media coverage, along with very public manner in which Timothy McVeigh's execution took place, brought us dangerously close to the mentality of the lynch mob and did nothing to alter my feelings that a desire for justice should, ultimately, be more morally persuasive for Christians than a desire for vengeance.