« The coming Democratic meltdown | Main | Day By Day »
May 04, 2006
They should have killed him
So says Peggy Noonan about the jury that lost its nerve. I share her ambivalence when it comes to the State taking a man's life, but I also share her belief that if there was ever a man deserving of a date with the hangman, it was Moussaoui.
Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.
Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.
[...]
How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.
It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.
No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.
This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.
He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.
He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.
This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.
As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.
Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.
[...]
I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear. I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.
If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?
And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?
As with so much in this clash of cultures, what many Americans perceive as the triumph of the U.S. legal system and proof of our dedication to justice and mercy will be seen by our enemies as merely weakness, proof of the West's decadence.
Noonan ends by stating her hope that this ambulatory sack of offal will not have the rest of his life to preach jihad to other prisoners, to gain more killer converts to the cause.
She's not hopeful, and neither am I.
Allah Pundit had a scathing roundup of reaction to the verdict, punctuated by his scornful refrain, "But at least we didn't make him a martyr."
Posted by Mike Lief at May 4, 2006 12:42 AM
| TrackBack