Capital Punishment:
Accepting the Unacceptable
If
you do not make mistakes and then ask for forgiveness, Allah shall replace you
by people who make mistakes, ask for forgiveness, and are forgiven.
Pain
Rusts
into beauty, too.
I
know full well that this is so:
I
had a heartbreak long ago.
Mary Carolyn Davies (1919)
She
fingered the edge of his mother’s sorrow like a tailor feeling the quality of a
rival’s well-made suit. Was it anything
like the pain she had felt...?
Susan Moody (1991)
Karla Faye Tucker was executed in
February 1998 for her role in two brutal murders. The weeks leading up to her execution were
full of media stories about Tucker’s being the first execution of a woman in
In the media coverage, Tucker was very
articulate expressing her faith as a born again christian. For this reason she
was able to draw together an unlikely crowd of supporters to her cause. The ACLU put in its standard appearance as a
critic of the death penalty for anyone.
They were joined by the usual contingent of religious liberals. But in
an interesting twist, many evangelical Christians, led by Pat Robertson (who
interviewed Tucker on The 700 Club) supported Tucker’s plea for mercy, even
though, as a group, they have traditionally been strong backers of capital
punishment.
I was attracted to the Karla Faye Tucker
affair by a radio interview with her biographer, Beverly Lowry. Actually it was Lowry’s story that I found especially compelling, because it was a
story of friendship between two people on the opposite sides of tragedy. Lowry
spoke of having lost her teenage son, Peter, to a hit and run driver, and
having to come to terms with that sudden and unexpected loss, that shocking and
disorienting loss -- that loss that leaves a dull ache upon one’s soul for all
time...that day, that event, that meeting between flesh and steel that one
shudders to imagine, and can never really accept.
And Lowry talked about accepting this
loss so that she could go on.
How is it, that we can go on in the face
of events that must be called unacceptable?
That which is undeserved. That which is inhuman -- but done by
humans. That which deprives someone of life long before
they are due to expire. That which is against all odds, but then happens. And
how do we go on knowing that these things happen... somewhere in the world...every
minute of every day?
Beverly Lowry feels that her son was
murdered just as surely as Karla Faye Tucker’s victims, who were torn apart by
a pickax while they lay in bed. It may have
been an accident that Lowry’s son was hit on the road (within view of his home)
but she is convinced that the driver who fled the scene must have known what he
or she was doing.
Peter’s life had been one of hope and
heartache all along. Inevitably his loss
caused his mother to look back upon his life and look back and look back more
than was probably healthy. And she
remembered that he was a happy and boisterous child until a point in fifth
grade, when everything began to change. She remembers the day he came home
holding his arm tenderly, telling her he had taken a fall. She remembers saying, “It’s broken” and the
look in his eyes that said, “Big duh, mom.”
She remembers what the doctor said to Peter after he had seen the
x-rays, and learned that he had fallen into a concrete ditch: “You set this
yourself, didn’t you?”
Somehow things began to change after
this. For the next several years Peter eased into trouble at school, dropping
out, petty theft, auto theft, and finally pawning a stolen gun, for which he
might have had to serve time. But he managed to get released, to complete
school. And he seemed to have had a real change of heart, when he died at age
18.
This story demands on so many levels that
its characters come to accept the unacceptable. Lowry has to come to terms with
the death of her son, even after his apparent getting back-on-track. Tucker has to accept the horrifying thing
that she has done. So do the families of
Tucker’s victims... some of whom, amazingly, became strong supporters in her
plea to escape the death penalty.
And as if it were not enough for Lowry
and for Tucker’s other supporters to accept a ruthless, mindless, drug-frenzied
predator as a friend, now they would have to accept the fact that she, too,
would soon be put to death.
///
In the years prior to Peter’s death
Lowry, a novelist, had watched the headlines of Karla Faye Tucker’s trial.
After several months of being able to think of nothing but death, without
knowing exactly why, Lowry went to visit Tucker on death row. Over the course
of several years, their stories were exchanged and the relationship
secured. And it became plain that Tucker
had indeed undergone a radical transformation. From having been on drugs more
or less constantly from age ten until she was jailed at 23, from having been a
school dropout, a teen prostitute, and the leader of a family of thugs...she
found herself alone on death row, with a mind, and a soul, still there for the
saving.
So what was it, that saved Karla, and
Beverly Lowry, from utter despair?
For both, the passage of time was
important. Tucker found the first 6
months in prison a nightmare, but then, a decisive moment came when she
realized that she would have to yield to the situation, or not. Adjust or refuse. Make a life within the terms handed down--no
matter how reduced or unpalatable the circumstances, no matter how appalling
the choices--or do not make a life.
Lowry found herself, at first, hating every
young person she saw, everyone who made it to a milestone that Peter would
not. But one day she ran into someone
who had known Peter, and managed to make a halfway upbeat comment. She knew
that something had changed inside.
Another thing that enabled these two to
cope with their tragedies was perspective. Lowry once told Karla a story of how
Peter had been treated by the Law. She
writes,
“It occurs to me all of a sudden how
nervy this is, to be telling a woman on Death Row about the horrors of jail. But
Karla gets it, and nods: go on. It is
the first requirement of successful adjustment to a severely restrictive life:
cut your losses, don’t rail against fate, don’t lose the outsider’s point of
view. Compared to what is the key to understanding.”
But if Karla Tucker has learned to keep
perspective on her relationship with the walls that surround her, so too has
Lowry. Beverly Lowry keeps on her wall,
both family-type framed photos of Karla, AND evidence photos used in Karla’s
trial: photos of one victim with holes all over him, and the other with a
pickax in her chest.
Lowry writes: “It’s important to keep
things in perspective, to hold on to the fact of just how sad a story this is; to remember why this winning, loving
girl-woman Karla Faye is where she is today.
But it could be said that the ultimate in
perspective is forgiveness. And Lowry does not claim to have come to the
point that she could forgive her son’s killer.
Karla, on the other hand, knows
forgiveness through her relationship with Christ.
Lowry accepts Tucker’s conversion as
sincere, recognizing in Karla a zeal to help people in any way she can -- by
writing letters to kids with drug problems, by keeping in touch with family
members, by knitting and crocheting things for friends of friends. She
recognizes in Karla a genuine change in attitude, a strong sense of remorse,
and yet an amazing sense of calm, and optimism.
Not that Lowry has any stomach for the
born-again rhetoric. Of her last meeting with Tucker, Lowry writes,
“Karla’s insistent use of the word “we”
continues to cause my feet to jitter.
What “we”? Pat Robertson and his
happy followers? Karla’s hard-core
religious fervor has made me uneasy from the beginning, which she knows, and,
usually, whenever it expresses itself I just back off. But she is facing an appalling prospect, and
I can’t change the subject. She’s
buzzing, in a state of high energy, intoxicated by the dream of what’s going to
happen next, “the bigger picture.”
Anyway, the appeal is obvious—-a Jesus who offers total forgiveness has
to be attractive to a condemned murderer.”
They say their final good-bye and Karla
promises to say hello to Peter in heaven. Lowry writes:
“Fourteen years later I still have dreams about him, looking for him, trying to figure out where he went. Karla thinks she knows, // and when I’m with her, in the aura of her dream, I keep hoping that some of her certainty will rub off on me.
“Is that my weakness--to exploit a woman facing the termination of her life? To use her in the hope that I can enjoy, even vicariously, something of her total conviction and maybe share her calm? She knows I’m doing it. And maybe, in her way, she has used me, too, to tell her story.
“To me, Peter seemed finally to be working hard to make himself into another, better version of himself, and then, before he was finished, he was gone. Karla, too, has worked hard to become another, better version of herself, and now, with that work virtually completed, she, too, is about to be gone.”
///
Having read Lowry’s book and articles
about Tucker, I felt a personal sense of loss when Karla was executed. It hurt
to watch Karla die, even from a distance, because I had come to know her. On
her final day, as news reports brought me up to date on the expected denial of
her legal appeal, my head said to me, “We have to be consistent. Anything less is unacceptable. Remorse does not absolve one from
punishment. We can’t treat her any
differently than we treat a big scary black man who has recently converted to
Islam.”
But my heart said something else: “I know
this person, I have read about her life and the details of her crime and her
remorse and her new life in prison which has been as productive as one could
hope for. This situation is
unacceptable.
Either way.
Perhaps to accept the unacceptable is the
first step toward forgiveness. It is not the same as forgiveness. There are
crimes, wounds, and words that I am not yet ready to forgive...perhaps some I
never will. But perhaps I can learn to
move in the right direction, if I can somehow accept the unacceptable.
Unitarian Universalists tend to see
themselves as people who can and do change the world. This may make it tougher to accept things
that we cannot change.
Here is one thing that I cannot change,
that haunts me: I saw the transformation in Karla, and I grew with her and
celebrated her new life. And what is
there to celebrate if it is not the fact that we can transform our lives???? But I cannot change the fact that Karla
killed two people, and that her own personal transformation, no matter how
profound, was not enough to absolve her.
///
A Hasidic tale tells of a Rabbi who asked
his disciples, “How do you know when night has passed and a new day has begun?”
One student answered him, “Is it when I
can look off into the hills and see whether a distant animal is a dog or a
sheep?”
No.
“Master,” attempted another, “is it when
I can look across the valley to a grove and see whether it is made up of fig
trees or peach trees?”
No.
When you can look into the face of your
brother or your sister and see the face of a human being...it is not daylight
until you can do this much.
BENEDICTION
May I have Courage to change the things I can,
Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
And Wisdom to know the difference.
May I have Patience with things that take time,
Appreciation for all that I have,
Tolerance for those with different struggles,
And Strength to get up and try again,
one day at a time.
o
Crossed Over, Beverly Lowry (1992)
o
“The
Good Bad Girl,” Beverly Lowry, in The New
Yorker (2/9/98)