Thinking About the Victims

November 16^th, 2011  Dayton Daily News

Father Who Killed his 3 Sleeping Sons is Executed

“Mental Competency Claim Denied”

“Lucasville, Ohio – A man who fatally shot his three sleeping sons in 1982, shortly after his wife had filed for divorce, was executed Tuesday with each of hands clenched in an obscene gesture…. Sister Helen Prejean, a nationally known advocate for ending the death penalty, attended a Tuesday vigil outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.”

In the “Local” section of the newspaper was this brief account of the grotesque departure of Reginald Brooks, age 66 from this world.   The short, back page article is another bleak and depressing commentary on the current state of American justice.  According to the law Brooks was supposed to die for what he had done.  But the law kept him alive for a very long time. Herein lies a massive moral and legal confusion.

Within the story are the seeds of an argument, but to what conclusion?   For one inclined toward lex talonis the conclusion is that a criminal justice system that takes almost thirty years to carry out its sentence is all system and no justice.

Consider for just a moment the Kafkaesque name of the place where Mr. Brooks resided for twenty nine years, then died: The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.  It would be enlightening no doubt, to hear the Ohio overseers of this ghastly and costly dormitory delineate the “correctional” progress of Mr. Brook during his long stay, or, for that matter of any of his colleagues awaiting a similar means of departure. Given Brooks’ goodbye posture, I think is safe to conclude that he left this correctional facility with the same…perspective, he had on the day he entered.     

For those who like Sister Prejean, conduct the vigils, carry the candles and weep for the condemned, the system itself is criminal. Death Rows are living hells designed to torture the pathetic, broken (mostly) men most of whom never had much a chance to start with in life. Executing them solves nothing and does nothing to relieve the anguish of the pain they inflicted on their way to holding cells -- killing added to killing.

The sad reality is that the death penalty as a piece of the U.S. criminal justice system serves no defensible purpose and it wreaks of disfunction.  It is very unlikely, given the completely arbitrary application and long delays in finishing it, that it deters anyone anywhere.  The families of the murdered victims like the convicted murderers twist in the wind for decades waiting for the lawyers, the courts and the psychiatrists to jump through the procedural hoops and fill out the paper work.  A sentence for a hideous crime that is carried out after a twenty-nine year delay is not an application of justice – it is a travesty, a mockery of justice.      

Should someone like Brooks have been executed?  In my view, yes.  But only after certification of mental competence?  If it takes ten, twenty or thirty years to answer this question, then I doubt that it is a question that will ever have a satisfactory answer.  Rightly or wrongly criminals have increasingly come to be regarded as subjects of medicine, patients, if you will, under the supervision of physicians as ill or impaired.  When this transition to patienthood is completed, and I believe that it will be soon, the death penalty will be gone. Doctors do not deliberately kill their patients.    

Whatever one’s view of capital punishment, however, it is deeply lamentable that an appreciation for the innocence and suffering of the victims has been lost or at least intolerably diminished. When we think of murder in this country, how depressingly common it is, how endlessly and pervasively it is featured as a theme of popular entertainment, how extremely protracted and arbitrary the legal process is for determining and exacting punishment, a perverse and ignominious social equation seems to be apparent: the victims lose their lives and the families lose their loved ones; those that take them are the recipients of vast amounts of time, attention and resources.    

The story of Mr. Brooks is a perfect case in point. There is a single mention of his “wife” whose sons he killed after she attempted to divorce him.   It is difficult to fathom the anguish and horror of her life after what he did.  Did she even survive?  The grandparents – how did they fare? From this report, we do not know. None of these human beings seem to be highly relevant to the way these things are discussed.  The story is in fact all about Brooks.  And, it has been all about Brooks since he destroyed the lives of his sons.  How much time (hours, days, months) from lawyers, social workers, mental health workers have been expended for him?  How much care and attention has he gotten?  And yet for all of it he leaves the world his three murdered children, shattered lives, giving everyone around him the finger.    Bon voyage, Mr. Brooks.