The Firing Squad Gives the Man His Due

Michael Brendan Dougherty, in “The Pope’s Death Penalty Stance Is Unconvincing” (National Review), has done the Church a service by refusing to receive a novelty as though it were a doctrine. He puts the case plainly. For most of Catholic history the death penalty was not an embarrassment but a requirement of justice, “giving a man what is his due”—the definition Thomas Aquinas took from the ancients. The modern revision, with its suddenly invented criterion of “inadmissibility,” rests on a social-scientific claim about prison conditions, not on revelation, and it dissolves under its own questions. If the penalty is wrong because the prisoner might be redeemed, why has the Church never taught that a repentant prisoner must therefore be spared? If it is wrong because detention is reliable, what do we say of the men who keep killing from inside the walls? Dougherty asks the right question: at what point did the Vicar of Christ acquire the competence to announce that circumstances have abolished the geometric exactness of justice? His answer—that they have not—is the only answer that preserves justice as something other than the mood of the age. And on the case at hand he is right: Nidal Hasan’s guilt clears any standard stronger than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The state is not forbidden to act because the condemned man remains an object of God’s possible mercy. The magistrate is appointed to restore the common good. The magistrate may do it.

While the Pope’s post moved through the networks, the United States prepared to carry out what the court had already declared. The condemned man took his place in the execution chamber. He was seated. The harness held him upright. The riflemen, federal employees, uniformed, under an officer’s command, took their positions across the room. The officer gave the order. The riflemen fired.

The volley struck him in the chest. The rounds tore skin, muscle, and bone, opened the thoracic cavity, and collapsed the lungs beneath the shattered ribs. Blood ran from the entry wounds and pooled in the harness that held him upright. He did not rise; the body has no standing left when the great vessels have been opened and the heart can no longer fill itself. The medics, trained and ordered and present, did not interfere. The faculty of breathing stopped when the blood filled the pleural spaces and the trachea. The body sagged, then settled into the mechanics of death: the limbs loosened, the face fixed, the posture was finished. At the end the only sounds were the echo of the volley and the steady drip of blood into the basin beneath the chair. The body was removed, wrapped, weighed, and taken to an institution’s refrigerated drawer—as all bodies are when the sentence has been completed.

Thirteen soldiers did not reach their forties because of what this man did. Thirty-two others carry the metal and the memory. The execution was not a reenactment. It was an ending. The state did not make a spectacle of despair; it made an accounting. The man who had declared himself outside the order by shooting soldiers where soldiers serve was delivered to the order’s verdict in the only language the order’s final word speaks. The heart that had pumped while his victims died was stilled. The eyes that had looked at bodies were fixed.

Hasan is not a case for mercy, because mercy presupposes a man still inside the household of the covenant, and he abolished his own place in it when he chose his side. The soldiers he killed were the state’s servants, and the state is the minister of God for the punishment of evildoers; to shoot them is to shoot at the order itself. By his own act he made himself an enemy in the biblical sense—the man outside, the reprobate whose deeds are his sign. What happened to his body is not a tragedy and is not a cost. It is the revealed verdict, the visible proof that a man may stand before the household of the covenant and receive exactly what his standing merits. The firing squad did not deprive him of redemption; no created power can do that. It did what the order does to a man who has made himself foreign to it: it removed him from the household, where he no longer had a place. The Church in her weakness may now speak of inadmissibility; the state, in her strength, still knows how to read a debtor’s ledger. The account is paid. The wall is high. He is on the far side of it, where he put himself, and he will not be fetched back.