SUPPOSE A certain old man has, for the past half century, made a career of fighting for justice, taking up causes before they were popular and becoming a well-known hero.
Now suppose that, torn by the contradiction between his public image and his self-image, he comes forward with a confession: At the age of 22, he killed another man for coming on to his girlfriend, and it was the shock of guilt that followed that drove him to dedicate his life to justice. He is now 75. Do we put this good man in prison -- or do we let this murderer go free?
The case sounds extraordinary, and it is. But it is not quite as extraordinary as it seems.
Life imprisonment, if we are serious about eliminating parole and all other forms of early release, means punishing old men and women for the crimes of their youth or middle age -- punishing them no matter how they have lived in the interim -- punishing them anew every day, denying them liberty, cutting off their potential, exposing them to we know not what. To sentence a man to it is to tell him to abandon his hopes and forget his dreams: He will never again achieve anything beyond the prison walls.
There is no compassion in this, and rarely is there justice.
As his punishment proceeds, special pains will be added, some predictable, others not. He may be beaten or raped, and he may have no way to protect himself or avoid his abusers. Perhaps his father will die, and he will be kept to his prison routine, denied the chance to grieve with his family at the funeral. Perhaps he will learn his daughter has been raped, and he will be unable to support her or to help her seek justice. Even days that would normally have been joyous -- days when his loved ones reach great milestones in their lives, holidays, his own birthdays -- will add to his grief as he marks them in prison instead of celebrating them with those he loves.
If all this becomes so oppressive that he would prefer death, the state may try as hard to deny him that escape as any other. With constant surveillance and skilled prison doctors, it may prolong his suffering far beyond the time he has any reason to love life.
And if, reflecting on his crime and, perhaps, on his punishment as well, he becomes a better person, if he becomes virtually a new person, with a character vastly different from that which he had when he committed the crime, he will continue to be punished. He may no longer be an evil person, but he will be treated as if that is all he is or ever could be.
If you had to look him in the eye each morning and sentence him to another day in prison, knowing what he had been through in the days and years of his imprisonment thus far, knowing what would be taken from him by the day to come, knowing whether and how he had changed, could you do it, morning after morning, for the rest of his life and yours, no matter what happened, and count yourself a minister of justice? Or would you have to admit, eventually, that he had paid all the penalty anyone had a right to demand, and that justice was now on his side?
A murderer may have committed his crime in the span of five minutes. He never locked his victim in a cage, never had it in his power to keep his victim under his control for decades. Until the last moment, his victim may have had the chance to fight or flee, and had he gotten away, the killer would not have been able to set the police after him. The victim may have been terrified, but for seconds, minutes, maybe even hours, not years.
By definition, punishment is something it is undesirable to experience. And while I think life imprisonment is worse than death, and therefore an unjustly harsh sentence for murder, I would need to say much more than I have said here to support that conclusion. But in the debate over the death penalty, life imprisonment is often taken as a benign alternative. It is not.
Alexander R. Cohen's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at acohen@cavalierdaily.com.
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