Somewhere in the bowels of this building is a man who knows the very hour of his own terminus, and who has known it for a while. This is a country rather short on irony and long on euphemism, so here I am in Potosi, Missouri, in a brightly lit barracks in the Ozark Mountains, to keep a bureaucratic appointment with death. In keeping a man uncertain of the time of his own death, the Japanese are bizarrely and ironically preserving his status as a human being-ignorant of the biggest date he's ever scheduled to make. Constitution could only prohibit them with a shudder as "cruel and unusual." The guillotine, a symbol of horror to Albert Camus, was originally installed by the French Republic as a swift and tender alternative to the wheel and the fire. Some methods of punishment were so ghastly and so elaborate that even the clearly worded U.S. Dostoyevsky wrote that if, in the last moment before a man's execution, he were given the alternative of passing the rest of his life on the summit of a bare rock he would choose the rock with gratitude. But, like other similar barbarities, it may have its origin in a vague humanitarianism. This policy strikes many people as barbarous, which it most certainly is. 'We know of 73 documented cases where innocent people were found on death row and released.' A cell door opens all of a sudden, and a group of strangers is standing there. If you are the leading actor in this little drama, your cue comes without warning. They don't notify either the family or the condemned of the time or the date. And in the diminishing group of countries which claims, with the United States, the right of life and death over the citizen, the Japanese practice a peculiar protocol. Russia, which is applying to join the Council of Europe, has pledged the abolition of capital punishment. The very first act of the Constitutional Court of liberated South Africa was to abolish the penalty of death. In order to be a fully signatory nation of the Council of Europe, for example, you have to show that you have wiped it from your book of statutes. Most "advanced" countries in the world have abolished capital punishment. Two classes of people are exempt from this rule: those who plan their own deaths, and those who are sentenced to be "put to death." Nothing is more predictable and more certain than death, and nothing is less predictable and less certain. "Wherever you happen to be," "Somewhere among the clouds above." Our whole existence as a species is made unique by our absolute foreknowledge of death combined with our complete ignorance of its timing. The two verses share an ineluctable element of the random and the uncertain. Kingsley Amis, a man of a deep, awed respect for the Grim Reaper, once wrote:ĭeath has got something to be said for it: There's no need to get out of bed for it Wherever you may be, They bring it to you, free!Īnd, passing from the absurd to the near sublime, Yeats wrote of an Irish airman who "foresaw" his own death: "I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above." You may laugh at death all you like, but only on the recognized condition that you allow death the concluding cackle. Second, he asked for a last cigarette and was refused it by the prison authorities. so that the event was more within the manageable compass of business and working hours. I've been spending a fair amount of time in and around death row in the past few years, and two aspects of White's terminal experience caught my attention. As a celebrated double murderer, he attracted few mourners and only a thinly attended vigil of death-penalty opponents. Last May 22, Larry Wayne White was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas.
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