The Dearly Departed

It's easy to get romantic about our life experiences, to look at things through from a sort of rose coloured nostalgic perspective. Throughout our lives we no doubt have a wealth of memorable moments, but there are of course many that we won't have a chance to experience. What is life if not a string of moments, one after another. Living life is about having experiences, the good along with the bad.

I visited three men on Death Row yesterday at Angola prison but that's not where my story begins.

When I arrived home late from work on Thursday night I found all of my neighbours gathered in the courtyard having dinner. They told me that they planned to watch "Dead Man Walking" that night, a movie that is arguably the most renowned cinematic representation of "southern hospitality". So many times I've walked in to Blockbuster with every intention of renting the movie, only to be distracted by "Blades of Glory" as a new release, or some other Hollywood flick which promises a much more upbeat evening. What are the chances that the day before my journey out to Angola a group of people I live with will decide to watch that very movie, a total coincidence. I had to get up at 6am Friday morning but I decided to make a date with destiny and just watch it.

For obvious reasons I can't write about the names or the details of the conversations that I had with those three men, but I will write about the effect that it had on me. Angola sits on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana and is one of the biggest state prisons in America. It's not what you'd expect if you just arrived there out of the blue. It's a giant chunk of land with farms and animals on one side, and on the other concrete buildings, high fences and row upon row of razor wire. It takes nearly 1o minutes to drive from one end of the prison to the row, which sits right at the end of the facility.

The rooms in which you sit are a little bigger than a telephone booth. Thick plate glass separates you from them and a phone exists as your link of communication. When you first enter the room you're alone for awhile as the guards retrieve the man from his quarters. The glass is so dense you can see your reflection in it as you wait. Your own image sits, staring back at you, perfectly in line with the empty chair on the other side. At this moment I was hit with the most overwhelming feeling of isolation. How easily I could be sitting in that chair on the other side. How incomprehensible it is that an inch of glass can distinguish the living from those condemned to die. The feeling of helplessness is difficult to deal with when it's just sympathetic, and so it is impossible to imagine how it must feel when it is the cold reality you wake up to every morning.

This is a life experience I hope to never have to live through, but it is certainly one that I can't help but wish I could understand. A strange respect and deference grows from this sort of inability to comprehend. They must be incredibly brave to keep pushing forward every day when others are working hard to kill them. It's so easy to admire someone for what they have endured in their life. The stress and anxiety that is created when you live everyday with the thought that there are people who hate you and want to kill you is something we appreciate in our ANZACS, both dead and living. We revere them for sacrificing their peace and safety for turmoil and violence. We vow every year, lest we forget, that their sacrifices were not in vain nor will they ever go unappreciated. Our Diggers are respected for what they accomplished, but more importantly, they are considered heroes for what they endured.

There is a fine line between respecting peoples sacrifices, and glorifying warfare. The same goes for these men on the row, after all they are men who endure the threat and fear of death every moment of their lives. Are they heroes too? It's easy to get romantic, to get carried away with the injustice of it all and to treat them like heroes. They aren't heroes, nor are they martyrs. It's unhelpful to take the bleeding heart approach and treat them like helpless victims, and god forbid pity them. I hate that word, pity.

It's easy to justify why I would fight for the life of someone on Death Row, but it's hard to stop yourself from putting them up on a pedestal. It's hard to fight for the rights of people who did not respect the rights of others. It's hard to believe that the person sitting across from you murdered someone. It's even harder to believe that someone intends to murder them in the future. I didn't look up the crimes committed by the men I visited because I didn't feel like it should matter. I wanted to treat them with the respect and dignity I'd give anyone else. Their punishment lies in the arresting of their liberties, not in being treated like something less than human. At the same time I have to always remember how important it is that these people be held responsible for their actions. It's difficult to give your heart and mind to a cause which demands that you curb your compassion at the same time.

In "Dead Man Walking", Helen Prejean, a nun living in New Orleans, battles against the values and expectations of those around her. Matthew Poncelet is a man convicted of double murder and sentenced to death, but still professing his innocence. The movie depicted the struggle of her urge to save the mans life with the fact that he was entirely unrepentant. It's hard not to feel a great deal of sympathy for a man who says with great conviction that he is innocent. The movie tricks you into believing fully in Poncelet's innocence by showing the moment of the crime in a flashback, with another man committing the murder. But the message in the film isn't that the Death Penalty is horrible because it could possibly execute an innocent person, that doesn't go nearly far enough. Moments before his execution he admits to the murder and it's as if the director has pulled the supports out from under you. The movie is no longer about innocence or guilt, but life or death. The viewer is forced to watch the execution of a guilty man, but a man nevertheless. The scene of his execution is cut intermittently with the true version of events during the crime, which confirm that he did indeed commit the murder. The message seems, at least to me, to be that no man deserves to die, but that such compassion or sympathy should never forget or forgive the crimes that they committed.

The experience of meeting those men on Death Row was incredibly challenging and confronting and something I would struggle to forget. They spoke about their experiences with the sort careful consideration that we so rarely afford ourselves in our modern, hectic lives. I'll finish this post off with the words of one of the guys I spoke with. It's not the last time I'll speak to them, and it's certainly not the last time I'll walk away from that prison feeling absolutely humbled.

Quote of the day:

"We're not monsters. We're just people, people who have made really stupid choices but people nevertheless. No-one can take that away from us."

Values At Any Price

That title doesn't really make sense, but who really cares?

I'm now officially travelling to America for 3 months to do an Internship. I'll be doing a placement as a volunteer with the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans, leaving on 27 November '07. I always thought New Orleans was the capital of Louisiana but I was surprised to find out that it's a city called Baton Rouge. The capital is more industrial and less populated than the Home of Jazz though! I think the center I am working in is on the border of the French Quarter which was saved from Hurricane Katrina because it rests on an elevated part of the land.

I applied for the Internship early this year and went through a huge application process of forms and interviews etc. My final interview was with Richard Bourke and if you remember he was the member from Reprieve who held the lecture on the death penalty at Melbourne University which first got me to really engage with the issue. Richard is quite famous amongst the interns for being able to systematically break you down during the interview process and challenge every reason you have for opposing the death penalty. I haven't met anyone who said their interview with him was a cake walk. Well, he did exactly that to me and I actually came away from the experience quite humbled.

The point he was trying to emphasise to me during the whole interview was that the only thing that separates me from anyone else who supports the death penalty are my values. I'm not answering to some higher moral calling that other people are to simple or too barbaric to understand. Now, that's not to say that I can't believe that the death penalty makes its constituents more brutal and unfeeling, but its an understanding that it does not necessarily make them bad people. And this is something that I realised I had never really considered. By acknowledging that the only difference between myself and a supporter of the death penalty are our values, not some inherent goodness or badness within us as human beings. If I had been born in Houston Texas to a typical family then it is more than likely that I would have been an avid supporter of the death penalty because that is the status quo I have been brought up in.

That sort of understanding and humility when dealing with your own values on any subject is actually something that is incredibly important. You can't win an argument with someone if you treat their standpoint as barbaric and inhuman, and you certainly won't convert them to your opinion. But if you can come to understand that it is something as simple as your values that separates you and that you might just have easily carried their values then you can approach the issue with the sort of humility that you need in a conflict of opinion.

Not only that, but it is also central to the issue of capital punishment and revenge. The systematic demonisation of people on death row is not uncommon at all. By dehumanising the condemned we are able to very simply classify them as unfit to live. Much like Camus' Outsider, if someone flaunts society's most basic standards and mores then they become a "heart that is so empty it threatens to engulf society." And this is where the basic concept of understanding comes into play. Sentencing someone to death shows an inability or unwillingness to understand what drives the person to do what they do, which would in turn require you to acknowledge them as a human. To acknowledge that, however, requires humility because it is in an uncomfortable thought to so closely associate yourself with someone that does not carry your same standards or values. Humility is the ability to admit that you have no right to say whether that persons actions have forfeited their right to life, or that you are any more of a human being than they.

A good example of this can be found in one of the greatest atrocities in human history, the Jewish genocide. Hitler and Himmler were not the men in the field murdering millions of Jews, they simply imparted their views and values on the men and women who would listen. And they did listen, because Hitler was an incredibly captivating and zealous speaker who could rouse crowds of thousands into a frenzy of passion. One of my school teachers was at a Nuremburg Rally and he was so overcome by the mass of people screaming "Zeig Heil" that he couldn't help but do the same through a stream of tears. So the question is, are the police and soldiers who instituted Hitler's Final Solution to the Jewish Question normal human beings? Consider this passage from Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitlers Willing Executioners" that describes the massacre of Jozefow where the victims were taken from the city to the outlying woods and executed one by one to prevent a panic amongst the masses who waited in the town center.

“The walk into the woods afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection. Walking side by side with his victim, he was able to imbue the human form beside him with the projections of his mind. Some of the Germans, of course, had children walking beside them… Did he see a little frail girl, and ask himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being… After the walk… the Germans had to raise his gun to the back of the head, now face down on the ground, that had bobbed along beside him, pull the trigger, and watch… the little girl, twitch and then move no more.”

To understand what could drive human beings to such lengths is a question that is both difficult to tackle and impossible to comprehend fully. Some people would suggest that the soldiers were systematically brutalised to a point that they were inhuman, but I would counter that brutalisation is an incredibly human response to an excess of violence. Much like our ears are able to adapt to frequent loud noises, or our nose is able to stop receiving certain scents, so to is the brain able to adapt to brutality. What could possibly be more human that such a response? If I was a normal German 22 year old in 1942 I have very little doubt that I could have been in a similar position. Most people would like to think they would never be capable of mass murder and given our upbringing and values it is likely we would be incapable. But change the context in which we live and you change our values and thus we are capable of completely different actions.

If you can understand that you are not dissimilar to those that carry different values to yourself then you are far more able to comprehend what drove them to do whatever they did and the beliefs that they held at the time. A quite famous historian, Browning, once said that "Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving". By acknowledging the human elements of any action or belief, rather than labelling it as inhuman, we are able to explain and understand the why and the how, and so we are better able to deal with it in the future. Perhaps if we had acknowledged that normal human beings are capable of genocide the International community would have been quicker to acknowledge it in Rwanda.

So, my hope is that by understanding that what separates me from a supporter of the death penalty in Louisiana is actually very little, I can perhaps present an alternative set of values and put them into practice in a way that will benefit my cause.


Quote of the day:

"We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force."

-Ernesto "Che" Guevara