Sunday December 05, 2004

And Feelings For All

Slate’s ever-keen Dahlia Lithwick gets it right when it comes to the emotional bloodletting that has infected the administration of the death penalty in the U.S.:

The notion that there is a place in the chilly, linear life of the law for this sort of sentimentality—the unrestrained id of emotion untethered from logic—is beyond strange. The idea that in order to decide whether a criminal deserves the “ultimate punishment” a jury must abandon reason and clarity for emotion and intuition inverts everything the law otherwise represents. When else do we contend, as a society, that people exercise fantastic judgment at that moment when they are sobbing and gasping for breath?

As an activist friend of mine observed on the eve of Tennessee’s first execution in 40 years: “The justice system is designed to produce justice. It is not designed to produce a feeling.”