It’s hard to fathom what satisfaction the bereaved from the Boston marathon bombing will feel if and when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is put to death.
Last week a Massachusetts jury sentenced him to die. He’s now 21, but at the unimaginably young age of 19 he went on a rampage with his older and domineering brother Tamarlan, planting a crude and deadly home made bomb at the marathon finishing line.
Once identified, the two Chechen émigrés went on the run, terrorising Boston and killing a police officer before Tamarlan fell in a hail of bullets. His young brother was found cowering in a boat, land moored in a suburban backyard. The final body count was three with another 260 injured - some of them maimed for life.
It was a terrifying 24 hours which, much like the infamous OJ Simpson chase and trial, mesmerised the world as the ordeal – from the marathon finishing line to the arrest of the younger Tsarnaev – played out on social media and television. Tsarnaev’s trial was always going to be an emotional spectacle where the death penalty was all but certain; the panacea for grief.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will likely spend the next 20 years doing what death row inmates do. Appeal after appeal will be mounted and, most likely, lost. His death sentence will be slow and agonising, punctured only by the prospect of waking another day to avoid the preferred method of state sanctioned killing in those US states where it is practiced – the lethal injection.
Justice is only the first part of the pact death penalty states have with their subjects. Tsarnaev’s lawyer opened the defence declaring, “It was him”. Only his mother is convinced it wasn’t. His lawyer hammered the defence that the younger brother was under the influence of his older sibling, that despite being seemingly completely integrated in to American society, he fell to Tamerlan’s radicalisation. The Chechen family immigrated with the same high hopes as most émigré’s. But hopes were dashed, poverty set in, and radical Islam took hold.
The other part of the pact is whether the justice the state decides upon really delivers what it purports to - closure, an over-used, meaningless word usually applied in situations of grief and fear. What’s unclear is how killing the perpetrator will make the lives of those bereaved or maimed any easier. What could deliver closure when you have lost a child in such unimaginably awful circumstances or when you watch your children wake each morning to fit prosthetic legs to their bodies?
Boston is still traumatised and very divided. Though even the parents of one of the three who died asked that the death penalty not be imposed, others who were injured at the finish line that terrible day want an eye for an eye, accepting that killing Tsarnaev will be as brutal an act as the misguided young Chechen inflicted upon them. Some fear putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death will make him a martyr. Others simply can’t stomach the prospect of genteel Massachusetts carrying out a state sanctioned murder. The divide is reflected nationwide too.
The Boston Globe recently conducted a poll that showed only 15 per cent of the city’s residents wanted Tsarnaev executed. A nation wide poll conducted by CBS showed far more Americans outside of Massachusetts wanted the young man dead rather than alive in a supermax prison.
For them, the pay off is the holy trinity of uncivilisation – vengeance, deterrence and the spectre of strong state authority willing to kill.
If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s victims examined each of these aims, its doubtful they’ll have found much solace. Vengeance is an ugly human characteristic, little respected and wholly unsatisfying. Killing criminals doesn’t deter others from committing crime as history has proven. And knowing the state has the power to kill should make all of them – and us – feel rattled to our core that death can be imposed at the will of one person or a jury. We should feel as rattled as we were when Indonesia put Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan to death just three weeks ago.
Australia opposes the death penalty and fought hard to keep Sukumaran and Chan alive, to live out the rest of their days in prison in Indonesia for drug trafficking. It is of course one thing to proclaim, as Prime Minister Tony Abbott did when Jakarta ordered Sukumaran and Chan to be killed by firing squads, “we respect the legal systems of other countries”. It’s quite another to take meaningful action to persuade death penalty nations, even those who share so many of the same values as Australia, that if their legal systems embrace the barbarism of an eye for an eye, we have far less in common than we thought – and there could be a price to pay for that.
Monica Attard is a Sydney based freelance journalist and former ABC foreign correspondent and senior broadcaster.
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