Zacarias Moussaoui will be having a lot of free time on his hands, as a jury handed down a recommendation of "life in prison" for his involvement in the attacks of 9/11. This comes as a shock to many people, who favored the death penalty for the only man charged with the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor (discounting a few ineffectual bomb-balloons the Japanese floated over California). Surely, some argue, if anybody should get the death penalty, it should be Moussaoui.
The jury was ultimately unable to reach a unanimous decision, because they called into question the extent of his knowledge and involvement in the atrocity. It's hard for any of us outside of the courtroom to judge whether they made the right decision, unless we care to assert that any knowledge or involvement warrants the death penalty.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that he was unquestionably responsible for orchestrating the attacks. Now we have ourselves a case where the death penalty would be justified, if indeed it ever is. Let us not forget that all of this comes at a time when the UN's Committe against Torture has released reports saying that torture and mistreatment is widespread in American prisons abroad where suspected terrorists are detained. The important question on our plate is whether the death penalty and torture should be used in these cases.
It seems that it will make little pragmatic difference whether Moussaoui gets a promissory note of execution by the state or not, because it's hard to imagine that he will last very long in jail, or that his stay will be altogether pleasant. Presuming his ultimate punishment will be similar in either case (dying in a pool of blood in the yard, I imagine), I submit that the accidents of his sentencing are little more than a reflection of the political implications of our justice system's structure. After all, it might be best that he doesn't die a martyr, stricken from life in a blaze of glorious sacrifice rather than quietly slipping from existence in a cold cell with a plastic shank in his stomach.
I'd be a hypocrite if I agreed with whatever course of action simply produced the best results. That is, if I prescribed that we forgo justice in the name of convenience. I like to think that the law and its process of enforcement do at least a decent job of doling out justice, but something seems amiss here. For instance, Texas executes people for murder pretty regularly. Now, there is some debate over whether Moussaoui's actions equate to murder, but I submit that if he knowingly allowed the attacks, and could have prevented them (not in the way that the FBI's negligence could have prevented it, but in that he could have easily stopped it and used his volition to opt out of it), that he is at least partly culpable for a portion of the blame, if not all of it. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that blame comes in "portions", but let's leave that issue for another day.
My point here is that there doesn't seem to be a vast disparity between the justice-value of Moussaoui's actions and that of the common killer. But if that's the case, why is it that a man that kills to steal gets the death penalty while a man that kills for political reasons gets a different sentence? Maybe I'm going too far in assuming that Moussaoui could have really prevented the attacks if he had wanted to. Perhaps I'm presuming too much to think that he could have gone to the police and told them what the plans were, but I just don't think I am.
Our sentencing has no guarantee of coherency, since it is handed down on a case-by-case basis by different individuals in different states behind different benches. We can't expect things to be uniform, but differences do speak for the attitudes of the nation. On one hand, American citizens are put to death by a jury of their peers for crimes of hatred or desperation, and on the other hand, a man acting out of political motivation is spared. Sure, had one or two jurors been different, the sentence might have been unanimous and severe, but the selection process still generates a relatively random sample.
The country nowadays has conflicting views on who ought to get the same sentence for analogous misdeeds. I think that if justice is served in the case of a murderer that uses a knife and gets the death penalty, it wasn't served in the case of the murderer that uses a cell phone and gets life, or vice versa. It's hard to have faith in a legal system with such little consistency. It seems like life and death decisions are made on the whims and emotions of a team of strangers. I don't know how to feel about the death penalty myself, and like I said, I have faith that Moussaoui will ultimately receive an inmate execution, but I don't like being put in a position where I feel I must either weep for the injustice of the executed or cry for the justice of Moussaoui's head on a plate.
I fear that I haven't given much of a compelling argument either way, and dammit, I'm not sure that anybody can. One thing I am sure of, however, is that justice isn't being served, one way or another.
Branden Stein is an undergraduate in Philosophy and German Literature at The Ohio State University. He can be contacted at: stein.179@osu.edu
