Nielsen’s Nook

Nielsen’s Nook
Nielsen’s Nook
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There’s justice and then there’s this…

Will Nielsen
June 25th, 2008
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The New York Times reported today that those convicted of raping children may no longer be executed for their crime. I am generally not very excited about the death penalty as a form of punishment; however, the reasons given in this article made my stomach turn.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a law that allows the execution of people convicted of a raping a child.

In a 5-4 vote, the court said the Louisiana law allowing the death penalty to be imposed in such cases violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

”The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. His four liberal colleagues joined him, while the four more conservative justices dissented.

There has not been an execution in the United States for a crime that did not also involve the death of the victim in 44 years.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was sentenced to death for the rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter in Louisiana. He is one of two people in the United States, both in Louisiana, who have been condemned to death for a rape that was not also accompanied by a killing.

The Supreme Court banned executions for rape in 1977 in a case in which the victim was an adult woman.

Forty-five states ban the death penalty for any kind of rape, and the other five states allow it for child rapists. Kennedy’s case is the only time a state has sought to execute someone. Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas allow executions in such cases if the defendant had previously been convicted of raping a child.

Did you catch it? If you don’t kill someone’s body, the taking of your life is not permitted because to take your life when you have not killed another’s body is cruel and unusual.  I suspect that these justices have never been raped, certainly not as children - and certainly not by their own parents!

While I have never been raped either, I have dealt with those who have been raped as children. People, who in their fifties, are still trying to pick up the pieces, fighting suicide every moment of every day. It seems cruel and unusual to rape a child. It seems light-weight to give such a perpetrator the death penalty. Rapists may spare the body, though sometimes they don’t do that either. However, they take what cannot be returned, they lacerate the soul and only miracle surgery can heal such wounds and even then the scars are more than many can bear.

I would suggest that a materialist world view has circumscribed this Supreme Court decision. One that sees death as merely a material bodily matter, and has turned a blind eye to the psychological and spiritual suffering that will accompany the rape victims for the rest of their lives.

Lord have mercy upon us, especially those who suffer in ways we’ll never know.

3 Responses to “There’s justice and then there’s this…”

[...] There’s justice and then there’s this… [...]

Left by Barack Obama Rejects Supreme Court Decision | Nielsen's Nook on June 25th, 2008

I can agree with most of what you say; child rape is more cruel and unusual than execution. However, I think there are some other things to consider. I’m not trying to defend the rapist (as there is no defense), but before I send someone to their death (or even a life sentence) I would want to know their motivation for the crime. According to Mike Lew in “Victims No Longer” (an authoritative book about the sexual abuse of boys) over 80% of child abusers were abused themselves as children and their abuse was never dealt with. If a boy was being sexually molested as a child and never was brought to healing from this, he then legally becomes an adult and begins to repeat what was done to him (in a pathological attempt to bring some kind of healing to himself); I would not want to punish him again with execution. I would, in effect, be punishing him for having been abused as a child.

God designed children to be incredibly resilient to trauma IF they are given the proper love and counseling right after the trauma. The permanent damage and horrendous ’scaring’ occurs when the childhood abuse is internalized (kept hidden or disassociated) by the child and is never dealt with. Another crime occurs when the victim is not secure in the love of his/her caregivers to expose the abuse and feels it has to be kept hidden. (I sadly know this from personal experience.) However, when a child rape is exposed, it is an opportunity for the child to get the help he/she needs to mitigate the trauma and an opportunity for the perpetrator to get the help he/she needs (while serving a prison sentence) if warranted.

Child rape is so inhuman, so sick and so unnatural, it begs us to question what could possibly have caused one person to inflict this on another; certainly something extraordinary. It is so right when you say that rape lacerates the soul, but fresh wounds are easier to heal and leave minimal scaring than those wounds that have festered unattended for many years. The long, unattended wounds (if the rapist actually possesses them) also deserve attention, not summary execution. I can’t help but look at the rapist and say, “But for the grace of God, there go I.”

Left by Duane on July 5th, 2008

Duane,

Thank you very much for your post. You bring a dimension of thoughtfulness to this discussion that my original post lacks. All I would say in response is to nuance or clarify my original statements in light of your contribution here.

Generally speaking, I am opposed to the death penalty as a form of punishment. I believe a Christian worldview directs one to engage in punishment more as discipline rather than punitive. As a disciplining agent, a punishment would be thoughtfully designed for rehabilitation and restoration depending on the participation and engagement of the convicted. This is how the Father deals with me, and how I believe he would have me deal with others. Death is alone the decision of the Maker as a consequence of sin and I as one, who apart from Christ would be also under the sentence of death, am in no cosmic position to condemn anyone to death. At least that’s where I’m coming from presently.

So what I’m challenging is the basis for the decision to overturn the death penalty for Patrick Kennedy, the step-father who raped his eight year old daughter. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote ”The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” I believe the proportionality to be much different than he seems to indicate.

Some of those I have interacted with who have been raped are angry; some are broken; some are doing rather well; some are men and some are women. I think recovery has to do with being in an ongoing environment where there is a high level of trust and stability (as you point out). The sense of injustice I have with the Supreme Court ruling is not so much that they are not killing a child incest-rapist, but that there seems to be a notion, at least in the article I cited, that the death penalty for the child incest-rapist is disproportional in that it is believed to be a disproportionally severe punishment for the crime. I would say it’s disproportionally light-weight, given that the rapist is killed painlessly, while many of the victims, though not all, are killed by slow painful death over a lifetime.

Oscar Wilde makes this point poignantly in his Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Left by Will Nielsen on July 6th, 2008

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