On the Execution of John Allen Muhammed

If you live in our area you have been following the news: John Allen Muhammed was executed last night. All of us knew somebody who lost somebody to the "DC snipers," or we shopped at a place where they killed, or heard the wail of a hundred sirens rushing to the scene of another random and meaningless death. We have all driven past a quiet scene after the blood had been cleaned up, tapping the brakes and staring at the gas pumps, the parking lot, the shopping-center bench where a neighbor's life was taken. Events were canceled, people were afraid to go out of their houses, crouching down between cars to pump gas, letting grass grow tall, canceling games and events, we were a community terrorized by some unknown dispenser of pointless death. The police had said that white vans were at the scenes of a lot of the killings, and it turned out white vans are everywhere. We learned to follow them with our eyes, every one of them.

Capital punishment is harsh, it is irreversible, and it's terrible when a zealous prosecutor sends an innocent man to an erroneous end from which he cannot be recovered. The circumstances are often pitiful, a disadvantaged defendant, poorly represented, surrounded by mean-hearted people with ugly prejudices. The execution of a prisoner is the occasion for extreme caution and respect for life.

Muhammed and his partner Lee Boyd Malvo blanketed the Washington DC area, and especially Montgomery County, with a pea-soup fog of fear in October, 2002, in a series of random shootings. They drove around in an old Chevy with one of them in the trunk pointing a rifle out through the keyhole, picking off innocent citizens minding their own business. Their modest vehicle and calm demeanor deflected the attention of authorities. Nobody really understands why they did it, a man and a boy overflowing with hatred for their fellow human beings.

Malvo will not be executed, he's given a break for being a juvenile when the crimes were committed. Muhammed though will stand as the justification for capital punishment. No consequence would have been sufficient to atone for the grief he brought to our community -- and, it turned out, to other communities in the country where the two had murdered randomly. The cost of maintaining his life in prison would have been an unfair penalty for the rest of us. No rehabilitation would have ever allowed him to live among us again, no penalty would have been great enough to count as fair punishment for what he had done.

Justice is a vague case, there is no rational explanation for why victims of offenses should feel any better when an offender is punished. It is one of those deep facts of human nature that we do our best to accommodate without losing our heads. There is sadness when a life is lost, but the tears that are wept after Muhammed's death are wept for his victims, not for him.