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The Rediff Special/ Venu Menon

The State has a stake in nurturing life as much as in snuffing it out

Karla Faye Tucker, the 38-year-old woman convicted for the pickaxe killing of a couple 14 years ago, went to her execution on February 4, 1998 with a smile. The state of Texas stood its ground against overwhelming pressure to commute the death sentence, ignoring a plea for mercy from the Pope.

The controversial execution has reopened the debate on capital punishment. The world appears to be moving away from the death penalty, though few nations have actually struck off the provision. It is increasingly being seen as an avoidable option. Abolitionists point to the high incidence of crime in societies that endorses the death penalty, and a dipping crime graph wherever it is not in vogue. But that is a matter of statistics.

The central issue is whether the State should take on the role of avenger, whether the best way to emphasise the sanctity of human life is by exercising State power to extinguish it.

In the end, it is a debate that may never be resolved. But it is interesting to note why Tucker commanded such wide attention. There are four thousand men and women in death row in Texas alone, with an equal claim to social underdog status as Tucker. If she was hooked on drugs at the age of 10, walked the streets as a teenaged prostitute and fell in with a motorcycle gang, it is conceivable that several of her cell mates may have taken the same route down the sewage system of American cultural deviancy.

What set Tucker apart from them? Some would argue it is because she was female, telegenic and white. This may appear to trivialise the capital punishment debate, but the hysteria evoked by Tucker in the Anglo-Saxon world is apt to eclipse the plight of the less articulate blacks and Hispanics languishing in death row. Above all, it shifts the focus away from the crime. Through sheer pressure of collective sentiment, the perpetrator is cast in the role of victim. And the application of a stringent federal law becomes an act of barbarism.

Everybody was convinced that Tucker deserved clemency, that her discovery of Jesus wasn't a sham, that the person about to be executed wasn't the same person who committed the heinous murder. No one doubted that Tucker's born-again Christianity might be a jailhouse conversion. There was willing suspension of disbelief in her favour.

But the justice system needs more than that to go by. It already had all that it needed. Here was an open-and-shut case complete with evidence and confessions. Under Texas law, the punishment fitted the crime.

There is also the question whether a black on death row will get the same reception on a claim of being a born-again Muslim who has discovered Allah's love and been reformed. America has heart, but is not evenhanded.

The Tucker episode does raise some pertinent questions. It puts the onus of rehabilitation squarely on the shoulders of the state. The legal system is under pressure to redefine itself in terms of critical pre-emptive intervention. The killing hand can be stayed if the State steps in at the right time. Three lives might have been saved if Tucker had been warned away from a drug-drenched childhood. The State has a stake in nurturing life as much as in snuffing it out. Death row needs to be preceded by life support. It is up to the State. This is what the opponents of capital punishment are basically saying.

If the words and tears generated by the execution in Texas on February 4, 1998 can lead to rethinking and a possible reform of the penal system, Karla Faye Tucker may have died for a cause.

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