To the Editor:
Re “I Saw an Execution” (Sunday Review, Jan. 3), Elizabeth Bruenig’s excellent, disturbing eyewitness account of the recent federal execution of Alfred Bourgeois:
I have always been and continue to be against the death penalty. My uncle, though, was a district attorney in Los Angeles and was for the death penalty — until he saw what it did to the people giving the injection. He said that it destroyed something in them, and that it should never be done.
There is no good, absolutely nothing redeemable, in capital punishment.
Sandra Fish
Stinson Beach, Calif.
The writer is a co-founder of the Humane Prison Hospice Project.
To the Editor:
I can confirm Elizabeth Bruenig’s sentiment that nothing is gained, nothing is restored, through the death penalty.
In 1973, having recently returned home after tours in Vietnam, I was with a beloved niece in a vehicle driven by my best friend when an intoxicated young man in a pickup truck sped across the center line and crashed into our car. My niece died in my arms, and my friend barely survived.
Although intoxication manslaughter is not a death penalty crime, it is a most violent one. It took a long time to release the hate I held in my heart for that young man. The loved ones of victims of offenders who receive the death penalty are ill served. This requires them to keep hate in their hearts. And hate is poison to the soul.
I pray, in this season, that God’s love restores the victims of violent crimes.
Marvel Maddox
Seguin, Texas
The writer is a former probation program administrator.
To the Editor:
The problem with opponents of the death penalty is that they seem to be more concerned with the perpetrator than with the victim. Elizabeth Bruenig gives a chilling description of the brutal death of Alfred Bourgeois’s 2-year-old daughter, acknowledging that “Mr. Bourgeois’s was the kind of offense often adduced in advocacy for capital punishment: cruel, senseless, depraved.” And she admits that the death penalty “occasionally feels not only appropriate, but also crucial.”
However, at the execution she focuses on her own feelings of discomfort (“I am transfixed, I am breathing consciously, I still have yet to accept that this is really happening”) and on details about the killer (like his “ghastly gulp for air”). There is no mention here of any thoughts of the little girl, whose last moments on earth were apparently a living hell.
John H. Bickford
Walhalla, S.C.
To the Editor:
Elizabeth Bruenig’s powerful story brought back a wave of disturbing memories from an execution I witnessed in 2001.
I was a reporter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I was chosen by my editors to witness the execution of Jay D. Scott, who had been convicted of murdering two people in 1983. He had been on Ohio’s death row for nearly two decades, and his lawyers had chronicled a pattern of bizarre behavior that included “fouling his food and then eating it.”
Nevertheless, courts had concluded that he didn’t meet the legal definition of insanity. Although I was opposed to the death penalty, I agreed to cover the execution because I wanted to see what it was that I abstractly opposed. The execution was a senseless, raw act of vengeance that left me feeling dirty and quivering with survivor’s guilt.
Ted Wendling
Traverse City, Mich.
To the Editor:
I’m a British resident of Chile. Like a growing number of people around the world, I find the death penalty aberrant, not only because of the risk of miscarriage of injustice but in all cases. It actually puts the government that carries it out on the same level as the murderer — or maybe even worse, because of the sheer deliberateness of enforcing the penalty.
Precisely because there is so much to admire about the United States, I find it shocking that while virtually all of Europe and most other countries of the Americas have eliminated capital punishment for all or nearly all crimes, the United States maintains it, remaining in the company of authoritarian countries like China and Saudi Arabia.
Why not instead lead an urgent national campaign to abolish the death penalty, together, perhaps, with the uncontrolled “right to bear arms”? The thinking behind both is surely not dissimilar.
Martin Joseph
Tunquén, Chile
The Meaning of Russian Hacking
To the Editor:
Re “Scope of Russian Hacking Far Exceeds Initial Fears” (front page, Jan. 3):
I’ll tell you what the Russian hacking project is all about: deterrence.
The Russians don’t like our pre-emptive “left of launch” strategies in the cyber realm or in space, where we get inside their networks to counteract them before they attack us. They are pre-empting our pre-emption. Checkmate.
Rose Gottemoeller
Mountain View, Calif.
The writer is a lecturer in international affairs at Stanford University and a former under secretary of state for arms control and international security.
The Lies of a Psychopath
To the Editor:
Re “To Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump” (column, Jan. 5):
Michelle Goldberg speaks of the “psychopath’s advantage” and questions whether psychopaths believe their lies. A simple answer is that psychopaths know they are lying. To ask whether they believe their lies is viewing them from our framework, not theirs.
It doesn’t matter to them what the truth is or what they really believe. Truth has no meaning to them. The only thing that matters is what words will have the effect they want.
Elizabeth F. Howell
New York
The writer is a psychologist.