Nunley and his co-defendant, Michael Taylor, brutally raped and murdered a young high school student named Anne Harrison. Nunley deserves to be punished for those crimes, and in fact, he did not deny his guilt. Nunley confessed his crime to the police and even pleaded guilty in court, under the terms of a “secret plea bargain” that he would be sentenced to life in prison. If the court had followed that agreement, Nunley would never be released from custody until he died a natural death, and he would be, at best, a footnote in Missouri history. However, the trial court judge sentenced him to death without holding a hearing on whether mitigating factors existed to support a life sentence, and without a jury. After that death sentence was overturned, another judge re-sentenced him to death in a proceeding where the second judge also failed to appropriately consider mitigating factors before imposing the ultimate punishment.
I would have preferred to write this column about Anne Harrison, celebrating her life, and mourning her untimely death. When I write about the victims of violence, I would rather not spend ink on those who have inflicted pain and death on others, but in this society, we perpetrate the violence cycle by killing the killers, and so I can't remain silent about what we do to them. I would rather that we expended our resources in preventing violence from happening, and in comforting and restoring those who have been its victims. In a more just and peaceful society, that is where we would spend our precious resources, rather than refining state killing and turning it into some sort of perverse art form.
We live in a violent society, in a violent world. Yet, time after time, those who have analyzed the death penalty conclude that killing people who kill other people does not make us safer. Studies find that, in state after state, the death penalty is most often imposed on the poor, on minorities, on those who kill white people. The machinery that was supposed to limit this penalty to the worst of the worst, the most unrepentant, the most vicious, actually limits the penalty to those who kill on the basis of geography. Local prosecutors have absolute discretion whether to seek death in a murder case, and some allow personal biases or political ambition to influence their decisions. The state obtains death sentences by dehumanizing killers, by convincing juries that the defendants are not as human as the jurors themselves. When the state pits its considerable power and resources against a criminal defendant by seeking to kill the person it has cast as subhuman--monstrous even, we feed the cycle of violence.
I would have preferred to write this column about Anne Harrison, celebrating her life, and mourning her untimely death. When I write about the victims of violence, I would rather not spend ink on those who have inflicted pain and death on others, but in this society, we perpetrate the violence cycle by killing the killers, and so I can't remain silent about what we do to them. I would rather that we expended our resources in preventing violence from happening, and in comforting and restoring those who have been its victims. In a more just and peaceful society, that is where we would spend our precious resources, rather than refining state killing and turning it into some sort of perverse art form.
We live in a violent society, in a violent world. Yet, time after time, those who have analyzed the death penalty conclude that killing people who kill other people does not make us safer. Studies find that, in state after state, the death penalty is most often imposed on the poor, on minorities, on those who kill white people. The machinery that was supposed to limit this penalty to the worst of the worst, the most unrepentant, the most vicious, actually limits the penalty to those who kill on the basis of geography. Local prosecutors have absolute discretion whether to seek death in a murder case, and some allow personal biases or political ambition to influence their decisions. The state obtains death sentences by dehumanizing killers, by convincing juries that the defendants are not as human as the jurors themselves. When the state pits its considerable power and resources against a criminal defendant by seeking to kill the person it has cast as subhuman--monstrous even, we feed the cycle of violence.
Our society becomes more violent when we allow our government to inflict violence on others, even others who have committed horrible crimes. If we want to break the cycle of violence, we need to stop killing people because they have killed. Rape and murder deserve condemnation, and criminals deserve to be punished for their crimes. But regardless of his crimes, Roderick Nunley a still a human being. Anne Harrison, and all other murder victims whose lives were stolen, were human beings. None deserve to have their lives cut short, whether by individuals or by a government.
We live in a violent society, but we have the power within us to work for a more just and peaceful society. We can refuse to cooperate with the machinery of death by re-humanizing the people who commit evil acts. We can recognize that, while their actions may require that they be removed from society, those actions do not remove them from the human race. We can demonstrate our resolve to respect the humanity in all human beings by refusing to let others kill in our names. We live in a violent society, but that can change, if we are willing to make small changes and take small stands to change it. We can break the cycle of violence, if we choose to do so.
(photo from Amnesty International)
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