Matt Damon in “All the Pretty Horses”
Sordid news regarding the death penalty continues to make its way into the national headlines. First there was the schizophrenic Missouri man missing twenty percent of his frontal lobe (from a lumber mill accident) who was executed for killing a policeman. Then there was the state of Utah declaring that, if it ran out of lethal injection drugs, it would resort to firing squads. And finally there was a woman declared innocent of killing her son after spending 22 years on death row.
I am against the death penalty but, if we keep it, I ask that people, starting with our lawmakers and judges, at least acknowledge the immensity of the punishment. As far as I tell, sentencing people to death has become a far too casual affair for many. Cormac McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses provides a model for the kind of serious reflection I have in mind.
John Grady, the novel’s principled protagonist, returns to America after some hair-raising adventures in Mexico and seeks out a judge to help him process the experience. While a prisoner, Grady kills a man in self-defense—the man has been hired to kill him—and then later he kidnaps a lawman who has shot Blevins, a 13-year-old friend, in his presence. Blevins has himself killed a man (while retrieving his stolen horse), but the informal execution circumvents the law. The lawman is taken off Grady’s hands in a mysterious manner, but Grady is haunted by the thought that he was angry enough to have killed him.
Grady’s conversation with the judge goes through several stages as he strives to understand why he’s feeling so bad. He begins with the man he killed, wondering whether he was just “a good old boy.”
The judge is able to take that worry off the table and relates a story of his own. He describes how he didn’t want to be a judge in the first place, precisely because of the responsibility to hand out the death penalty. But because he witnessed other judges botching the process, he decided to become one. Upon occasion he sentences people to death, but he never stops thinking about them, even twenty years later. My point is that he takes his task absolutely seriously. Here’s their conversation:
I didn’t want to be a judge. I was a young lawyer practicing in San Antonio and I come back out here when my daddy was old and I went to work for the county prosecutor. I sure didnt want to be a judge. I think I felt a lot like you do. I still do.
What made you change your mind?
I dont know as I did change it. I just saw a lot of injustice in the court system and I saw people my own age in positions of authority that I had grown up with and knew for a calcified fact didnt have one damn lick of sense. I think I just didnt have any choice. Just didnt have any choice. I sent a boy from this county to the electric chair in Huntsville in nineteen thirty-two. I think about that. I dont think he was a pretty good old boy. But I think about it. Would I do it again? Yes I would.
Grady gets the point and so moves on to a second explanation for his guilt—that he was prepared to kill the captain, even if he didn’t actually do so. He even has an understandable explanation for his feelings. After all, the man killed Blevins. But because Grady is relentlessly self honest, he rejects this comforting rationalization.
Finally he puts his finger on the real explanation: when Blevins was being shot, Grady remained silent. If he had been true to his personal code, he should have protested, even though it wouldn’t have done any good. His anger at the captain, in other words, is primarily anger at himself for violating his code:
He picked up his hat and held it in both hands. He looked like he was about to get up but he didn’t get up.
The reason I wantd to kill him was because I stood there and let him walk that boy out in the trees and shoot him and I never said nothing.
Would it have done any good?
No sir. But that don’t make it right.
In other words, Grady understands that our desire to kill another human being can arise from problematic reasoning. He is determined to uncover what really moves us in our actions.
We see that the captain has meted out death for far worse reasons. Originally, he agreed to allow relatives of Blevins’ victim to avenge him. When they lost their nerve, the captain, afraid of losing face, shot Blevins himself. In other words, he killed a man because he was afraid of being embarrassed.
The judge recognizes in Grady a man who would himself be a great judge. As he puts it, “There’s nothin wrong with you son. I think you’ll get it sorted out.”
When we as a society decide to execute someone, we set ourselves up as God, committing an act that can never be taken back. We stain our honor if we allow revenge or politics or anything less than a love of justice guide our actions. Keep that in mind next time you hear people glibly talking about the death penalty.
