Is Anyone Listening?

Last year I attended an anti-death penalty rally in Austin. I decided it was an exercise in futility though the speakers were quite good. There was a celebrity human rights advocate, a pair of Texas State Representatives, a sister of a death row inmate, and the husband of a murdered woman. But they were preaching to the choir. The rally wasn’t well attended and the people who were there came because they were already death penalty opponents. The local press was there too but not in force. I doubt the event got much play on the evening news. If it did they would in fairness have had to report a sparse crowd, warm maybe but not wildly enthusiastic. Calls to action were vague and I thought a little hollow. Since then I have taken several opportunities to write my state representatives, my congressman, both my senators, the governor, and the Dallas Morning News urging that, if not abolished altogether, the death penalty at least be applied more sparingly. Not much response there either though the DMN did print a pair of my opinion pieces (predating the rally.) The governor, one US Senator, and my State Senator eventually wrote back to thank me for my concern but effectively saying their minds were made up; not surprising since most of the electorate is more concerned with crime than with the fate of criminals. The others didn’t respond at all. That did surprise me. They must be really secure in their seats.
It makes me wonder what it will take to get a genuinely serious discussion going on this subject. It won’t be me writing elected officials, though I will continue to do that. They don’t forge public opinion. In a democratic system they are products and servants of it. Something will have to happen to draw the public’s attention, something on a national level that doesn’t focus on failures of a single state. Texans get their backs up when the outside press tries to point fingers. I can do that because I’m a Texan. If the New York Times tries it we will most likely tell them to mind their own business. Holier than thou attitudes are counter productive. It will have to be some kind of gross miscarriage of justice that exposes flaws in the whole system, something that forces us all to take collective responsibility for what we do as a society. Dostoyevsky observed that one measure of civilization is how society treats its prisoners. Something has to make us ask what kind of people we want to be.
Maybe it isn’t in the cards. There may be nothing out there that will have the impact of Emil Zola’s J’accuse, thought by many to be the greatest newspaper article in history. That was the 1898 open letter to the President of France accusing the army of covering up the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus had been wrongfully convicted. The army knowingly acquitted the man they knew had actually committed the crime. They had a reputation to protect and if Dreyfus had to be sacrificed so be it. In a precursor to the European Holocaust the affair provoked a wave of anti-Semitism not seen in France since the Middle Ages but it also caused enough public soul searching to force serious reform. Maybe we don’t have those kinds of abuses in modern American administration of capital punishment. Maybe our system is too transparent. Maybe the public passion for better justice isn’t there. It wasn’t there in France either until J’accuse came along. Where is Emil Zola when we need him?