A comparison of these figures authorizes us to inform the stockholders of this company, and the assemblymen who voted for sugar beets rather than for buildings, that they have certainly killed more children than they suspect. As an adversary of capital punishment, I am far from demanding the death penalty for these individuals. But to begin with, it seems to me an indispensable and urgent duty to conduct them under military escort to the next execu-tion of the murderer of a child, and at the conclusion of the ceremony to present them with a table of statistics which will include the figures I have been discussing.
When the state sows alcohol, it cannot be surprised if it reaps crime.21 And it is not surprised, after all—it merely restricts itself to chopping off the same heads for which it poured out so much alcohol. It imperturbably executes its justice and sets itself up as a creditor: its good conscience is not affected.
Hence we have one representative of the interests of alcohol indignantly answering the Figaro questionnaire: «I know what the most outspoken abolitionist of capital punish-ment would do if he were suddenly to discover assassins on the point of killing his mother, his father, his children, or his best friend . . . Alors!» This «Alors!» seems a little drunk already.
Naturally the most outspoken abolitionist of capital punishment would fire, and with every justification, at the assassins, and without affecting in the slightest his reasons for outspokenly urging the abolition of capital punishment. But if his ideas led to consequences of any value, and if the same assassins smelled a little too much of alcohol, would he not subsequently turn his attentions to those who make it their business to intoxicate our future criminals?
It is even a little surprising that the parents of victims of alcoholic crime have never had the notion of requesting a few elucidations from the floor of the Assembly itself. But the contrary is the rule, and the State, armed with the confidence of all, with the full support of public opinion, continues to punish murderers, even and es-pecially when they are alcoholics, somewhat the way a pimp punishes the hard-working creatures who provide his liveli-hood. But the pimp doesn’t preach about his business.
The State does. Its jurisprudence, if it admits that drunkenness occasionally constitutes an extenuating circumstance, is un-aware of chronic alcoholism. Drunkenness, however, accom-panies only crimes of violence, which are not punishable by death, whereas the chronic alcoholic is also capable of pre-meditated crimes, which gain him the death penalty. The State thus maintains the right to punish in the very case in which its own responsibility is profoundly involved.
Does this come down to saying that every alcoholic must be declared nonresponsible by a State which will strike its breast in horror until the entire populace drinks nothing but fruit juice? Certainly not. No more than it conies down to say-ing that the facts of heredity eliminate responsibility and guilt. A criminal’s real responsibility cannot be determined exactly. All calculation is powerless to take into account the total num-ber of our ancestors, alcoholic or not.
At the other end of time, such a number would be 1022 times greater than the number of inhabitants of the earth at present. The total of diseased or morbid tendencies which could be transmitted is thus incalculable. We enter the world burdened with the weight of an infinite necessity, and according to logic must agree on a situation of a general nonresponsibility. Logically, neither punishment nor reward can be distributed accurately, and therefore all society becomes impossible.
Yet the instinct of self-preservation, in societies and individuals alike, re-quires, on the contrary, the postulate of individual respon-sibility; a responsibility that must be accepted, without day-dreaming of an absolute indulgence which would coincide with the death and disappearance of any society whatso-ever. But the same line of reasoning that compels us to abandon a general nonresponsibility must also lead us to conclude that there is never, on the other hand, a situation of total responsibility, and consequently no such thing as absolute punishment or absolute reward. No one can be rewarded absolutely, not even by the Nobel prize. But no one must be punished absolutely if he is found guilty, and with all the more reason if there is a chance he might be innocent.
The death penalty, which neither serves as an example nor satisfies the conditions of retaliative justice, usurps in addition an ex-orbitant privilege by claiming the right to punish a necessarily relative guilt by an absolute and irreparable penalty.
If, in fact, the death penalty serves as a questionable ex-ample of our gimcrack justice, one must agree with its sup-porters that it is eliminative: capital punishment definitively eliminates the condemned man. This fact alone, actually, ought to exclude, especially for its partisans, the discussion of all the other dangerous arguments which, as we have seen, can be ceaselessly contested.
It would be more honest to say that capital punishment is definitive because it must be, to point out that certain men are socially irrecoverable, constitut-ing a permanent danger to each citizen and to the social order as a whole, so that, before anything else, they must be sup-pressed. No one, at least, will question the existence of certain beasts in our society, creatures of incorrigible energy and bru-tality that nothing seems capable of subduing. And although the death penalty certainly does not solve the problem they present, let us at least agree that it goes a long way towards eliminating it.
I will return to these men. But first, is capital punishment confined only to them? Can we be absolutely certain that not one man of all those executed is recoverable? Can we even swear that one or another may not be innocent! In both cases, must we not admit that capital punishment is eliminative only to the degree that it is irreparable? Yesterday, March 15, 1957, Burton Abbott, condemned to death for the murder of a 14-year-old girl, was executed in California: it was certainly the Mud of crime that I imagine would class him among the irrecoverables. Although Abbott had constantly protested his innocence, he was condemned. His execution was scheduled for March 15 at 10 in the morning. At 9:10 a reprieve was granted to allow the defense to present an appeal.22
At 11 o’clock the appeal was rejected. At 11:15 Abbott entered the gas chamber. At 11:18 he began to breathe the first fumes of gas. At 11:20 the secretary of the reprieve board tele-phoned the prison: the board had changed its decision. The governor had been called first, but he had gone sailing, and they had called the prison directly. Abbott was removed from the gas chamber: it was too late. If the weather had been bad the day before, the governor of California would not have gone sailing. He would have telephoned two minutes earlier: Abbott would be alive today and would perhaps see his inno-cence proved. Any other punishment, even the most severe, would have permitted this chance. Capital punishment, how-ever, permitted him none.
It may be thought that this case is exceptional. Our lives are exceptional too, and yet, in the fugitive existence we have been granted, this exception occurred not ten hours by plane from where I am writing. Abbott’s misfortune is not so much an exception as it is one news item among many others, an error which is not at all isolated, if we examine our newspapers (for example, the Deshay case, to instance only the most recent). The jurist Olivecroix, applying a calculus of prob-abilities to the chance of judiciary error, concluded in 1860 that approximately one innocent man was condemned out of every 257 cases.
The proportion seems low, but only in re-lation to moderate punishment. In relation to capital punishment, the proportion is infinitely high. When Hugo wrote that he preferred to call the guillotine Lesurques,23 he did not mean that every man who was decapitated was a Lesurques, but that one Lesurques was enough to wipe out the value of capital punishment for ever. It is understandable that Belgium definitely abjured pronouncing capital punish-ment after one such judiciary error, and that England brought up the question of its abolition after the Hayes case.
We can readily sympathize with the conclusions of that attorney general who, consulted on the petition for reprieve of a criminal who was most probably guilty but whose victim’s body had not been recovered, wrote as follows: «The sur-vival of X assures the authorities the possibility of effectively examining at their leisure every new sign that may subse-quently be discovered of the existence of his wife (the victim, whose body had not been recovered). . . .
On the other hand, his execution, eliminating this hypothetical possibility of ex-amination, would give, I fear, to the slightest evidence of her still being alive a theoretical value, a pressure of regret which I consider it inopportune to create.» The man’s feeling for both justice and truth are admirably expressed, and it would be advisable to cite as often as possible in our assize courts that «pressure of regret» which sums up so steadfastly the danger with which every juryman is confronted. Once the innocent man is dead, nothing more can be done for him except to re-establish his good name, if someone is still inter-ested in asking for such a service. His innocence is restored actually he had never lost it in the first place. But the persecution of which he has been the victim, his dreadful sufferings, and his hideous
