The Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield is a huge, gloomy Victorian structure whose very appearance seems calculated to implant in the mind of the onlooker the idea of justice in its most retributive sense. It is one of the oldest prisons in America. Uncompromisingly somber, the penitentiary suggests not only that crime does not pay but that whosoever is a wrongdoer is quite conceivably beyond redemption. On death row, the condemned cells were built for an epoch when, after a man was told he must die, the supreme penalty was administered far more swiftly than in these present days of interminable legal postponements. Each cell still measures only seven by seven feet, implying momentary residence. A strong electric light shines in the face of the condemned all night and all day. The condemned are not allowed to communicate with one another, and until very recently, were denied even the solace of an earphone radio. To live on death row at Wethersfield is in effect to dwell in solitary confinement until the day of one's execution. As I write these words (mid-October 1961) the state of Connecticut is preparing to kill a twenty-four-year-old felon named Benjamin Reid. Reid is no Caryl Chessman.1 As a matter of fact, he is subliterate and possesses an intelligence which, if not so low as to be called defective, can only be described as marginal. The condemned at Wethersfield are allowed to read and to write letters, but it is doubtful that Ben Reid has availed himself much of these privileges; and this is a circumstance which must have made his confinement all the more forsaken, because Reid has lived in the presence of the electric chair for four years and three months.
On a bitterly cold night in Hartford in January of 1957, Ben Reid, who was nineteen at the time, waylaid a middle-aged woman in a parking lot and beat her to death with a hammer. His avowed and premeditated motive was profit (the woman was a friend of his mother's and had been known to carry large sums of money with her), but this aspect of his crime he so ruinously botched that he got nothing. Over $2,000 was discovered on the woman's frozen body, which Reid in his final panic had jammed into a car. It would appear that Reid scarcely bothered to conceal his tracks, fleeing to the home of a relative in New Haven, where he was found in short order by the police. He seemed rather relieved to be caught. He made several confessions, and in the summer of that same year, was brought to trial by jury in the Superior Court at Hartford. The trial was a fairly brief one, as murder trials go. On June 27, 1957, Reid was sentenced to die by electrocution. He was taken to Wethersfield (a suburb of Hartford, and except for the eyesore of its prison and several small factories, a lovely elm-lined New England town) and there in his tiny cell, brightly illuminated night and day, he has been for more than four years, awaiting what must be, for him, the ever present but always undiscoverable moment of his death.
There is, of course, no such thing as absolute justice, but even advocates of capital punishment will grant that when a human's life is at stake, there should be the closest approximation of absolute justice the law can attain. In terms of absolute justice, to make evident the reasonableness of Ben Reid's execution for murder it would have to be proved that his crime was morally more reprehensible than a similar crime for which some other murderer received a lesser sentence. There have been, and still are, murderers whose crimes repel us by their violence and brutality quite as strongly as does Ben Reid's. Some of these criminals have been put to death as creatures past salvation; more frequently sparing their lives, the state has sentenced them to serve a life term, with the possibility of parole, or a number of years, and by this relative leniency has granted, at least theoretically, the rather more lucid assumption that some men's crimes are not so depraved as to place them forever beyond redemption. But the logic of this random choice is as fearful as it is mysterious. The wickedness, the inherent immorality, of any crime is a quality which it is beyond the power of any of us to weigh or measure. Ben Reid's crime, however, has been weighed, and Reid himself has been found completely and irrevocably wanting. Neither absolute justice nor any kind of justice, so far as the eye can see, has been served. It might be interesting to learn something about this young man, and perhaps discover why the state has judged him irredeemable, past hope of recovery.
Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing, an expert foe of the death penalty, once said that in order to be executed in America a person had to be three things: poor, a man, and black. He was speaking of the North as well as the South. He was also admittedly generalizing, if not being somewhat facetious, for a great many white men and a few women of both races have, of course, been executed, and on exquisitely rare occasions the state has taken the life of a criminal of wealth. But the implication of his remark, it is safe to say, is borne out by the statistics—North and South—and Ben Reid fills the bill: he is a poor black man. To read of his background and career is to read not only of poverty and neglect and a mire of futile, petty crime and despair, but, in the end, of a kind of wretched archetype: the Totally Damned American. If one wished to make a composite portrait of the representative criminal upon whom the state enacts its legal vengeance, one's result would be a man who looked very much like Ben Reid. Like his victim, who was also a Negro, he was born in a dilapidated slum area on the north side of Hartford. When he was two his father died, leaving his mother virtually destitute and with several children to support besides Ben. These years toward the end of the Depression were bleak enough for a large number of Americans; for people in the situation of Ben Reid and his family the times were catastrophic and left ineradicable scars. When Reid was almost eight his mother got into a shooting scrape and was grievously wounded; she was left crippled for life and partially paralyzed. At this point Reid was forced to enter the Hartford County Home, and there he remained for eight years. He was not alone among his family to become a ward of the People; during the time he was at the county home his twin brother was committed to the state hospital for the insane at Norwich, while an older sister, adjudged to be mentally deficient, was sent to the Mansfield State Training School. Most children are released from the county home at the age of fifteen, but since no one wanted Reid, he received the dispensation granted, in special cases, to the totally unwanted and was privileged to stay an extra year. One pauses to speculate, hesitates, goes on, feeling presumptuous (there is no other word) as one tries to imagine Ben Reid's thoughts during this weary, bedraggled era. He was never too bright, so probably—unlike other adolescents somewhat more richly endowed in mind as well as circumstance—he entertained no Deep Thoughts about life at all. To Reid, coming out of oblivion into this existence which, so far as one can tell, had seemed to guarantee the unfulfillment and frustration of every ordinary childish yearning, life must have begun to appear simply and demonstrably lacking in significance. Lacking in significance, it must necessarily have lacked any values whatever, and it is not at all surprising that Reid, soon after he was sent away from the county home, began feloniously and empty-headedly to trifle with those values in life which society so highly regards.
When the county home finally discharged him, the nation was experiencing a time of prosperity such as no country has ever seen, but very little of this abundance rubbed off on Ben Reid. For a year or so he was shunted from one foster home to another; he went hungry again from time to time, and there were occasions when he was reduced to foraging from garbage cans on the backstreets of Hartford. It was during this period that Reid had his first brush with the law, in an involvement which has come to seem numbingly typical of his age and background: he was caught acting as a runner for a narcotics peddler, and for his offense was placed on probation. A few months later he tried to rob a store, hopelessly bungled the endeavor, and was sentenced to serve a term in the state reformatory at Cheshire. It is apparent that he was in no way reformed. However, it may be said that after his release from the reformatory, an episode occurred in Reid's life which tends in some small way to alleviate the harshness and ugliness of his career until then. He met a girl. She was a few years older than he, but they began seeing each other and presumably fell in love, and they were married in 1956. It might have been an answer to Reid's trouble, but it wasn't. He was unable to get a job. Not long after their marriage Ben began to brood about money and commenced hitting the wine bottle. His wife apparently did her best to straighten him out, but these efforts led to nothing. She was pregnant and had just left him when Reid, thinking about money, went out into the snow that night and committed the crime for which he is now scheduled to die.
Often, it seems, what appears to be justice is merely a shadow image of justice, determined by queer circumstances which can only be discerned in retrospect. This sinister element in the law might alone be enough to cast final doubts upon the infliction of the death penalty; for only under conditions of absolute justice—a kind of aseptic legal vacuum completely invulnerable to fleeting social panic, hysteria, shifts in public temper—could we presume to condemn a man utterly, and absolute justice nowhere exists. It of course cannot strictly be proven, but it seems at least probable that had Ben Reid not come to trial at the particular time he did, he would not have been condemned to die. The reason for this conjecture is the existence in Hartford at that same time of two particularly vicious criminals: a huge, lantern-jawed ex-con and ex-resident of death row named Joseph (“The Chin”) Taborsky and his moronic accomplice, Arthur Culombe. Taborsky, who was a psychopath of fearfully sadistic dimensions, and Culombe, a kind of torpid, blinky-eyed caricature of the dim-witted henchman, had finally been apprehended after a series of holdup-murders which had terrorized central Connecticut and, quite literally, sent many of the people of Hartford in off the streets. A notable feature of their modus operandi was to make their victims kneel down at their feet before shooting them. Taborsky and Culombe had been dubbed by the newspapers, with scant originality though in luminous headlines, “The Mad Dog Killers,” and when they came to be tried there can be no doubt that the public, which attended the trial in droves, was in something less than a mood of composure. Ben Reid was tried at the same time and in the same building. His mother, crippled and woefully concerned, was the only spectator on the first day of the trial, when the jurors were sworn in, and except for Reid's wife and one or two interested onlookers, remained the only spectator until the trial's end. The People's interest was in the Mad Dogs, not in Ben Reid. There seems little doubt that the Taborsky-Culombe affair next door, with its public hubbub and its reverberant atmosphere of mass outrage, did nothing to help Ben Reid's case, and in fact subtly contaminated his own courtroom with the odor of vengeance.
The trial, as I have said, lasted only a few days. Reid's defense was almost nonexistent; he had, after all, killed someone with what in the legal sense is surely malice and premeditation. His defense counsel (since Reid had no money, this job fell to the public defender) made strenuous efforts in his client's behalf, outlining his squalid background and the nature of his upbringing. But the jury (Respectability in its pure, concentrated essence, disarmingly mild-eyed and benign, like a Norman Rockwell tableau: five Christian housewives and among the rest, as might be anticipated in Hartford, a clutch of insurance adjusters) was not terribly moved. Testifying in his own behalf, Reid seemed confused. Once when asked why, after his first blow, he continued to strike the woman, he replied that she had seemed to be suffering so that he wanted to put her out of her pain. Now, asked the same question by the prosecutor, he could only mumble hopelessly, “I don't know. I started to shake. I lost control of myself. I didn't want her to die.” In his final summation, the prosecuting attorney expressed a few personal regrets but went on to add that we must not be swayed by the fact of a person's sordid environment; after all, some of our most valued citizens have struggled up to eminence from the lower depths, fighting their way to fame and fortune, ladies and gentlemen, while people like this criminal sitting here, etc. It had the echo of a thousand courtrooms: Look at Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Look at Joe Louis! It was the old American death-cry, and there is no reply to it, save the negative one, to bespoken in a whisper, that when life is an issue we have no God-given right to measure the gallant strength of a few men against the imponderable weakness of a foundling like Ben Reid. The jury was asked if it would like to retire and deliberate right away, or if it would like to have lunch first. It replied that it would like to have lunch. After it fed itself it retired and came back with the verdict in a little over an hour. As happens with rather enigmatic frequency in capital trials, the judge flubbed the reading of the death sentence. In setting the date of execution, he said, “the year 1958,” instead of “the year 1957,” and the entire pronouncement, for the record, had to be read over again. Up until this time Reid had showed very little emotion during the trial, except for the moment when the prosecutor began to describe his crime in its bloody detail, at which point, in a gesture which can only be described as childlike, he furiously clapped his hands over his ears. Now perhaps he felt that the judge was damning him twice. At any rate, he broke down and wept.
One curious fact which tends to underline the basic senselessness of capital punishment is the way in which we are regularly brought into touch with an evil apart from the nagging, chronic, yet somehow endurable distress which the death penalty itself causes us: this is the almost unendurable incongruity it manifests in its choice of victims. If in Caryl Chessman, for instance, we were confronted with a plucky, dogged, intelligent man (so intelligent, in fact, as to have blurred in the minds of many people the nature of his morality, which was that of a cynical, self-justifying hoodlum; he verged as close to an embodiment of the perfect son of a bitch as the mind can conceive) who possessed the right at least to the possibility of redemption, in Ben Reid we are faced with a man so egregiously lacking in gifts, so totally desolate in circumstance, in quality of mind and spirit, that though he bears an almost antipodean relationship to Chessman as a man, we find ourselves questioning by this very contradistinction his implacable abandonment by society. Of course, the facts of heredity and environment cannot be allowed completely to eliminate responsibility and guilt. Reid's crime was an appalling one—one of such blind ruthlessness that it should have been apparent at the outset that he must be removed from the community until that time when it might reasonably be made certain that he could take his place again among his fellow men. Failing this approximate certainty, it would have to be made sure that he was incarcerated for good. But here we are not speaking of correction. We are not even speaking of that reasonable punishment which might carry with it vitalizing connotations of remorse and contrition. We are speaking of total abandonment. Perhaps not so wise but no less unfortunate than Chessman, Reid too had been judged beyond salvation. It is this abrupt, irrevocable banishment, this preemption by the state of the single final judgment which is in the providence of God alone—and the subtle but disastrous effect this act has upon the whole philosophy of crime and punishment—that wrecks the possibility of any lasting, noble concept of justice and causes the issue of the death penalty to become not peripheral, but central to an understanding of a moral direction in our time.
Against an awesome contemporary backdrop of domestic trouble and crisis, and the lingering image of concentration camps, and the threat of mass annihilation, the case of Ben Reid might seem an event of such small moment that there is hardly any wonder that it has commanded no one's attention. It is a case little enough known in Hartford, much less in the state of Connecticut or the broad, busy world. If it is true that crime in general, save in its most garish, tabloid aspects, faiIs to gain our serious regard, it may also be said that the question of capital punishment commands even less interest on the part of thinking people, especially in America. It becomes one of those lofty moral issues relegated to high school debates. To most thinking people, crime is something we read about at breakfast. The infliction of the death penalty, even further removed from our purview, is a ceremony which takes place in the dead of night, enacted, like some unnamable perversion, in shame and secrecy, and reported the next morning, on a back page, with self-conscious and embarrassed brevity. Our feelings are usually mixed; conditioned by two decades of James Cagney movies, and the memory of the jaunty wisecrack when the warden comes and the last mile commences, few of us can escape a shiver of horrid fascination which the account of a man's judicial execution affords us. But the truth is that few of us, at the same time, are left without a sense of queasiness and discomfiture, and indeed there are some—not simply the quixotic or the “bleeding hearts,” as Mr. J. Edgar Hoover describes those who abhor the death penalty—who are rendered quite inescapably bereft. “For certain men, more numerous than is supposed,” wrote Albert Camus, “knowing what the death penalty really is and being unable to prevent its application is physically insupportable. In their own way, they suffer this penalty, too, and without any justification. If at least we lighten the weight of the hideous images that burden these men, society will lose nothing by our actions.” This is not alone an interior, personal viewpoint which would subvert a general evil in the name of delicate feelings; Camus's other arguments against capital punishment are too fierce and telling for that. The fact remains that all of us, to some degree, are spiritually and physically diminished by the doctrine of legal vengeance, even though it manifests itself as nothing more than a chronic, insidious infection beneath the public skin. We need only the occurrence of a sudden Chessman, flaunting his anguish like a maddened carbuncle, to make evident the ultimate concern we have with our own debilitating and corrupting sickness. That we do not discuss this problem until a Chessman appears is only an indication of one of our most ruinous human feelings—our inability to think about any great issue except in the light of the unique, the glamorous, the celebrity. Chessman was indisputably unique as a criminal and as one condemned; it is not to demean that uniqueness to declare that we shall never resolve the issue of capital punishment until we ponder it in terms not alone of Chessman, but of Ben Reid.
It is more than likely that apathy about the question is generated by the knowledge that capital punishment is on the decrease. With great pride the commonwealth acknowledges that, on the average, it now exterminates only about fifty people a year—like stars on a flag, one for each sovereign state. A common attitude might be articulated in the words of Time magazine, which said during the Chessman affair: “If opponents of capital punishment were patient enough, they could just sit back and wait for it to fade away—in practice, if not on the statute books. But abolitionists try to hasten that fade-away by argument.” Aside from the fact that very few evils have been hastened into extinction without the benefit of incessant argument, such a statement represents a blindness to the profounder truths which seems to seize Time at intervals. There is very little patience among men who are waiting to die. “To sit back and wait for it to fade away” is of small consolation to the “160 or so” people (including Ben Reid) who Time in the same article stated were awaiting execution on death rows all over America at the time of the Chessman affair. I do not know how Time’s writer visualized the number 160—if indeed he tried to visualize it at all: larger than fifty maybe? less than a thousand? As for myself, the more I ponder 160 condemned faces, the more the number acquires a queerly disproportionate hugeness, and to use any phrase which implies such a gradual, far-off diminution seems to me, quite simply, a triumph of indifference.* Moreover, I am not at all sure that capital punishment will in fact fade away, as long as Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the guardian of our public morals, has any say in the matter.
Mr. Hoover, according to a news item last June in the New York Herald Tribune, for the first time in his long career as our premier law-enforcement officer, has allowed himself, in what I suppose must be called a policeman's trade journal, to proclaim his belief in the efficacy of the death penalty. The article went on to describe the particular malfeasance which had impelled Mr. Hoover to take this position. It was a singularly hideous crime. A California woman, who happened, incidentally, to be pregnant, enticed a little girl of six into a car. There in the woman's presence her thirty-year-old husband raped the “screaming” child, who thereupon was bludgeoned to death by the wife with a tire jack. Apprehended and tried swiftly, the man was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, while his wife received life imprisonment. Past any doubt this was a deed so horrible as to tempt one to view it almost metaphysically, as if it were enacted in a realm beyond even abnormal behavior. All of our emotions are unhinged, displaced, at the contemplation of such a monstrous crime. As Anthony Storr, writing in a recent issue of the New Statesman, remarks: “To rape and murder a little girl is the most revolting of crimes. It is easy to sympathize with those who feel that a man who could do such a thing should be flogged or executed….We think of our own young daughters and we shudder. The child rapist has alienated himself from our society, and we want to eliminate him, to suppress him, to forget that he ever existed.”
Yet as one thinks about the Herald Tribune article and the crime and, more particularly, Mr. Hoover's attitude toward it, it seems evident that in lending his great prestige to the furtherance of capital punishment and, moreover, in using this particular case as an example of its presumed “efficacy,” Mr. Hoover (who, after all, is not a law-giver, but a law-enforcement officer) is committing a two-fold error. Because where one might say, purely for the sake of argument, that the death penalty was effective in preventing such crafty and meticulously deliberate crimes as kidnapping for ransom, or treason, or even the hijacking of airplanes, one would be almost obliged to admit, if he had any understanding of criminal behavior, that its value in a crime of this type was nil. For the two wretched people who perpetrated this outrage were not, in any sense of the word, rational, and clearly not susceptible to rational controls. To believe that by taking away the life of even one of these sickening perverts we shall deter others from similarly mad acts is demonstrably a false belief: only one conceivable end is served, and that is vengeance, an emotion which—instinctive as it may be—society can no longer afford. As Anthony Storr goes on to say: “It is also important that we should not simply recoil in horror, but that when we catch the child rapist we should study him and the conditions which produced him. In that way only may we be able to…offer help to those who are driven by similar desires….You and I may imagine that we could never rape a child and then murder it: but, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that even this potentiality exists within us. We do not know what internal pressures drive the rapist, nor what conditions determine his dreadful acts. But he cannot be regarded as a different kind of animal with different instincts; for he is also human, and subject to the same laws and the same forces which determine the desires of every one of us. It is tempting to treat him as something utterly foreign from ourselves and so avoid looking into our own depths….To condemn him as inhuman is to fall into the trap of treating him as he treated his victims: as a thing, not a person, a thing on whom we can let loose our own sadistic impulses, not a fellow creature who might, even yet, be redeemed.”
At this juncture, whether we are viewing a child rapist or Ben Reid, we are admittedly faced with problems that do not lend themselves to ready solutions. For one thing, there is the familiar question: “Wouldn't Ben Reid, when all is said and done, be better off dead if he had to serve a life sentence in prison?” This, or something like it, is a commonly heard sentiment, often uttered by people who are compassionate and well-meaning. But in the end it only emphasizes a corollary evil of capital punishment—the equally vengeful notion that there is no alternative to the death penalty save a sentence of perpetual incarceration. Significantly, if it is true that a life term with no hope of parole is worse than death (and one cannot help but agree that it may be worse), it becomes necessary to ask why we do not sentence our most villainous offenders to life, reserving the death penalty for lesser criminals. But more importantly, to assume that short of killing a man, we must doom him to a lifetime behind prison walls is to succumb to the doctrine of retaliation in its most hateful sense; and it is the practice of capital punishment more than any other single factor that tends to blight our administration of justice and to cast over our prisons the shadow of interminable revenge and retribution. Now, it would appear that some criminals are hopelessly incorrigible. Taborsky would seem to be mad or half mad, or, though sane within the legal sense of the word, seemingly devoid of any kind of understanding of right or wrong; from these people it would certainly be clear that we must protect ourselves by keeping them behind high walls forever. At the very least, as Anthony Storr points out, we can study them and learn why they and their kind behave as they do. A majority of criminals, however—including those whose deeds have been quite as ugly as Ben Reid's—are amenable to correction, and many of them can be, and have been, returned to society. As for Ben Reid, in arbitrarily inflicting upon him the sentence of death, in denying him even the chance of rehabilitation that we have just as arbitrarily granted others, we have committed a manifest injustice; and the death penalty, once again, reveals its ignoble logic.
It has been argued that opponents of capital punishment are swayed by emotion, that they are sentimental. To the degree that sentimentality may be considered a state of mind relying more upon emotion than reason, it would seem plain that it is the defenders of the death penalty who are the sentimentalists. If, for example, it could be proved that capital punishment was an effective deterrent to crime, even the most emotionally vulnerable, die-hard humanitarian would be forced to capitulate in favor of it. But, unable to fend off the statistical proof that it is no deterrent at all, proponents of capital punishment find themselves backed into a corner, espousing emotional, last-ditch arguments. In the present instance, its lack of deterrent effect may be shown in the fact that it did not deter Ben Reid. Even more strikingly it is true in the case of the terrible Taborsky, finally executed, who had barely escaped electrocution for murder once (he was released from death row on a judicial error and freed from prison), whereupon he committed the series of brutal slayings I have mentioned. If it is evident that Taborsky should never have been released into society, it seems almost as clear that he is a case in point of that theory, proposed by a number of serious observers, that the death penalty in significant and not too rare instances actually exerts a fatal lure, impelling certain unbalanced people to crimes which ordinarily they would not commit. (Ina recent English case one Frederick Cross of Stockport, near Manchester, said in testimony: “When I saw the man in his car I got the idea that if I was to kill him I would be hanged….I don't wish to be defended at all. I killed him so that I would be hanged.” The victim was a complete stranger. Cross achieved his desire: he was hanged.) Finally, in order to make reasonable the argument that capital punishment is a deterrent, why is it that the public is not incessantly exposed to its horrible finality, forced to witness the barbarous rite itself, and thereby made to reflect on the gruesome fate awaiting malefactors? But it remains a secret, shameful ceremony and except for the most celebrated cases, it is even indifferently reported in the press. Until by legislative mandate all executions are carried on the television networks of the states involved (they could be sponsored by the gas and electric companies), in a dramatic fashion which will enable the entire population—men, women, and all children over the age of five—to watch the final agonies of those condemned, even the suggestion that we inflict the death penalty to deter people from crime is a farcical one.
Shorn of all rational, practical arguments, those who favor the death penalty must confront those who would eliminate it upon the solitary grounds of vengeance, and it is here, upon these grounds and these grounds alone, that the issue will have to be resolved. There is no doubt that the urge for revenge is a strong human emotion. But whether this is an emotion to be encouraged by the state is a different matter. As for Ben Reid, how much actual vengeance society still harbors toward him can only be a matter of conjecture. It would be a disgrace to all of us to say that it could be much. Having dwelt in his seven-by-seven cell on death row, as I have said, for over four years, he would seem to have endured such a torture of bewilderment, anxiety, and terror as to make the question of vengeance academic. Since that day in June 1957 when he entered his cell on death row, there have been numberless writs, reprieves, reversals, stays of execution, all carried out in that admirable spirit of Fair Play which marks American justice but which, like a pseudosmile masking implacable fury, must seem to a condemned man pitiless and sadistic beyond any death sentence. A year and a half ago, indeed, it appeared that Ben Reid would have his opportunity for redemption; the judge of the U.S. District Court vacated his conviction on the grounds that his trial had been “fundamentally unfair” because the police had exacted his confessions without informing him of his rights to counsel or, for that matter, of any of his rights. At this point Reid's attorney told him the good news: it looked as if he was going to live. This past September, however, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York took a different view: since counsel had not brought up the point of illegal confessions at the trial, Ben had in effect “waived his rights.” Thus the lower court was overruled—not without, however, a vigorous dissenting opinion by one of the justices, Judge Charles E. Clark, onetime dean of the Yale Law School, who said that the view that Reid waived his rights “borders on the fantastic in any human or practical or, indeed, legal sense.” Reid has just recently been granted a reprieve, until April 30, 1962, in order that his case may be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Especially in the light of Judge Clark's angry dissent, it seems likely that Reid's case will at least be accepted for review. Whether by these nine old metaphysicians, as Mencken called them, the legal point will be resolved in Reid's favor remains, as usual, a mystery. In any event, for Reid it has been a splendid ordeal. His present lawyer (who, incidentally, is also a Negro) has protested to the state, asking his removal from the tiny cell. After four years there, he contends, Ben's mind has badly deteriorated. Nowhere else on earth is a man dragged by such demoralizing extremes to the very edge of the abyss.
“The little man, despite the pratings of Democracy,” Judge Curtis Bok has written of the death penalty, “is still the scapegoat.” And he added this observation: “Someday we will look back upon our criminal and penal processes with the same horrified wonder as we now look back upon the Spanish Inquisition.” Should the U.S. Supreme Court turn down his appeal, I am told that there is an outside chance at least that Ben Reid—due to those considerations of environment and mentality which his lawyer initially argued for in vain—may have his sentence commuted by the State Board of Pardons. This is highly unlikely: the Board of Pardons has never yet commuted a death sentence of a man convicted under the same Connecticut law. But there is a chance. If this comes to pass and Reid is allowed to live, he will gain, aside from the fragments of his life, an ironic kind of victory: nothing could demonstrate more cruelly the travesty of justice which is capital punishment than this shabby and belated mercy, predicated upon the identical arguments which were advanced in his favor in a court of law nearly five years before. On the other hand, should the fact if not the spirit of justice be served, and Ben Reid goes to the electric chair one night this spring, it may be said that the soul which is taken will already have been so diminished by our own inhumanity that what shall be lost is hardly a soul at all, and that the death penalty—having divested a man not alone of his life but of that dignity with which even the humblest of men must be allowed to face death itself—has achieved its ultimate corruption. Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee! It is perhaps a late date in history to summon up the Gospel in behalf of a derelict Negro boy; having abandoned him, it does not become a Christian society to waste a shred of its jealously guarded piety upon him whom it has cast out into darkness. Only the condemned can truly know the heaviness of guilt, it settles upon their spirits like the weight of all the universe, and the quality of their bereavement is solitary and unique among humankind. To attempt to soothe this bereavement through Christian homilies would seem to be, like that final promenade with the chaplain whispering from Holy Writ, an act of outrageous hypocrisy. Yet somehow, try as we might to evade the verdict, we find ourselves being measured: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Until, searching our hearts, we can reconcile these words with the murder we inflict, in the name of justice, upon Ben Reid, and his fellows likewise outcast and condemned, we stand ourselves utterly condemned.
[Esquire, February 1962.]
* In 1982, there were nearly 1,000 American prisoners on death row. Although actual executions have decreased, the number of condemned has vastly increased, and the United States remains the single major Western nation in which the death penalty not only exists but is on the march.—W.S. (1982)