When Someone is Driven to Murder, Where Does the Responsibility Lie?
It’s been a very long time since someone called me a bleeding-heart liberal, a label that was never complimentary and always carried with it a connotation not simply of weakness, but of cowardice as well. To be called a bleeding-heart liberal was to be accused of a moral failure, an unwillingness to hold the line between right and wrong, good and evil. It was to be dismissed as someone who thought personal accountability for wrongdoing was trumped by the sociological or psychological explanation for why that wrongdoing occurred. I do not think this is true, and I wrote about it back in 2010, in a blog post called Killing Rage, which takes its title from a book by bell hooks and deals with the story of Omar S. Thornton, who killed himself after killing eight people in Manchester, Connecticut.
Thornton drove a truck delivering beers for Hartford Distributors. He’d been called into a disciplinary hearing on the morning of the shooting, Tuesday, August 3rd, after having been accused by company officials of stealing beers. They offered him a choice between resigning or being fired. Instead, he opened fire. When he was done shooting, eight people were dead, two were wounded, and he placed a call to 911 because he wanted “to tell my story, so you can play it back.” He’d been, he said, racially harassed at his workplace to such an extent that he’d had no choice but “to take [things] into my own hands and handle the problem.”
In my post, I tried to draw a distinction between the need to understand Thornton–assuming his account of racial harassment was true–and the need to hold him accountable for the murders he’d committed. As I did then, I recognize now the difficulty in making this distinction, since acknowledging that someone like Thornton might also have been a victim can make it feel like we are placing him on the same level as his victims. It can make it feel like we are forgetting the fact that the people he killed no longer exist because of him, and so I will say again what I said back in 2010. Since I do not want to lose sight of the fact that those eight people are gone, I would like everyone reading this to pause here and go read “Remembering Lives Lost in a Warehouse Rampage,” an article in The New York Times that memorializes their lives.
Nature VS. Nurture
That act of remembering, however, important as it is, is not an adequate response to the question raised by the fact that Thornton’s actions may have their own internal logic. For if the murders he committed are at least one logical consequence of the depredations of racism; if, to put it another way, the racism he experienced turned him into a man capable of committing such murders; if, in other words, the racial hatred he could not escape made him the enraged and murderous Black man our racist stereotypes teach us to fear, then how responsible is he really for the fact that he became that man and what does it say about us if we are unwilling even to ask that question? (Which, I would add, is a very different question from asking how responsible he is for the lives he took.)
Broadly speaking, of course, this question is part of our ongoing debate about nature versus nurture. In other words, was Thornton-the-murderer primarily a product of his environment or was the choice that he made to kill something to which he was predisposed by the genetic facts of his birth? Or was it a combination of both? The answer you choose will have broad implications for the laws and policies you establish to deal with people like Thornton.
Sa’di Says
You might not think a 13th century Iranian Muslim poet would have much to say about this, but there is a religious version of the nature versus nurture debate, which might be called divine omnipotence versus the free will of human beings. Are we, in these terms, as moral people, the sum of our choices, responsible and accountable to God and other people for each and every one? Or are we what God has made and knows us to be, already and inescapably destined to live out the logic of our creation? Few if any people who believe in the monotheistic god stake out the extreme position on either side of this discussion–it’s not much of an issue for polytheists–which means that all monotheistic believers ultimately confront the same dilemma. On the one hand, and perhaps most obviously, if human beings really have free will, then it is logically impossible for God to be omniscient. On the other hand, if God’s omniscience in any way impinges on free will, then it is God, not us, who is ultimately guilty of the evil we do. Not only could we not help it, but God knew it was going to happen and did nothing to prevent it.
Sa’di captures this dilemma in a story:
An unjust king asked a pious man’s advice about the best way to worship God. “For you,” the man replied, “it would be best to sleep half the day, reducing by half the harm you do to your people.”
I saw a tyrant sleeping half the day.
“If sleep can clear his mind,” I said, “it’s good;
but if his slumber only keeps us safe,
he’s being lazy. His death is safer still.
On the surface, Sa’di sounds here like he’s writing a stand-up routine. The pious man’s response is precisely the kind of truth-speaking that the best comics use to make us laugh at ourselves while he or she exposes a serious social issue. Underneath that truth-speaking, however, is the assumption that the unjust king will always be unjust, that he is the way he is because God made him that way. So it’s not so much that he won’t change, but that he can’t. The pious man prescribes sin-reduction as the form of worship to which this king should aspire because he doesn’t think anything else will make a difference, not in the king’s life and not in the lives of his subjects.
Sa’di, however, then pushes the joke even further. Imagining a tyrant who does indeed sleep half the day, Sa’di suggests that if “sleep can clear [that tyrant’s] mind,” if it represents the possibility of real change, of true repentance–or, to put it another way, if it represents evidence that the king is exercising his free will in order to change–then the sleep is a good thing, an authentic form of worship. On the other hand, if the tyrant’s half-day sleep is only a preventive measure, if it does not result in the kind of change that would end the tyrant’s tyranny, then what, Sa’di asks, is the point? Why should he, or we, be satisfied with half measures?
These days, we confront this question, though we rarely put God at the center of it, when we debate the relative merits of, for example, life in prison versus the death penalty, or when we perform thought experiments that ask if the world would be a better place if someone like Hitler had never existed. The whole Terminator series of movies was predicated on this question, as was Minority Report. I don’t have an authoritative answer–I don’t think anyone does–but I know that we do ourselves an injustice if we fail to respect the full complexity of the question.
Interesting post!
When you say
an appropriate response would be that we are willing to ask the question, at least to some degree. In fact, we already do (in the context of insanity defenses and sentencing, as well as overall defenses.) But we have also collectively decided that some things that may be relevant in real life are simply treated as irrelevant in the justice context. Or that they may be too difficult to prove, or raise too many collateral problems.
I don’t think this is really accurate, at least not in this case. Very few people–I doubt there are much more than a handful–would suggest that mass murderers are biologically predisposed to commit mass murder in any detectable sense; almost all people would acknowledge that some combination of nurture and free will are primarily if not almost entirely at fault.
So the question is really a part of our ongoing debate about nurture. More precisely, what effects can (and/or should) receive consideration when we judge folks? Should they count for positives only, negatives only, or both? And what are the limits of the practical effects, when it comes to things like evaluating it, and judging it, and fairly applying those rules?
Or, given that we are in a system which is based on an assumption of free will: at what point do we cut people loose to swim or sink?
Well, that’s certainly something I agree with. FWIW, if you want to think about this in a not-entirely-theoretical way you might check out http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2014/08/10/like-the-ostrich-that-buries-its-head-in-the-sand-mr-holder-is-wrong-about-data-driven-sentencing/ and http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2014/08/13/more-about-ag-holder-as-an-ostrich/ and http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2014/08/14/more-ostrich/ in which federal district court judge and a lot of high level experts are discussing some related issues. (and really interesting ones, like, say, “how, if at all, should we use class membership as a factor in determining someone’s sentence?”)
Huh? Most serious opposition to the death penalty has to do with one of three things: (a) a general moral belief that sane people should not deliberately kill other people when they can avoid doing so; (b) the real fact that we have an alarming tendency to execute lots of people who are not actually guilty; and/or (c) issues related to redemption and reconciliation, which are obviously impossible when you’re dead. None of those are nature/nurture unless you really stretch things.
At heart, I think the real issue you’re looking at is whether environmental factors should be considered…. and on one, the other, or both sides. (to continue with another rape analogy, just because it’s such a common crime to discuss on Alas: how do you distinguish between “excused because his environment made him likely to murder” and “excused because his environment made him likely to rape?” After all, the “product of environment” excuse applies to everyone else, not just black men. You see the problem.)
So in that sense I think you may be missing the forest for the trees; the practicalities of having some sort of consistency in our application of justice often has to take precedence over specific analyses. Even when the specific analyses might, in some cases, produce individually preferable results, the usually cannot be sustained en masse.
(Also, having left this for last as not to distract: the question is… delicate. This was someone who was a confessed and convicted murderer. So discussing it in a context which would suggest that he should not have been convicted of murder is difficult to do without a lot of qualifications.
I’m not so sure you pulled it off back then. Think of all the qualifications that a feminist man might make on Alas when discussing, say, issues relating to due process or defenses for an accused and as-yet-unconvicted rapist. Then triple them: once because you’re discussing blame and final outcomes, as opposed to process; once because he was criminally convicted after a confession, not merely accused; and a third time because you’re discussing intentional mass murder instead of rape. Frankly, I don’t think you got there in the “Killing Rage” post. You try to suggest you’re not really blaming the victims and that you’re not really excusing the shooter, but it comes across more as “this rage and actions were arguably reasonable, so we should understand it on principle” and less as “this expression of rage was horrible, unreasonable, and unacceptable but we should probably try and understand it as well as necessary in order to be able to stop it in the future.” The first perspective would have been a better fit for something other than mass murder, I think.)
Oh, great — the substitute time machine only goes in reverse. Can anyone else lend me a hand?
Well, somebody did. I was sent back to this century to kill her before she blabbed. Now it’s done, I can’t find my time machine. A little help, anybody?
His death is only as safe as his successor. Better to have a tyrant that sleeps half the day than to kill him and see him be replaced by a tyrant that doesn’t. (Dictators that aren’t tyrannical often don’t stay dictator very long, and whether tyranny is preferable to ongoing civil war is still an open question.)
[/missing the point]
G&W:
You may be right that I got a little too caught up in the nature vs. nurture rhetoric and kind of muddied things up in this post more than was necessary, but this:
kind of misses the point, I think. The fundamental question we ask when we talk about the legitimacy of the death penalty is whether we believe there can be people whose crimes or so heinous that their complete absence from the world will make the world a better place to live in, regardless of anything mitigating that might be said about those people as individuals, and that is, at its base, the question that Sa’di’s story addresses—though it does so in a context that is quite distant from our own. I sill think this question touches on the whole nature vs. nurture debate in ways that you are missing, but since I did not really set that up clearly in the post, I’m not going to try to address it in a comment.