My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

by William Styron

  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 perip
heral, 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.”

 
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