Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah by firing squad in January, 1977 - the first execution in the U.S. after a nationwide 10-year moratorium imposed by the Supreme Court. Gilmore himself chose the firing squad rather than hanging. He had been convicted of two heartless and needless murders during a robbery even though the robbery victims fully complied with all of Gilmore’s instructions. He had started his criminal career as a 14-year-old car thief and had spent 18 of his 35 years in and out of prison. His father had been a known con artist and was an abusive parent. Genuine efforts to rehabilitate Gilmore failed even though he exhibited above average intelligence, some positive leadership qualities and considerable artistic talent. After his murder conviction and subsequent death sentence, Gilmore decided not to seek any routinely available appeals. His case became a “cause célèbre” among civil societies opposed to the death penalty in spite of Gilmore’s repeated objections to appeal from his sentence of death and his wish to end his prison career with his execution.
In 1975, Karen Ann Quinlan was 21 when she had a few alcoholic drinks and later took a Valium as part of a diet program. She went into a coma for more than 10 years as a result and remained alive only by means of extraordinary artificial medical breathing devices. Her physicians indicated little or no hope of improvement. Karen’s parents requested her doctors to disconnect her from any extraordinary medical devices as the most humane way to end Karen’s suffering and give her the “right to die with dignity.” Karen’s doctors refused her parents “end of life” request because state law prohibited them from doing so. Subsequently, Karen Ann Quinlan’s “right to die” case, like the Gilmore case, became a “cause célèbre” and made medical history.
What do Gary Gilmore and Karen Ann Quinlan have in common? They both faced the issue of dying with dignity but under entirely different circumstances and the distinction between their respective circumstances represents part of the reason for this article.
A man opposed to his own mortality is a struggle far more absurd than, ‘The Man of La Mancha’s’ servant, Sancho Panza, charging windmills with a saber. Yet we unyieldingly challenge this existential absurdity by extending life through science, technology, medicine and an abiding faith in the wisdom and guidance of providence. Indeed, while we all know we must die someday, many of us, somewhat unconsciously perhaps, believe that a providential exception will be made in our own particular case. Occasionally the absurdity of the struggle looms so compellingly large that we lose all hope for any meaningful or dignified future. The parents of Karen Quinlan prayed for the death of their beloved, comatose daughter to release her from what they and many others deemed a useless, undignified, vegetable existence. Gary Gilmore himself objected to any appeal from his death sentence to hasten the end of a useless life of imprisonment.
Many condemned men and women survive death row for a decade or more by exhausting a plethora of court appeals. Nevertheless, each new unsuccessful appeal and subsequent rescheduled execution date produces greater feelings of anxiety, abandonment, despair, frustration and ultimately a need to finalize the inevitable.
Gary Gilmore faces lifelong imprisonment and like Karen’s parents, he appeals for the right to “die with dignity” rather than endure a hopeless lifelong imprisonment. Yet, Gilmore is not terminally ill and his struggle admits of an appeal not only to God but to men.
The life of this murderer may not be important when weighed against the crime he has committed. But, the way by which he dies is of the utmost importance. Condemned men and women develop a keen sense of the shrinking field of time on which they must come to terms with the purpose and meaning of life. No
precisely-timed ritualized killing of Gary Gilmore need remind us of our own sober search.
The condemned will be seated on a platform with a black hood covering his face and a white target pinned to his chest. Two stage lamps, one on each side of the condemned, will illuminate the willing target. Five marksmen will be hidden 30 feet upstage in this theatre of the absurd, behind a burlap screen while an audience of a dozen witnesses look on from the side. What a pity only these twelve will benefit from the deterrent effects of this dramatically macabre stage-set? On the contrary, let it blaze across every TV set in the nation in living color and print its indelible image of the ultimate retribution on all impressionable minds - especially our youth - and in particular the minds of Gilmore’s two invited guests, one of whom is his girlfriend. And as a fitting complement to this series of ironies, a licensed and presumably board certified physician will examine Gilmore at precisely the end of his crime-ridden life - consistent, of course, with the medical ethic, “First, do no harm.” Needless to say, the good doctor, under these peculiar circumstances, could hardly be doing any “good”(?).
Not only will the state of Utah have bestowed upon itself the dubious distinction of “staging” the first execution in this nation in almost a decade, but it will have in the minds of many Americans, lent Gilmore a hand to commit suicide (the right to die). A nation seeking to spread its political philosophy to developing peoples around the globe cannot restore the most extreme of punishments without ushering in a darker age in the history of man’s treatment of man. Even the tenderhearted justice of late 19th century czarist Russia will shine as a beacon of mercy in that kind of darkness. Only several hundred met death at the hands of the executioner during all the repressive decades of Czar Nicholas II’s autocracy. Even now, hundreds wait on death rows of U.S. prisons. If there is a message in all this killing why is everyone hidden behind black hoods, burlap screens and remote prison walls? Let us be proud of our institutions of justice and if we cannot be proud of them let us abolish them forever.
Karen Ann Quinlan’s case continues to raise questions of moral theology, bioethics, euthanasia and civil rights, ironically some of the same questions we could raise in the Gilmore case and the death penalty.
Ultimately, the death penalty is a cockamamie of contradictions wherein doctors certify the taking of human life, pharmacists concoct elixirs of death, the clergy urges the condemned to go willingly (suicide?) to their fate, and correctional (?) personnel often gird against their natural instincts toward mercy and humanity and methodically grind the machinery of death.
In Albert Camus’ watershed existentialist novel, “The Stranger,” Muersault, the central character and a condemned murderer in French Algeria awaits execution by the guillotine. Muersault himself, even while fantasizing an elaborate, desperately brilliant escape as the time set for his execution relentlessly and inevitably approaches, realizes that he resembles a patient more than he does a prisoner. It is in the best interests of “the patient” to cooperate with the treatment imposed by penal society’s most ghoulish machinery of death rather than risk the possibility of a botched and even more painful death.
If, however, we need a more practical, pragmatic or political approach for burying the death penalty, we need not look very far. No nation in the Americas has executed anyone in the last 14 years except the United States (11 in 2022). Even in the U.S., Virginia became the first southern state and the 23rd U.S. state to ban the death penalty. Far more importantly, states without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates/1000,000 population than states which impose it - the difference in those rates have averaged almost 40% lower in non-death penalty states for many, many years. No nation in Europe imposes the death penalty, not even Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, except Belarus. Globally, 144 nations have banned capital punishment, either in law or practice, 2/3 of the world’s countries.
“The Death Penalty: can we LIVE without it? Apparently, the entire civilized world and even many not so civilized “can LIVE without it.”
Art Siegel resides and works on his tree farm in Walton. Sustainable and productive stewardship are his primary goals. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Master of Science in Education at Wagner College and a Master of Science in School Administration. He is a retired English teacher and dean of students, certified tree farmer with the National Tree Farm System, Master Forest Owner and filmmaker (EmArt Productions Ltd). He is producer of the films, “Parcelizing the Catskills and the Boiled Frog Syndrome,” “Escape from the Holocaust” and others. He produced documentary films about pilots of the Eighth and Ninth United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in the European Theatre of War during WWII.
