How Much Retribution Is Required?

In the box where I post my blog on Facebook each week, there is a question. “What’s on your mind?” It says.

This week, the F B question is daunting because what is on my mind, what I cannot seem to release, is this question: Should twenty-one year-old, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Boston Marathon bomber and murderer, when convicted---and there is no doubt that he will be--be sentenced to death or receive life imprisonment without parole?

As you probably know, in order for him to receive the death sentence, the jury would have to be unanimous.

 Although I am not frozen into this view, generally speaking I am opposed to the death sentence. How can we revere life itself—the essential, God-given life force--and at the same time deliberately extinguish it, no matter how twisted the human being who contains that life has become?

Possibly the death sentence gives some families a kind of closure?  It is certainly less costly to the taxpayer than life imprisonment. According to a study done in 2010 by an organization called The Price Of Prisons, the annual cost per prisoner ranges, depending on the state, from $31,000 per year to $60,000. And that data is five years old.

I spent a year working in a holding jail in Ohio. A holding jail is a prison in which the inmates are incarcerated while they await trial and/or sentencing. This jail time can sometimes last a year, maybe even more and was known to the inmates as doing “hard time” because they could not get out of doors for exercise, nor were there were programs or a library. They just sat. So a steady group of them came to our rather feeble—I thought— weekly drug abuse program in hopes that their sheer physical presence might elicit a positive comment from one of us to the sentencing judge when their turn came up.

In fact, drugs were easily come by and were the jail population’s major recreation. I learned much about the nature of prison life from these men, many of whom were two and three timers who, hoping to shock me, told me prison stories of sadism and appalling brutality. I learned not to shock easily.

From what I heard and, I might add, from movies we have all seen, should the jury in Boston decide to punish Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by life imprisonment, he will do very hard time. Given his youth, his looks and the national public outrage against the act of terrorism he committed, in all likelihood he will be repeatedly sodomized, beaten, perhaps even brutally murdered while he is incarcerated. This is possible even if they put him in solitary for life. 

Acknowledging that no punishment can possibly bring back the three people whose lives were lost, or return to health and wholeness the two hundred and sixty-four people who were injured in drastically life altering ways, what do you think is the appropriate punishment for Tsarnaev?

In my view, the most severe punishment we could inflict on this unrepentant young man is life imprisonment without parole. And, although I disapprove of the death penalty, in this case I think that death by lethal injection would be merciful compared to life imprisonment. Is mercy called for? How much retribution do we require and what sort of punishment will satisfy our sense of justice?

My natural inclination leans toward mercy. But, then, I am not the mother of that little boy.