Vol. 2 No. 4 · 6 March 1980
pages 9-10 | 4381 words
Mailer’s Psychopath
Christopher Ricks
- The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
Hutchinson, 1056 pp, £8.85, November 1979, ISBN 0 09 139540 2
Gary Gilmore robbed the unresistingservice-station attendant, told him to liedown, and then shot him in the head. Twice, fast. The next day, Gilmore robbed the unresisting motel-manager, told him to lie down, and then shot him in the head. Once only, because the gun jammed, and so the man died slowly. Convicted, Gilmore chose to die as quickly as the law would allow, and chose to be shot. He had spent 18 of his 35 years locked up, and he wanted no more of it, knowing that whatever lifetime he might gain could be only a death-watch.He waived his right of appeal, and flung himself on the justice of the courts. That shook them. But in the end, in January 1977, after every stay of execution had been prised off by the combined efforts of Gilmore and his prosecutors, Gilmore’s bad life came to a good end. He was then brave. He was dignified. Generous, too, giving his eyes to someone young who needed them, and giving his pituitary gland to the sick child of his cousin Brenda, the woman who, though she still loved him and had been the one to get him released on parole only nine months earlier, had since turned him in and had given her undeviating testimony. Gilmore was generous, and humorous with it. ‘Well,Moody, I’m going to leaveyou my hair. You need it worse than Ido.’ Thy need, or necessity or whatever, is greater than mine.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 9 · 15 May 1980
From Henry Schwarzschild
SIR: Christopher Ricks, in his review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (LRB, Vol.2, No 4) appears to find Gary Mark Gilmore’s homicides, including both his murders and his own execution, impressive, gratuitous acts of existential self-assertion. Gilmore’s lethal solipsism elicits Mr Ricks’s (and Mr Mailer’s) patent admiration. Our efforts at the time to keep the State of Utah from premeditated, ceremonious killing strike Mr Ricks as ‘officiousness’. However that may be, Mr Ricks quite mistakes the ‘cruel parallels’ between a courtordained execution to which the victim consents (e.g. Gilmore) and medical euthanasia for someone already terminally ill or indeed dead by some clinical criteria (e.g. Karen Ann Quinlan).
In the latter case, the patient (or, in the event of the patient’s incapacity, a family member or next friend) decides not to postpone the inevitable death when either pain or deprivation of sense or feeling leaves nothing to life but its technical persistence. There remain complex questions of morality and of the state’s right to interfere with such private decisions. Suicide (or constructive suicide, or becoming an accessory to a suicide) presents virtually the same issues.
Gilmore, however, illustrates a situation fundamentally dissimilar. ‘Don’t I have the right to die?’ Ricks quotes Gilmore as asking. To begin with, phrased as imprecisely as that, dying is an inevitability, not a right. Did Gilmore have a right to commit suicide and thereby die at a time of his own choosing? Probably so, all other things being equal. But the question of suicide is utterly inapposite to the Gilmore case. What was at issue in the proposed execution of Gilmore was not suicide but rather judicial homicide. Gilmore did not decide to die: the State of Utah decreed that he should be killed. If, as opponents of capital punishment assert, governments ought not to have the legal power and do not have the moral right to kill human beings, then the consent of an individual to an act that the state is not entitled to perform cannot ratify such an act.
However much of a right Gilmore may have had to die (i.e. to commit suicide), he did not have the right to have the state kill him. There is no such right. Certainly the State of Utah would not have heeded any claim of Gilmore’s that he had a right to live. The state takes charge of the right to live or die of persons convicted of a capital crime, the defendant’s rights to that decision have been extinguished, and the question that remains is what right the state has to kill a human being whose life and death are entirely within its control. We declare: None!
In the light of these considerations alone, we reject the imputation of having ‘officiously’ striven to keep Gilmore alive. Our strife, in any event, was with the State of Utah, not with Gilmore (who demanded to be executed); with the State of, Florida, not with John Spenkelink (who fought against his execution); with the State of Nevada, not with Jesse Walter Bishop (who merely refused to resist his execution). Resistance to the power of governments to kill people is not ‘officiousness’. The injunction ‘Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour’ (Leviticus XIX:l7) bespeaks the commitment of human-rights and civil-liberties advocates against tyranny and murderous government the world over.
Henry Schwarzschild
Director, Capital Punishment Project, American Civil Liberties Union, New York
