Cintra Wilson, SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
Sunday, July 13, 1997

I was watching a rerun of "The Simpsons" one evening when the show was interrupted to broadcast live, from a New Jersey courthouse, the sentencing of Jesse Timmendequas, the convicted child molester who strangled and raped 7-year-old Megan Kanka. The camera tore in for a super-close-up on Timmendequas' blank face and tried to climb inside his flat shark eyes, while the jury foreman read off a list of their votes.

I thought of all the kids who must be watching "The Simpsons" with me, watching adults ceremoniously decide that another adult must be killed. This was presented as Must-See TV, and it felt pornographic: Oooooh, ogle the monster as he's condemned.

Whatever his childhood was like, no matter how many times he may have been sodomized and mangled and humiliated, the jury decided it wasn't enough to mitigate his crime, and they voted unanimously that he should die by a lethal injection.

America, despite having plenty of other problems, assembled in the town square of television to hysterically stone another diseased scapegoat.

Chief prosecutor Kathryn Flicker sank any sympathy the jury may have felt for Timmendequas' brutal childhood and subsequent insane crimes by posing the question: "Where does individual responsibility fit into this whole scheme?"

But "individual responsibility" is an inappropriate term to use in the case of a person who has such a severe mental aberration that it compels him to do terrible things.

When, as a society, we fail to recognize the rape and murder of a child as the acts of a truly unwell mind, we somehow condone them by inferring that they could ever be the product of a SANE mind. We are, in effect, saying: we ALL have powerful impulses to rape and kill little girls, every day - the rest of us just know how to control ourselves. You're just lazy; you're just selfish. You're just irresponsible.

To deny that Jesse Timmendequas is sick is to deny that he was ever an abused child himself. Something in him grew up blackened and gnarled. It doesn't take a shrink to deduce that in the defenseless little Megan, Jesse T. saw HIMSELF - the self that he hated, and that his parents hated and molested and hurt - the victimized self that was now compelled to externalize and destroy. He would certainly continue to ruin little girls if he remained out on the street, because he is insane.

The defense team's main theme, "Do we kill the mentally ill in this country?" definitely wasn't as Hollywood-sexy as the royal grief of the Kankas and the blazing moral righteousness horrific crimes excite. Jesse Timmendequas is not a charismatic human being. He's an ugly, perverse, weaselly, hellborn little wretch, who was never loved by anyone. When he begged for his life, his plea was completely upstaged by the camera-ready Mr. Kanka and his prepared speech about the wonderful little girl who loved the color pink, stolen from them forever by this dirty little beast. The jurors and
the TV audience were caught up in his opera, his quest for what his wife called "The Ultimate Justice" to somehow compensate for his loss. And the press rolled gleefully into an orgiastic lather of revenge, milking the bathos and drama and steering away from any objective analysis.

The front page of the New York Post said "We'll watch him die" and showed the Justice-Has-Been-Served faces of the Kanka parents. "I'll be in the front row," said Mr. Kanka. "It's not revenge" Maureen Kanka kept telling the press. "God forgive me, but I think he deserves it," said her neighbor. Why would they feel the need to ask God for forgiveness or somehow explain that it "wasn't revenge," if they knew that Timmendequas' death was really RIGHT? Anybody who has ever seen somebody they hate get their just desserts knows what a foul joy it is, but Americans love to see their fury quenched by
ultraviolence, and there will be plenty of people sorry on Aug. 5 that the lethal injecting of California death row inmate Thomas Thompson isn't simulcast live on all three major networks.

Revenge is an unhealthful thing, a thing that America feels it deserves, an "OK" vice like steak and whiskey and cigars.

To want to watch a man be killed is to be party to the same animal bloodlust and skewed rationalizations that fueled Timmendequas in the first place - to kill him is really to join hands with him; to join him in HIS low arena, participate in HIS game, and be just like him. Death is not justice. When people cease to exist, they are not suffering for their crimes or understanding anything.

Timmendequas' death, the Kankas admitted, wouldn't bring them "closure." Parents of slain children can't feel any relief from their despair, and revenge is too dark and low and greedy to touch the finer feelings of loss that accompany such a tragedy. Some parents of Timothy McVeigh's bombing victims spoke out, days after his death sentence was pronounced, to this same effect: His death would not help them or bring their loved ones back. The death penalty is just as gory and pointless, just as barbaric, just as meaningless, as the crimes Timmendequas or McVeigh or the Unabomber committed. America has made it "right" to kill those who kill; it feeds into our romantic notion of ourselves as gritty cowboys and
tough world cops. We can't have a plot without a murder, and we can't have a murder without revenge.

Killing people to show that killing people is wrong is wrong, sayeth the bumper sticker. Until the American system is able to provide us with a moral example other than the histrionic action-movie logic of eye-for-an-eye, we're as unthinkingly guilty and vindictive and desperately vicious as a pack of starving dingos. Unfortunately, several thousand Hollywood films on this theme will have to be blockbuster successes for this idea to ever really permeate the American psyche.