Master of his fate

In the spectacle of Timothy McVeigh misusing the justice system, the media and the public’s attention until his death, President George Bush offered one of the more insightful comments yesterday. “For the survivors of the crime and for the families of the dead,” the president said, “the pain goes on. Final punishment of the guilty cannot alone bring peace to the innocent. It cannot recover the loss or balance the scales, and it is not meant to do so.”

Some of the several hundred family and friends of the victims who watched the death on television might agree, many others probably would not, or at least would hope not. But the president’s comment raises an important question about the use of the death penalty. “Closure” is the popular word for what people who have suffered extreme emotional pain say they want from witnessing an execution. The president, who as governor of Texas oversaw perhaps more executions than anyone else, says closure is not what they get.

Justice, the president says, is what Mr. McVeigh got yesterday, but that is not entirely clear. For instance, how is it justice when a man is found guilty of killing 168 people and then decides he doesn’t want to wait around prison so tells the judge he wants to be executed in the next four months? Mr. McVeigh now will suffer no longer for his crime; those he wounded and the families of those he killed will go right on suffering. The scales of justice rarely balance exactly, but something about his volition, even eagerness to have his life ended made them seem particularly unbalanced in this case.

And just in case anyone missed this, Mr. McVeigh was good enough to leave a copy of “Invictus,” a poem by the 19th-century British editor William Ernest Henley. “Invictus” means unconquered, and the poem is full of the rousing lines (“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”) that made Mr. Henley famous during his time. Only in Mr. McVeigh’s case, it wasn’t his head that was bloody but his hands – and the blood wasn’t his, but his victim’s. But to a man who controlled his fate to the end, these facts may seem like minor details.