For months now, my students have been submitting reviews of one film/book: 우리들ì?´ íë³µí ìê° (Our Happy Time), which is, I’ve basically taken from their reviews and discussions, the Korean version of Dead Man Walking. The death penalty in (South) Korea exists but hasn’t been used for some time now, and this movie seems to have young people convinced it should be abolished.
What’s interesting is that I ended up objecting to the arguments the students made, because in general they were either sentimental, or based on non-demonstrable assumptions, or what have you.
If the death penalty is wrong, it’s not wrong because people might change — if it’s predicated on change, if change is the most important thing, the death penalty probably brings about more change than life imprisonment ever would. It’s not wrong because some people facing the death penalty evoke our sympathy, because sympathy and compassion are fickle things, not suitable for judging the morality and immorality of a justice system’s available responses to a crime.
I said that I disagreed with the arguments they advanced; and yet, I too don’t feel that a death penalty is something a civilized society levies of its criminals, even its worst ones.
Yet as I read Ritu’s post, rparvaaz: What I learned from Saddam Hussein, I found myself considering that, in fact, emotion does need to enter into the question. If an act is proscribed, it makes no sense for the society that proscribes it to then use it as a punishment. That it does stirs a kind of shock and disorder in people. We can sense an inner contradiction. Some people have neither the logic nor the emotional coherence to sense this.
Am I weeping for Saddam? No, I think he was a bastard. But to celebrate an execution… it still shocks me.