What do you think now, Justice Scalia?
Leonard Pitts Jr. says the argument against the death penalty does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now!
I sit in a room of black paintings, listening to the walls of day open into darkness, when a shaft of light at the ceiling’s center moves into one canvas, creates an opening purple, rose, and what I hear instead of silence is a line, a poet’s voice,
God sent me to the sea for pearls.* If I could, I would follow the call glowing in the painting’s lower corner, enter the gray-black surface and sail the turbulence which is every hero’s sea. A boy I loved believed he could enter a rock with his thumbnail. He would trace the invisible crack in the stone’s surface his grandfather had polished that he might sail the darkness, find whatever he could in a rock formed by fire. I sit in a room of black paintings, chapel walls silent as stones, and as inanimate, until
God sent me to the sea for pearls becomes the storyline breaking out of time at the water’s edge, looking from the porch of the sea onto the sea’s dark expanse, and diving into that rhythmic infinite for the stone one must pull from the clay bottom, gray matter, the luminous rock within the stone of the oyster, the skull. The sea-stone is a pearl. But I meant to sing about the boy I loved who dreamed in his madness he had swallowed a pearl— a god making the stories of men, a man making the stories of gods, a boy building song out of story. I sit in a room of paintings no longer black, listening, and what I hear instead of silence is a line, a voice, the boy speaking: Every dream is ancient: A boy lives by the River Min in the province of Sichuan, gathers grasses for his living, and when one day he pulls from the soil a pearl tinged with rose, he buries it in his mother’s rice jar. Grass, rice, coins in abundance make a village covetous, and when they come to seize the boy’s treasure, he swallows the jewel, his belly burns with thirst until he drinks the river dry, and his back swells with scales and wings, the sky with rain, a mother’s heart with tears. This is the story of the dragon’s pearl, of a culture’s call for creation, and what belongs to a people belongs to the one man. The myth of a pearl becomes the story of a boy who wanted to die, to let the river enter him until he was cold as stone, until the stone of madness he imagined lodged in his skull could shine, illuminate a world. These are the paintings of a man who wanted to die, to penetrate stone until he could not see, a blind man wanting a second chance, second sight. These are the paintings of a man who wanted to live, to return from stone in a burst of light, rose-tinged, a pearl, a coin, a luminous other. This is the struggle between story and song. The pearl is the rock animated, the clay bottom resurrected and ascending.
God sends us to the sea for pearls,
for luminous stone, animated by the call of creation. The boy I loved wanted to die listening to the sea. He believed, in death, he could penetrate stone, enter the rock-hard earth with his thumbnail, rose-colored half-mooned cuticle of stone digging into darkness, into the blood-black river of his wrist. The boy I loved wanted to live, a pearl, a coin, a luminous other life he would invent, ancient life, beckoned by an ancient call. He believed he must die to begin again. I sit in a room of paintings purple and black and rose, listening to light, the voices of the dead swelling like a sea in the back of my skull, and I look at my hands, ask them for a spell, a god’s incantatory call to dust.
* God sent me to the sea for pearls
To the Honorable Antonin G. Scalia, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Dear Sir: Twenty-one years ago, your then-colleague, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, wrote what became a famous dissent to a Supreme Court decision not to review a Texas death penalty conviction. In it, Blackmun declared that he had become convinced “the death penalty experiment has failed” and said he considered capital punishment irretrievably unconstitutional.
The death penalty, he wrote, “remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination ... and mistake. ... From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”
You mocked him for this stance in an opinion concurring with the majority, invoking as justification for capital punishment the horrific 1983 case of an 11-yearold girl who was raped then killed by having her panties stuffed down her throat. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection,” you wrote, “compared with that!”
A few months later, the very case you had referenced came before the court. Henry Lee McCollum, a mentally disabled man who was on death row in North Carolina after having been convicted of that rape and murder, applied to the court for a review of his case. You were part of the majority that rejected the request without comment.
The demagoguery of your response to Justice Blackmun is pretty standard for proponents of state-sanctioned death. Rather than contend with the many logical and
God sent them to the sea for pearls. In memory of Ian Davidson
(1962-2012) irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, they use a bruteforce appeal to emotion. Certain crimes, they say, are so awful, heinous and vile that they cry out for the ultimate sanction. For you, Sabrina Buie’s rape and murder was one of those, a symbol of why we need the death penalty.
As you have doubtless heard, it now turns out McCollum was innocent of that crime. Last year, he and his also-mentally-disabled half-brother Leon Brown (who had been serving a life sentence) were exonerated by DNA evidence and set free, A few days ago, McCollum was pardoned by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.
The case against him was never what you’d call ironclad. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a confession McCollum, then a 19-year-old said to have the mentality of a child 10 years younger, gave with no lawyer present after five hours of questioning. “I had never been under this much pressure,” he told the News & Observer newspaper in a videotaped death row interview, “with a person hollering at me and threatening me ... I just made up a false story so they could let me go home.”
But he didn’t go home for over 30 years. You and your colleagues had a chance to intervene in that injustice and chose not to. Not incidentally, the real culprit avoided accountability all that time.
The argument against the death penalty will never have the visceral, immediate emotionalism of the argument in favor. It does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now! — when something bad has been done. Rather, it turns on quieter concerns, issues of inherent racial, class, geographic and gender bias, issues of cornercutting cops and ineffective counsel, and issues of irrevocability, the fact that, once imposed, death cannot be undone.
Those issues were easy for you to ignore in mocking Blackmun. They are always easy to ignore, right up until the moment they are not. This is one of those moments, sir, and it raises a simple and obvious question to which one would hope you feel honor bound to respond. In 1994, you used this case as a symbol of why we need the death penalty.
What do you think it symbolizes now? Email Pitts at lpitts@ miamiherald.com.