Insight

A surgeon of justice retires.

If we rely on a cancer surgeon for recurring disease, it’s because we trust him to remove malignancies.

Crime is a cancer. Perpetrators grow like malignancies.

A judge is our surgeon in criminal justice. After 28 years on the bench, one is pulling off the surgical gloves and putting away the scalpel.

Calhoun-Cleburne Circuit Court Judge Sam Monk is retiring. He has sentenced six people to death and has sent at least as many to be locked away for a lifetime.

His grip on the balance has been firm, yet the years have changed his personal views. Monk, like a number of other judges in capital cases, has voiced his opposition — in retirement — to the death penalty.

Like those in other professions, he has been forced to sideline his personal beliefs in order to do his job.

This should be cause for unease. A man who has peered into the souls of the most repugnant criminals in this area no longer finds redeeming value in the death penalty.

More unnerving yet, he is not alone.

Justice Robert Utter, in a statement from his 1995 resignation after 23 years on the Washington State Supreme Court, put it more directly: “I have reached the point where I can no longer participate in a legal system that intentionally takes human life in capital punishment cases. We continue to demonstrate no human is wise enough to decide who should die.”

Monk, in part, is guided by his religion. Any New Testament Christian should have a few fundamental issues with a society murdering one of its own, he says.

Though there are clearly few similarities between Jesus of Nazareth and the sort who largely occupy Alabama’s death row, Christ, too, was sentenced to death.

Still, more than 70 percent of Alabamians strongly support the death penalty. Perhaps they find no conflict with their religion — or choose to ignore it.

Through their comments, Monk and others reveal that they are tired of carrying the cross for an imperfect system of revenge by death. Even if it’s the small cross: the syringe.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, in his dissenting opinion on Callins v. Collins, vowed that he would no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.” He recognized that despite its earnest efforts, the highest court in the land may not be the highest authority.

“Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed,” he said.

The surgeon and the judge alike tinker with the machinery of death. Only one professional has to campaign for re-election in a state that’s “tough on crime.”

When our social surgeons — our circuit-court judges — are carrying out an operation they believe is ineffective, we are only wounding ourselves for wounding’s sake.

Judges like Sam Monk are telling us what their careers have taught them: The death penalty, like surgeons’ “bloodletting,” is out of place in our time.

Nick Cenegy is a Knight Fellow of Community Journalism at the University of Alabama’s master’s degree program at The Anniston Star. He can be reached at npcenegy@bama.ua.edu.