Reading accounts of the testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui leads me to wonder whether there aren't times in which killing is a rational act.
I take at face value his delight in the suffering of those transformed by the violence of the 9-11 attacks. Testifying in Alexandria, Virginia at his death penalty trial, Moussaoui told jurors "it make my day" to hear testimony of those recounting their agony and grief. "We want to inflict pain on your country," he said. And without question, he told the jury, he's prepared to kill as soon as possible.
A reporter for The New York Times seems to find it hard to take Moussaoui's statements at face value. "The ostensible reason for Mr. Moussaoui's testifying was to persuade the jury to spare his life," the reporter wrote. This is simply bad reporting. I doubt his lawyers wanted him to testify.
Moussaoui, like all defendants, has an absolute right to testify, and to say whatever he pleases, whether his lawyers like it or not. His public defenders' duty is to seek to save his life if they can. That can lead to strategic conflicts. Moussaoui appears to want death, and with it the bully pulpit to tell us off in a way not one of his contemporaries in hate has yet been able to. His lawyers want to spare his life, reasoning that life is better than death.
Yet for some clients, some of the time, death is preferable. Is that a choice they should be able to make?
Controversy abounded in Connecticut when convicted serial killer Michael Ross elected to throw in the towel, abandon further appeals, and go quitely into the night. His public defenders turned his desire to die against him, arguing that "death row syndrome" had undermined his will to live. Death was irrational, they contended. Ross reasoned it was preferrable to life in a box, and, one suspects, he enjoyed the attention his garnered.
In Moussaoui's case, "jihad syndrome" has created a comparable desire to die. So on and on the hearings go. Starring in his own melodramatic role as Martyr for a Day, Moussaoui gets his wish. Call it jury-assisted suicide.
The state should not kill. But I believe that because I value individual authonomy above the legal fictions we create to secure liberty. For some individuals some of the time, death can be a rational decision. Hence, physician-assisted suicide.
Moussaoui apparently wants to die. He fills me with disgust, and loathing over the fact that he can manipulate our jury system in such a perverse manner. Were I a juror, I would most likely oblige him and vote death. But, a small voice in me advices not to. Make him take his own life. He pretends to be courageous enough to kill others; let's see if he kill himself, in a small, quiet cell, out of the public's eye.
