THE EVILS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A READING TOWARD STEPHEN KING’S THE GREEN MILE
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra In English Letters
By
SELVIE FEBRIANIE
Student Number: 024214027
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2007
i
The goal of human life is to serve and to show love and the readiness to help others. (Albert Schweitzer)
Human power to choose enables them to think like angel or demon, king or slave. Whatever the choices, it will be created and realized by their minds. (Frederick bailes)
OUR GREATEST GLORY IS NOT IN NEVER FALLING, BUT IN RISING EVERY TIME WE FALL (Confucius)
selvie’s collection
iv I dedicated this thesis for the following people who contribute much in my life: My dear parents ‘Mimom’ and ‘Pipop’ My dear sister ‘’Cim-com’ Opa Supit Lambertus Ngantung in Manado Tante ‘Ndut’
v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank you My Lord Jesus Christ, for always accompanying me in every condition that I face. I believe that in Your guiding only I could accomplish everything, including this thesis.
My deep gratitude goes to Dr. Novita Dewi, M.S., M.A. (Hons.) as my
Advisor. I am very surprised that I could accomplish my thesis in two months. I am greatly helped by your ideas and suggestions which are extremely valuable. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dra. A. B. Sri Mulyani, M.A. as my
Co-Advisor for detailed suggestions for improving my thesis.
My great and deep gratitude goes to my dear parents, Agung Widodo,
Bc.Hk and Sofie Yosefien Ngantung for being the best parents. I am very blessed to be your daughter. When I am feeling down, both of you always motivate me and make me strong. Your life experiences have taught me much. For my sister,
Bertha, thank you for accompanying me during my library study.
I truly thank to my friends in Pelita Group, Budi and Mas Yudho for helping me to finish my business. I would not forget to thank Pdt. Yusak E.W and
Mbak Arum who help me with the computer. My friends in GKI Prambanan, thank you for taking over my position and finishing my works. I thank also my friends in English Letters 2002, my ‘twin’ Dini, Shella, Ori, David, Swesty, Ferdi,
Thomas, Dodi, Meme, and thank you for English Letters Department Sanata
Dharma University. I do really appreciate all the helps given to me. God bless us.
Selvie Febrianie
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ...... i APPROVAL PAGE ...... ii ACCEPTANCE PAGE...... iii MOTTO PAG ...... iv DEDICATION PAGE...... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS...... vii ABSTRACT...... ix ABSTRAK ...... x
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 A. Background of the Study...... 1 B. Problem Formulation ...... 6 C. Objectives of the Study...... 7 D. Definition of Terms...... 8
CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL REVIEW ...... 10 A. Review of Related Studies ...... 10 B. Review of Related Theories...... 12 B.1 Theories on Character ...... 12 B.2. Theories on Setting...... 13 B.3. Theories on Narrative Reading and Plot ...... 14 B.4. Theories on New Historicism...... 17 C. Review on social condition in America in Depression Era ...... 18 D. Review on Capital Punishment ...... 20 E. Theoretical Framework ...... 25
CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY...... 27 A. Object of the Study...... 27 B. Approach of the Study ...... 30 C. Method of the Study...... 31
CHAPTER IV: ANALYSIS ...... 34 A. The Depiction of The Badness of Capital Punishment through the story of Characters and Settings...... 34 A.1.Lowering the Value of Human Life, Throwing Away Humanity...... 35 A.2. Unfair Trial...... 39 A.3. No Chance of Rehabilitation...... 41 A.4. Execution of the Innocents...... 44 A.5. Legalizing the Act of Killing ...... 46
vii B. The Contextuality of the Badness of Capital Punishment in The Green Mile with the Situation and Condition in America in Depression Era and with the World in General ...... 52 B.1. Lowering the Value of Human Life, Throwing Away Humanity...... 52 B.2. Unfair Trial...... 56 B.3. No Chance of Rehabilitation ...... 61 B.4. Execution of the Innocents ...... 64 B.5. Legalizing the Act of Killing...... 65
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION...... 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 76
APPENDICE ...... 79 Appendix 1: Summary of Stephen King’s The Green Mile...... 79 Appendix 2: The Story of Scottsboro Boys according to A People and A Nation...... 82
viii ABSTRACT
SELVIE FEBRIANIE (2007). THE EVILS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A READING TOWARD STEPHEN KING’S THE GREEN MILE. Yogyakarta: Departament of English Letters, Faculty of Letters, Sanata Dharma University.
Capital punishment has been an endless topic for debate as its practice has created pro and contra from its supporters and opponents. Many criminals are punished in the name of justice and law through the system of capital punishment. Nevertheless, something done in the name of justice and law is not always right or perfect. Depression era in America has been a witness from this kind of punishment. This study is to analyze the above issue by asking two questions: first, how the badness of capital punishment in The Green Mile is depicted through the story of the characters and settings. Second, how the badness of capital punishment is contextualized with the situation and condition in America during the Depression era and with the world in general as well. To do the analysis, several steps were applied. First, the primary data and the secondary data were gathered. The data consisted of Stephen King’s novel The Green Mile as the primary data. For the secondary data, the information about capital punishment, Depression era, and the situation and condition of the world in general was gathered. Second, a close reading was conducted both of the novel The Green Mile as the literary text and the information about capital punishment and depression era as the non-literary text. The theories which were used were theories of character, theories of setting, theories of narrative reading and plot, and theories of new historicism. The approach which was used was new historicism approach. From the analysis, it was found five evidences which support that capital punishment is bad. (1) The value of human life seems nothing once someone is convicted to die. His crime has lowering his life value. It is worsened by the status as the convicted person, the next corpse. There is no humanity in the practice of capital punishment although it is done in the softest way. It takes life not in the time decided by God. There is no way to return back for the convicted persons.. Although they are found not guilty later, it is already too late. Their life can never be brought back. (2) There is a possibility that capital punishment is unfair. Its unfairness is in law process in court and discrimination of racial status. In the discrimination of racial status, many Blacks got unfair verdict and treatment. Those who are not white are discriminated. (3) There is no chance for having rehabilitation. (4) It is possible that the innocents are punished. (5) Capital punishment legalizes the act of killing since it opens the paradigm that human can kill others although it is done in the name of justice and law. It becomes an example that killing others is allowed. This paradigm is very dangerous since human’s mind is able to store many information. Once ‘to kill other is allowed’ information is put in their minds, it will be there and can come out anytime without being realized.
ix ABSTRAK
SELVIE FEBRIANIE (2007). THE EVILS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A READING TOWARD STEPHEN KING’S THE GREEN MILE. Yogyakarta: Jurusan Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma.
Hukuman mati telah menjadi topik perdebatan yang tidak pernah usai karena prakteknya telah menciptakan pro dan kontra baik dari para pendukungnya maupun dari para penentangnya. Banyak penjahat dihukum dalam nama keadilan dan hukum melalui sistem hukuman mati. Walaupun begitu, sesuatu yang dilakukan atas nama keadilan dan hukum tidak selalu benar atau sempurna. Jaman Depresi di Amerika telah menjadi saksi atas hukuman semacam ini. Skripsi ini adalah untuk menganalisa permasalahan di atas dengan mempertanyakan dua pertanyaan: Pertama, bagaimana keburukan hukuman mati di The Green Mile dipaparkan melalui kisah para karakternya and latar belakangnya. Kedua, bagaimana keburukan hukuman mati dikontekstualisasikan dengan situasi dan kodisi di Amerika selama jaman Depresi dan dengan dunia pada umumnya. Dalam menganalisa, beberapa metode digunakan. Pertama, data utama dan data pendukung dikumpulkan. Data terdiri atas novel Stephen King The Green Mile sebagai data utama. Sebagai data pendukung, informasi mengenai hukuman mati, jaman Depresi, situasi dan kondisi dunia pada umumnya dikumpulkan. Kedua, pembacaan seksama dilakukan terhadap novel The Green Mile sebagai teks sastra dan informasi mengenai hukuman mati dan jaman Depresi sebagai teks non-sastra. Teori-teori yang digunakan adalah teori karakter, teori seting, teori membaca naratif dan plot, dan teori historisme baru. Pendekatan yang digunakan adalah pendekatan historisme baru. Dari analisis, ditemukan lima bukti yang mendukung bahwa hukuman mati itu buruk. (1) Tidak ada kemanusiaan dalam praktek hukuman mati walaupun hukuman tersebut dilakukan dengan cara yang paling halus sekalipun. Hukuman mati mengambil kehidupan tidak di waktu yang ditentukan oleh Tuhan. Tidak ada jalan kembali untuk para terdakwa mati. Walaupun kemudian mereka ditemukan tidak bersalah, hal itu sudah terlambat. Hidup mereka tidak dapat dikembalikan. (2) Ada kemungkinan bahwa hukuman mati itu tidak adil. Ketidakadilannya adalah pada proses hukum di pengadilan dan diskriminasi atas status ras. Banyak dari orang kulit hitam mendapat putusan dan perlakuan yang tidak adil. Mereka yang bukan orang kulit putih didiskriminasi. Nilai dari hidup umat manusia sepertinya bukan apa-apa sekali seseorang didakwa mati. Kejahatannya telah merendahkan nilai hidupnya. Hal tersebut diperparah dengan statusnya sebagai terdakwa mati, calon mayat. (3) Tidak ada kesempatan untuk mendapatkan rehabilitasi. (4) Ada kemungkinan bahwa yang tidak bersalah dihukum. (5) Hukuman mati melegalkan tindakan mengambil nyawa sesama karena membuka pola pikir bahwa manusia dapat mengambil nyawa sesamanya walaupun hal itu dilakukan atas nama keadilan dan hukum. Hal tersebut menjadi contoh bahwa mengambil nyawa sesama diperbolehkan. Pola pikir ini sangat
x berbahaya karena pikiran manusia mampu untuk menyimpan banyak informasi. Sekali informasi ‘mengambil nyawa sesama diperbolehkan’ dimasukkan dalam pikiran mereka, informasi tersebut akan tersimpan di sana dan dapat muncul kapan saja tanpa disadari.
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Capital punishment or death penalty is often the subject of
controversy. Opponents of the death penalty argue that life imprisonment
is an effective substitute for capital punishment that may lead to
miscarriages of justice, for example, wrong conviction. On the other hand,
supporters believe that the death penalty is justifiable. It can be argued,
however, whether capital punishment is right or wrong since it deals with
human life.
Talking about life is an endless topic. Human can be in the world
because they have life, their souls are alive. As Edward Koch states in his
essay that life is indeed precious (1996: 321). Although we occasionally
say that “ you can kill the body but not the soul”, it does not have any
meaning for people today, for people recognize others by identifying their
physical body. Those who are known although they had died long time ago
are people who can influence the world. Although their physical
appearances do not exist in the world anymore, people still recognize
them, such as Albert Einstein who had given his contribution to the world
through his scientific findings. But, how about them who are condemned
to die because of their criminal acts? What memory people will have about
them, since they do not have a chance to change their life in a better track?
1 2
The only thing that people will remember about them is the way they die.
The narrator in The Green Mile, the literary work to be discussed in this thesis, says, “ The only thing most of these people will remember about you is how you go out, so give them something good”(1996: 112). This quotation describes how ironic the life of the convicted person is.
A question will soon arise regarding the fairness of the punishment.
Should capital punishment be the last way to close the case?
Does it solve the real problem? According to an article entitled
“Justice and the Nature of Moral Community” in
(www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~tonya/spring/cap/group1.htm), each year in
America there are about 250 people added to death row and 35 executed.
The death penalty is the harshest form of punishment enforced in the
United States today. Once a jury has convicted criminal offence they go to the second part of the trial, the punishment phase.
Punishment is a kind of consequences for what the criminal had done in the past. We believe that every country has its own rules and laws.
The criminal is punished according to the law in the country where he or she committed crime. In the case of crime done outside his or her country, he or she will be returned to the country of origin and punished there. The question is what kind of punishment he or she will receive. The worse the crime is the heavier the punishment will be.
In most places, the practice of capital punishment is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, or as part of military justice. Capital 3
punishment is a part of contentious issue. Supporters of capital punishment argue that it deters crime, prevents recidivism, and is an appropriate retribution for the crime of murder. Opponents of capital punishment argue that it does not deter crime more than life imprisonment, violates human rights, leads to some execution of some who are wrongfully convicted, and discriminates against minorities and the poor.
It is still fresh in our memory about the execution of Fabianus
Tibo, Dominggus da Silva, and Marinus Riwu. They are three Indonesian people who were condemned to die by shooting because of the chaos in
Poso, which took more than 1000 victims. They were executed on 21
September 2006. Many people said that it was not fair since they only did the job that was ordered to them. Why did not government punish the one who created the chaos? But, it is useless to reopen the case since Tibo and friends had died while they were the key witnesses to find the real person behind the chaos.
Jeremy Bentham in his work “Rationale of Punishment”
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12565a.htm) says that death is regarded by most men as the greatest of all evils. As we know that evil is the source of all bad things. Dealing with evil will lead us into suffering.
The issue of capital punishment will be discussed more through this thesis by using a literary work, which is a novel. The novel being discussed here is a novel written by Stephen King entitled The Green Mile. 4
By seeing this issue from literature, it will hopefully change a paradigm of thoughts for the readers regarding capital punishment.
John Horton in Literature and The Political Imagination (1996) says that, “ Many such novels seem to speak, and some profoundly, about questions concerning the nature of human experience” (p.70). Literary works such as drama, poem, and novel are often used to reveal a certain topic. For some writers, it is enjoyable to record the thoughts or ideas in pieces of papers than to utter them directly and then in the next day people will forget about that. Horton also states that novels tell us how to live, how society should be organized, or what is right or wrong (p.70).
Sometimes, people do not care for what we are talking since it is a habitual activity. But, when people read a certain text and find something interesting there and learn from it, it will be a different case.
Literary works can be the way for the writers to criticize, or raise a certain issue in order to draw public opinion. A writer often hopes that the readers can give their opinions, concerns, or just attentions on matter or issue revealed in his or her work.
The writer of the present thesis would agree here that The Green
Mile is King’s response toward capital punishment.
The Green Mile was written in 1996 and considered as one of
King’s best novels, rich in details and characters. The story is very challenging and demanding. Set in 1930s at the Cold Mountain State
Penitentiary’s death row facility, The Green Mile is the ironic and tragic 5
story of John Coffey, a giant, solemn, and gentle inmate condemned to death for the rape and murder of twin-nine-year-old girls. Coffey is described as someone who only "knows his own name and not much else", and lacks the ability to do more complicated things. John Coffey is condemned to death because of raping and killing two little girls. Soon, he will be executed on an electric chair. It is a story narrated years later by
Paul Edgecomb, a superintendent who has the duty to help every prisoners spend their last days peacefully. It is his job also to make sure that every man walks the green mile to the execution with his humanity intact.
Edgecomb has sent seventy-eight inmates to their date with “Old-
Sparky”, but he is never encountered one like Coffey, a man who wants to die, yet has the power to heal. And in this place of ultimate retribution,
Edgecomb discovers the terrible truth about Coffey’s gift, a truth that challenges his most cherished beliefs.
The above story of The Green Mile is the proof that we cannot deny that, sometimes, human’s character and condition can be interesting subjects to discuss. The guards and the prisoners’s characteristics in The
Green Mile are defined well as well as the situation and the condition in the prison. It is also about the condition of the characters’s emotion, mental, moral, etc.
This thesis will focus mainly on the badness of capital punishment.
It is to analyze whether capital punishment is right or wrong to be done, even if the inmates are the most dangerous criminals. Here, the statement 6
of the right or wrong verdict about capital punishment will not be given.
However, the readers will let their minds find their own opinion whether
capital punishment is right or wrong through the founding in the analysis.
Therefore, the founding about the badness of capital punishment will be
listed, and it is up to the readers to define whether it is right or wrong to be
applied as a punishment system since the subject is human life. There have
to be a strong reason to support or to oppose the system of capital
punishment. As Barnet and Bedau states in their book Current Issue and
Enduring Questions (1996) that reason may not be the only way of finding
the truth, but it is a way we often rely on. By setting our minds to a
problem, we can often find reasons for almost anything we want to justify
(p.35). Reason is important in justifying something. A right thing can be
wrong when it does not have strong reason. On the contrary, something
wrong can be right when it has a strong reason.
B. Problem Formulation
Referring to the topic above, the writer states two problem
formulations in order to guide the analysis as follows:
1. How does King’s The Green Mile depict the badness of capital
punishment through the story of the characters and settings?
2. How is the badness of capital punishment in King’s The Green
Mile contextualized with the situation and condition of America
during the Depression Era and with the world in general? 7
C. Objective of the Study
The focus of the thesis is on the badness of capital punishment that
will be analyzed through the story. The badness is the same as the evil.
Since capital punishment has been an endless debate, the analysis is
focused on its badness although there are people who support also the
capital punishment.
It is noticed earlier that there are many capital punishments done in
order to punish the criminals. It does not happen only in one country, but
also in many countries. Every time this kind of punishment is done, it will
be a phenomenon. Debates soon emerge and continue for years.
Given the problem above, the first problem formulation is meant to
depict the badness of the capital punishment. Through characters and
settings in the story, the depiction of the badness of capital punishment
will be clear. Since the story is in narration, it is interesting to use the story
itself in the analysis. The characters become the means to analyze the
badness since the story in The Green Mile is rich in characters. It means
that The Green Mile describes many characters and they are told in
humane way although some of them are prisoners. The settings are used
also as the supporting means.
The next analysis will be on the contextuality between the novel
and the reality. The badness of the capital punishment that has been
depicted through the characters and settings is contextualized with the real
situation in Depression Era (the historical period where the story 8
happened) and with the world in general. The situation and condition in
the world in the past and in the present are used for meaningful
comparisons since the situation and condition always change from time to
time.
D. Definition of Terms
There are four terms to be defined in this study: ‘capital punishment’,
‘badness’, ‘contextual’, and ‘evil’.
1. Capital Punishment
According to John K. Roth in International Encyclopedia of
Ethics (1995: 118), capital punishment is the execution for a crime
on the grounds of justice and/or deterrent benefit to society. The
history of the practice raises the question of ‘cruel and unusual
punishment’. Execution has occurred through many ways such as
cruxification, hanging and burying alive. Today, the methods are
gas chamber, electric chair, and lethal injection.
There is another definition about capital punishment from
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It is stated that capital
punishment, or the death penalty, is the execution of a convicted
criminal by the state as punishment for crimes.
2. Badness
According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, the meaning
of ‘badness’ is the quality of being bad, while ‘bad’ is wicked, 9
evil, faulty and immoral. Therefore, the meaning of badness is the
quality of being evil, fault, and immoral. Since the definition is
negative, ‘badness’ is related to ‘not good things’ (84).
3. Contextual
The word ‘contextual’ is often heard. To limit the meaning,
‘contextual’ is defined according to The Concise Oxford
Dictionary. ‘Contextual’ means parts that precede or follow a
passage and help to fix the meaning. The other meaning is
circumstances in which an event happens (259).
4. Evil
The word ‘evil’ is limited in meaning according to English
Dictionary for Advanced Learners. ‘Evil’ refers to all the wicked
and bad things that happen in the world which causes a great deal
of harm to people. It is morally bad. Another definition is a
harmful or unpleasant situation or activity (294). 10
CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL REVIEW
This chapter is divided into five parts. The first part is the review of related studies which consists of criticisms from the experts and comments about the object of the study, The Green Mile; the second is the review of related theories; the third is the review of social condition of
America in the Great Depression especially on the issue of capital punishment; the fourth is the review of capital punishment; and the fifth is the theoretical framework.
A. Review on Related Studies
Since it is difficult to find the sources from the published books, many of the sources below are taken from the Internet site. However, for a balance, one source from a published book is applied.
In an article entitled “ The Green Mile”
(http://web.tiscali.it/luigiurato/king/greenmile.htm), a reviewer states that morally The Green Mile is a story about wonder and the faith in God. It is also about moral conflicts and about the death penalty. It is said that King himself does not give the readers his personal opinion about capital punishment. He just draws this issue and puts it in his novel. He says, ” but
I guess he against it because most of the inmates are described to be so human”.
10 11
To add, there is a review about the work and the topic taken from
(http://www.bookrags.com/shortguide-green-mile/copyright.html)
Because The Green Mile is an anti-capital punishment exemplum, characters are defined morally in the simplest terms. King emphasizes the fundamental humanity of the two men who are the first to be executed, Arlen Bitterbuck and Eduard Delacroix. While King tells the reader that the two men are murderers, he shows them speaking and acting with such dignity, love, and simple faith that one perceives their executions as evil, unnatural acts.
The two men are described in human way. Here, King implies his idea that capital punishment is wrong. He shows that idea through The
Green Mile. However, King does not show his disagreement on capital punishment directly. He shows it through the story of the characters and settings.
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), the author does not state directly that capital punishment is wrong. He raises a question, which is simple but deep in meaning, if God does really exist, why that kind of terrible thing could happen (298).
Another comments on The Green Mile come from Aaron as stated in (http://members.aol.com/tishede/king.htm). Aaron says that King uses his story as an effective vehicle for social commentary about racism and capital punishment, but without lecturing. Stephen King is the most talented writer alive today. His novel, The Green Mile, can deliver his idea about capital punishment.
In (http://www.siplyaudiobooks.com/displayBook.php?bld=1389),
Gary Kuhlken in Stockton states his opinion about The Green Mile. He 12
says, “I ordinarily I can’t stand Stephen King, but I really grew to like this story as I went along, I now know way too much about life on Death row”.
The Green Mile is also used to tell the readers about life on death row. It is more interesting to read a literary text and get some information from it than to read a non-literary text. However, with the theory which is explained later, the writer would like to make non-literary text is enjoyable to be read as well as literary text, since some people tend to choose reading literary text. Reading a story and getting information at the same time are more enjoyable.
The writer agrees with several comments above. It is wrong when people take other people’s life considering that everyone has the right to have life. In this thesis however, the writer emphasizes on the badness of the capital punishment. It is the evil of capital punishment. Evidence is more important than speech. It will be explained further in the analysis.
Besides supporting the already existent study about capital punishment, the writer adds on new perspectives.
B. Review on Related Theories
1. Theories of Character
According to Abrams in Glossary of Literary Terms (1981: 20), the meaning of characters are the person presented in dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with moral and 13
disposition qualities that are expressed in what they say-the dialogue-and what they do-the action.
Holman and Harmon also state their character definition that character is a complicated term that includes the idea of the moral constitution of the human personality, the presence of creatures in art that seem to be human beings of one sort of another (1986: 81).
Character is also defined as a description of identifiable type of person. The type of person can be seen from his or her speech, action, appearance, and manner (Baldick, 1990: 34).
2. Theories of Setting
Since the work describe the situation happen in 1930s, theory of setting is applied in order to help the analysis.
Robert and Jacobs start it with the theory. In their book Fiction: An
Introduction to Reading and Writing, Robert and Jacobs say that setting refers to the natural and artificial scenery or environment in which the characters in literature live and move (1987: 29).
Holman and Harmon present the other theory. As stated in their book A Handbook to Literature, setting as the physical, and sometimes spiritual background against which action or narrative (novel, drama, short story, poem) takes place. There are four elements to make up setting: a. The actual geographical location, its topography, scenery. And such
physical arrangements as the location of the windows and doors in a
room. 14
b. The occupation and daily manner of living characters. c. The time or period in which the action takes place, for example,
religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions through
which the people in the narrative move (1986: 465).
3. Theories on Narrative Reading and Plot
Narrative is often used in novel since it deals with story. It is the art of telling stories. Narrative makes stories alive and shows how one event led to another. In this part also, the theory on plot will be applied.
Narrative has close relation with plot.
Jonathan Culler in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
(1997) says that narrative structures are pervasive. He notes Frank
Kermode, another critic, about narrative. Frank says that when a person says a ticking click goes ‘ tick-tock’, we give the noise of a fictional structure, differentiating between two physically identical sounds, to make tick a beginning and tock an end. The clock’s tick-tock he takes to be a model of what people call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form. (79)
Peter Barry in Beginning Theory (2002) notes that narratology is about stories. He says that narratology is defined as the study of how narratives make meaning, and what the basic mechanisms and procedures are which all common to all acts of story telling (222-223). He adds that narratology is not the reading and interpretation of individual stories, but 15
the attempt to study the nature of the ‘story’ itself as a concept and as a cultural practice (p.223).
Peter Barry also puts another narratologist’s theory in order to make his book rich. Gerald Genette states six basic questions about the act of narration. a. Is the basic narrative mode ‘mimetic’ or ‘diegetic’?
‘Mimesis’ means ‘showing’ or ‘dramatizing’. It uses specified
setting and dialogue that contain direct speech. It is ‘slow-telling’.
‘Diegesis’ means ‘telling’ or ‘relating’. The narrator just says
what happens, without trying to show it as it happens. b. How is the narrative focalized?
Focalization means ‘viewpoint’ or ‘perspective’, which is to
say the point of view from which the story is told. c. Who is telling the story?
One kind of narrator is not identified at all as a distinct
character with a name and a personal history, and remains just a voice
or a tone.
The other kind of narrator is the kind who is identified as a
distinct, named character, with a personal history, gender, a social-
class position, distinct likes and dislikes, and so on. These narrators
have witnessed, or learned about, or even participated in the events
they tell. There are two kinds of this narrator. First, it is heterodiegetic.
Narrator is one who is not a character in the story he or she narrates, 16
but an outsider to it. Second, it is homodiegetic. Narrator is present as
a character in the story he tells. First person narrators may be either
heterodiegetic or homodiegetic. They may be telling someone else’s
story, rather than their own. Omniscient narrators are necessarily
heterodiegetic. d. How is time handled in the story?
Narratives often contain references back and references
forward. Sometimes the story will ‘flash back’ to relate an event which
happened in the past (analeptic). On the contrary, the narrative may
‘flash forward’ to narrate, or refer to, or anticipate an event which
happens later (proleptic). e. How is the story ‘package’?
First, a ‘single-ended’ frame narrative is one in which the frame
situation is not returned to when the embedded tale is completed.
Second, ‘double-ended’ frame narrative is one in which the
frame situation is reintroduced at the end of embedded tale.
Third, ‘intrusive’ is that the embedded tale is occasionally
interrupted to revert to the frame situation. f. How are speech and thought represented?
It may be a direct speech or indirect speech. The choice is
belonged to the writers. (2002: 231-239)
Every story must have a plot. Hamalian and Karl in The Shape
of Fiction (1978) define plot as “a group of chronological ordered 17
events that are also related to one another by cause and effect” (516).
Events are arranged in chronological order and they are related one
another by cause and effect.
4. Theory of New Historicism
‘ New Historicism’ was first introduced by Stephen Greenbalt in
1982. In his essay “ Resonance and Wonder”, Stephen Greenbalt says
“The new historicism obviously has distinct affinities with resonance; that is, its concern with literary texts has been to recover as far as possible the historical circumstances of their original production and consumption and to analyze the relationship between these circumstances and our own. New Historicist critics have tried to understand the intersecting circumstances not as stable, prefabricated background against which the literary text can be placed, but as dense network of evolving and often contradictory social forces. The idea is not to find outside the work of art some rock onto which literary interpretation can be securely chained but rather to situate the work in relation to other representational practices operative in the culture at a given moment in both in history and our own”.
Bijay Kumar Das in his book Twentieth Century Literary Criticism
(2002) states that the most important aspect of the New Historicism is the concern with the reading of the text which is determined by the ‘position’ from which the readers read it and the ‘context’ in which ‘test’ is written
(181).
New Historicism is defined well by Peter Barry in his book
Beginning Theory (2002). “ A simple definition of the new historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary 18
text, usually at the same historical period (172). In simple word, new historicism read the literary and non-literary text together.
To make it clearer, Peter Barry also puts another definition about new historicism in his book. This definition is offered by an American critic Louis Montrose. He defines new historicism as a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’ (172-173).
He also adds that the new historicism involves ‘an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary text’.
C. Review on Social Condition in America in the Depression Era
The Depression was a period where economic activity was stagnant
and at an all time low in many countries of the world. The effects of the
stock market crash of 1929 that ensued in Depression Era in the United
States lasted from the beginning of 1930 to the late 1930s.
According to several sources such as Our Nation From Its
Creation (1964), A People and A Nation (1984), and American Realities
(1981), the Great Depression is described as the following description.
The Depression Era with an economic downturn started in 1929
and lasted through most of the 1930s. Cities all around the world were hit
hard. Unemployment and homelessness soared. Farmers and rural areas
suffered as prices for crops fell by 40–60%. Mining and logging areas 19
had perhaps the most striking blow because the demand fell sharply and there were hardly any other alternatives.
Beginning in the United States, the Depression spread to most of the world’s industrial countries, which in the 20th century had become economically dependent on one another. People lost their jobs, homes, and savings, and many depended on charity to survive. In 1933, at the worst point in the Depression, more than 15 million Americans—one- quarter of the nation’s workforce—were unemployed. Therefore, people who had job would keep their job although the wages were low and the jobs do not fit with their wishes.
The impact of the Depression on individual was gradual. Most people remained unemployed, but each day thousands received severance slips. Unemployment increases from 4 million at the beginning of 1930 to 13 million in early 1933. Farmers, brandishing shotguns to prevent foreclosures, defied the law to defend their homes. In The Green Mile, the work to be analyzed, the Detterick family whose twin-little-girls are raped and murdered also has guns although they are cotton farmer.
Blacks, women, and the unskilled lost their job first. Whites and managerial personnel were let go last. Discriminatory practices based on race and gender were accentuated. Whites displaced many blacks as servants, and Atlanta fired its Blacks sanitation workers to replace them with whites. At this time, some boys and girls wandered on their own, living in hobo jungles usually populated by adults. People were all over 20
the roads. Everyone—Blacks as well as Whites—thought it was going to
be better over the next jump of the land. John Coffey, one of the
characters in The Green Mile, is also a wanderer since he has no family.
The court’s condition during the Depression was very bad,
especially for the Blacks. In America's history, capital punishment had
been assigned out of all possible proportion to Black inmates over White
ones, strongly suggestive of racist practices institutionalized within the
penal system. There was not much people can do during Depression time
except waiting.
Roosevelt, the president at that time, had policies that won the
support of labor unions, Blacks, people who received government relief,
ethnic and religious minorities, intellectuals, and some farmers, forming
a coalition that would be the backbone of the Democratic Party for
decades to come.
D. Review on Capital Punishment
Capital punishment is the lawful infliction of death as a
punishment and since ancient times, it has been used for a wide variety of
offences. The Bible prescribes death for murder and many other crimes
including kidnapping and witchcraft. By 1500 in England, only major
felonies carried the death penalty- treason, murder, larceny, burglary,
rape and arson. 21
Edward I. Koch, a mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989 and is still active in Democratic politics, states in his essay “ Death and Justice:
How Capital Punishment Affirms Life” that execution can never be made humane through science. It is not the method that really troubles opponents. It is the death itself they consider barbaric (1996: 322). Koch does mind on the method of capital punishment. Whether the condemned person is put to death painlessly, without ropes, voltages, bullets, or gas.
Killing is killing. The act of taking human life can be made in many ways according to the state policy. Whatever people call the method, killing is wrong. Koch also says that the execution of lawfully condemned killer is no more an act of murder than is legal imprisonment an act of kidnapping
(1996: 325).
In America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (except Israel) most countries still retain the death penalty for certain crimes and impose it with varying frequency
(http://www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk/shootinh.html).
According to (http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/issues/pu- sbd2.htm), there are several methods to do the capital punishment.
British style, hanging is an extremely quick process that is designed to cause instant and deep unconsciousness and also benefits from requiring simple and thus quick preparation of the prisoner. 22
Lethal injection may appear to be more humane than other methods, to the witnesses, but is a very slow process. It usually causes unconsciousness in under a minute but this does not always happen.
There is considerable debate and litigation going on at present as to whether the first chemical causes full unconsciousness. The biggest single objection to lethal injection is the length of time required to prepare the prisoner, which can take from 20 to 45 minutes depending on the ease of finding a vein to inject into, which is vital for a painless death.
The gas chamber seems to possess no obvious advantage as the equipment is expensive to buy and maintain, the preparations are lengthy, adding to the prisoner's agonies, and it always causes a slow and cruel death. It is also dangerous to the staff involved.
Electrocution can cause a quick death when all goes well, but seems to have a greater number of technical problems than any other method, often with the most gruesome consequences (This may in part be due to the age of the equipment - in most case 70-90 years old). To run the electrocution well, a cap has to be put on the prisoner’s head with a wet sponge inside the cap. The sponge should be in wet condition because it is used to deliver the electric. If the electric runs well, the prisoner will not suffer in a long time. On the contrary, when there is a trouble with the sponge, it is the same as burning the prisoner’s body alive. 23
Shooting by a single bullet in the back of the head seems greatly preferable to shooting by a firing squad in that it is likely to cause instant unconsciousness followed quickly by death rather than causing the prisoner to bleed to death, often whilst still conscious.
At the Roman time, there was crucifixion as the method.
Crucifixion was a method of inflicting capital punishment by nailing or trying malefactors to pieces of wood transversely placed the one upon one another. The incidents of crucifixion were that the criminal, after the pronouncement of sentence, carried his cross to the place of execution.
The criminal was next stripped of his clothes, and nailed or bound to the cross. The latter was the more painful method, as the sufferer was left to die hunger.
According to Encyclopedia of Ethics (1995), capital punishment is present in the earliest criminal codes and is probably as old as civilization itself. Hammurabi’s code, in the eighteenth century B.C.E., provided for capital punishment for a number of offences, including murder, putting a death spell on another, lying in capital trial, and adultery (118).
In America today support for capital punishment has become both a litmus test for political candidates and a practice that is increasingly under scrutiny even by persons who support it in principle. 24
Frank G. Kirkpatrick in (http://www.philosophy-
religion.org/kirkpatrick/capital-pun.htm) states that the issues were
simply one of the effectiveness and fairness of capital punishment, the
debate could be easily settled. It is manifestly unfair: African American
men (over 95 percent of whom were too poor to hire their own lawyers)
were almost four times as likely to receive the death penalty than
nonminorities. Eighty percent of people sentenced to death were
convicted of killing Whites even though minorities make up more than
half of all homicide victims. It is also increasingly clear that people have
been sentenced to death without adequate defense or a chance to have
exculpatory evidence presented during the increasingly restricted appeals
process.
As Abel Martinez in
(http:/www.cwrl.utexas,edu/~tonya/spring/cap/group1.htm) state in her essay
“ Capital punishment is a barbaric remnant of an uncivilized society. It is immoral in principle, and unfair and discriminatory in practice. It assures the execution of some innocent people. As a remedy for crime, it has no purpose and no effect”.
We live in world where people know that life is so important. Abel says that this capital punishment is only done by uncivilized society.
Justice can miscarry. Wrongful conviction of criminal homicide is possible to happen. 25
In the same source as Abel Martinez, Leslie Cantu states also in her essay about capital punishment as follows:
“The death penalty is wrong morally because it is the cruel and inhumane taking of human life. The methods by which executions are carried out can involve physical torture”.
A human being’s life does not belong to only the community. It is a part of the universal scheme of life. Everybody is placed in the world by the divine law for divine and universal purposes, and there is nothing that can give human the right to legalize the taking of life.
Taking others’ lives is morally wrong since every human being has the right of life. Unfortunately, one of the methods of punishment is capital punishment or death penalty. It is the method that requires the taking of the criminals’ lives. In short, the criminals must die as the compensation of their crimes. They must pay for what they did before no matter that now they have changed into better men.
During the Depression times, the number of capital punishment was
the greatest. According to the survey done by US Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice statistic, there were 1791 convicted to death.
E. Theoretical Framework
In order to make the analysis clear and understandable, several
theories are applied to help the writer in answering the problems stated.
Theory on character, theory on setting, theory on narrative reading and
plot, and theory of new historicism are applied. 26
Theories on character, theories on setting, theories on narrative reading and plot are applied to answer the first problem. The depiction of the badness of capital punishment in the story of the characters and settings are appropriate to be analyzed by the above theories.
In answering the second problem, theories of new historicism is applied. This kind of theory is applied to understand the situation in
America in 1930s and the world in general compared to the novel. By reading and understanding and later comparing the reality in 1930s, the reality in the world in general, and in the novel at the same time, the writer does a parallel reading to answer the second problem. 27
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
This chapter consists of three-parts of discussion. The first is the object of the study, second, the approach to analyze the work, and the third is method of the study.
A. Object of the Study
The genre of literature, which is being analyzed here, is a novel entitled
The Green Mile written by Stephen King. The Green Mile (1996) is a serial novel. It is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., with all six volumes in a trade paperback. More or less as a challenge, Stephen King published this story as a serial in six parts. Just as in Charles Dickens' time, the story was crafted while the book was already in production. In keeping with the serial concept, the first edition consists of six thin, low-priced paperbacks.
It is a fiction novel that contains the reality happened in the past, especially the condition and situation of the Louisiana State Penitentiary Death
Row during the Depression Era.
Since it first appeared, The Green Mile has been republished as a single volume with 465 pages. The first edition contains a section where the narrator speaks directly to the reader; the later edition contains an additional foreword. 28
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels. King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters.
The Green Mile was adapted by Frank Darabont for the screenplay of a feature film of the same name in 1999, directed by Darabont, starring Tom Hanks as Paul Edgecomb and Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award and The Golden Globe. While the novel itself won Bram Stoker Award in 1997.
The Green Mile has contributed much to the idea of capital punishment. It gets many responses from its readers and critics on how people suppose to react on the issue of capital punishment.
The main characters are the inmates and guards of the E Block on Cold
Mountain Penitentiary. The book has a clear narrative voice belonging to the captain of the guards, Paul Edgecombe. "The Green Mile" is the corridor from the cells where the prisoners live to the execution room beyond Paul Edgecombe's office. Similar corridors leading to execution rooms at other prisons are called the
"last mile". The linoleum flooring of this corridor is green. The story takes place in the 1930s (the book in 1932 and the film in 1935), but there is also a framing plot where Paul is shown as an old man in a nursing home, trying to exorcise the ghosts of his past through writing.
27 29
The story centers on John Coffey, an almost seven-foot Black man who is condemned to death because of raping and killing two small white girls. He is notable because of his size and also for his strange behavior; he is very quiet and prefers to keep to himself, he weeps almost constantly, and is afraid of the dark.
He is the calmest and mildest prisoner the guards have ever seen, despite his hulking form. Besides John Coffey, there are two other prisoners on the cell block during the main period the book focuses on. One of them, Eduard Delacroix, a convicted arsonist, rapist, and murderer, is small and cowardly. The other,
William Wharton, is tough and boasting, claiming to be a modern Billy the Kid.
When Paul looks even before the 1930s, he recollects about warding the Chief, a
Native American named Arlen Bitterbuck, and the Prez, a former CEO who killed a relative, hoping to collect life insurance money.
The story also features Mr. Jingles, a small and unnaturally intelligent mouse who befriends Delacroix. He appears much earlier than Delacroix, and
Paul speculates he was looking for the Cajun. The mouse learns various tricks and appears to follow commands; Delacroix insists that the mouse whispers things in his ear. After the two meet, Delacroix practically falls in love with the mouse, and
Mr. Jingles ceases his cell searching.
Over time, the guards realize that there is something else special about
John Coffey, as he is revealed to possess mystical healing abilities. These powers heal Paul's urinary infection, the warden's wife's brain tumor, and Mr. Jingles broken form. They are faced with the terrible truth that they must execute what 30
they call a "gift from God". They finally execute Coffey, but not before he passes on an unnatural lifespan to both Mr. Jingles and Paul. In the end, Mr. Jingles dies of old age at the age of 64 in Paul's nursing home, Paul reveals to the reader how his wife died, and we learn that Paul is 104 years old, and how he wonders how much longer he has got to stay. The book ends with this quote: "We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green mile is so long."
B. Approach of the Study
Since the thesis deals with the contextuality of capital punishment in fiction and reality, the approach, which is applied here, is new historicism approach. The writer has her own reason by using this approach since this thesis deals with two kinds of text, which are literary text and non-literary text. Both of the texts are compared each other in order to find the best solution to answer the problem formulations, especially problem formulation number two.
As Harvey Birenbaum from San Jose State University in his book The
Happy Critic (1997) states, “ This approach brings to the text specialized knowledge about political and other social circumstances of the period when the work was written. It challenges the traditional view of history as events of state, large scale movements, and the career of major figures” (222). Furthermore, Bijay
Kumar Das in his book Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (2002) states that the 31
new historicists emphasis on a new kind of reading of the Renaissance texts springs from the idea of ‘rehistoricizing’ the text in order to make it relevant to the present (172). Here, history is not used as the background of the story but history also has the role as the text.
Although The Green Mile is not written in the Depression Era, but this novel uses Depression Era as the setting of time, condition, and situation. The situation and condition in Depression can be seen through the story in this novel.
It is hoped by using the new historicism approach; the analysis can be easily understood. Therefore, the readers will recognize the writer’s intention to write this thesis and know why the writer chooses the topic. The important point is that the readers can understand the topic being analyzed.
C. Method of the Study
For completing all the sources, the writer conducted library research and
Internet browsing. In this method, there were two types of source, primary source and secondary source. However, since new historicism theory and approach were applied, there were two kinds of text, literary and non-literary text.
As the primary source and the literary text, the writer chose the novel written by Stephen King entitled The Green Mile. Close reading toward the novel was done since the familiarity with the novel was needed. There were two non- 32
literary texts which were chosen. The first book was Current Issues and Enduring
Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Argument, with Reading. This book is published in 1996, the year when The Green Mile is written. It was to see whether there was an influence or not from the situation in 1996 toward the writing of the novel. The second book was A People and A Nation: A History of
The United States which described about the condition and situation in 1930s. For answering the two problem formulations, several books were gathered as the references.
Some steps were done in order to finish the research. The first step was doing a close reading for the novel The Green Mile. The focus was on the characters, the settings, and how the capital punishment was done in the story.
The second step was finding some books as the references such as A Glossary of
Literary Terms, Literature and the Political Imagination, Writing with A Purpose,
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, An Introduction to Fiction, Beginning
Theory, The Shape of Fiction, Structure, Sounds, and Sense, Literature.
Introduction: Reading, Studying, and Writing about Literature, Fiction: An
Introduction to Reading and Writing, A Handbook to Literature, Twentieth
Century Literary Criticism, The Happy Critic, Our Nation From Its Creation: A
Great Experiment, and American Realities. Some essays taken from Internet were also read in order to gather the sources as complete as possible.
Several theories were used such as theories on character, theories on setting, theories on narrative reading and plot, and theories of new historicism. 33
Next, the writer also applied an approach to analyze the topic. It was new historicism approach.
The analysis was divided into two parts. First, it was to discuss the first problem on the badness of capital punishment. The second part discussed the second problem, i. e. the contextualization of the badness of capital punishment depicted in the novel and in reality.
As the last step, the writer drew a conclusion. The result of the analysis can be found in the conclusion. 34
CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
The analysis is divided into two main parts. The first part is the depiction of the badness of capital punishment in Stephen King’s The Green Mile. The badness of capital punishment is depicted through the story which is seen through the characters as well as the settings. Since there has been a study that discussed capital punishment from economic, politic, social, moral, and religious part, the writer chose other perspectives.
The second part of the analysis is the contextuality of the badness of capital punishment in The Green Mile with the situation and condition in America during the Depression Era and with the world in general. The situation and condition in the world in general, especially on the application of capital punishment, will be a valuable information in this analysis. In this part, the analysis is focused on the parallel reading between the novel as the literary text and the real situation in America during Depression Era and the situation in the world in general as the non-literary texts. The badness of capital punishment that has been depicted well in the first part will be analyzed through contextualization.
Whether capital punishment described in the novel is exactly the same, or different with the reality about capital punishment in America at Depression Era is analyzed here. This part will hopefully give a clear analysis about the evil of capital punishment.
34 35
A.The Depiction of The Badness of Capital Punishment Through the Story of the Characters and Settings.
A.1.Lowering the Value of Human Life, Throwing Away Humanity
Capital punishment makes the value of human life becomes low. There is no appreciation to the prisoners although they are, likewise, human beings. The prisoners are treated as being less human. In this story, it is done by Percy
Wetmore, one of the guards in E-Block. He is a new guard there. Considered his family relationship with the governor, it is funny that he chooses to work in a prison than other better places. Percy is young and brash, with a penchant for a cruelty and violence. He is bubble just waiting to brush. All the other guards who befriends with Paul Edgecomb, hates Percy.
He hesitated again, looking nearsightedly around almost as if expected to see that the walls had grown ears, before finishing: “Someone like Percy Kiss-My-Ass-and –Go-To-Hell Wetmore.”(66)
“ Huh,” Brutal said. “The day Percy Wetmore sits his narrow shanks down here at this desk will be the day I resign.”(66)
No one likes Percy because of his bad treatment to the prisoners. Percy also treats the other guards every time he experiences uncomfortable situations with them. He will report them to his uncle, who is a governor, so that they can be punished or even fired.
Percy has a trouble with one of the prisoners there. At least, it is what
Percy has in his mind. It is Eduard Delacroix, a little Frenchman. He has a mouse named Mr. Jingles. Delacroix’s mouse is one of the God’s mysteries. This mouse 36
has been a good company for Eduard Delacroix. Delacroix is sentenced to death because of raping and murdering. He quarrels with Percy since he always laughs at Percy’s foolness and because Percy always tries to kill his mouse. Anytime
Percy has a chance, he always tries to hurt Delacroix.
“Let me at im, let me at im!” Percy cried, lunging forward. He began to hit at Delacroix’s shoulders with his baton. Delacroix held his arms up, screaming, and the stick went whap-whap-whap against the sleeves of his blue prison shirt. (122)
Every time Percy has a chance to do something bad toward Delacroix, he will not throw that chance away. It seems that he enjoys it. it happens because
Delacroix is a prisoner and Percy is a guard. Percy thinks he can do anything as a guard. He acts like a real guard. Once the prisoners are sentenced to death, they will be considered died although they are still alive. It is what in Percy’s mind.
There is no difference between corpse and human being. Although Delacroix and the other prisoners are alive, sooner or later they will be executed and be corpses.
Therefore, in Percy’s mind, what is the difference between corpse and something that is going to be corpse? He treats them for those two different things the same.
Although the prisoners are still alive, their life values are nothing. It is up to the guard, like Percy, to treat them. It is clear described when Percy brings John
Coffey in to the prison.
It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of “Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!” (10)
Percy brings Coffey in to the block without respecting him. He ushers
Coffey and treats him likes he treats inanimate creature. Coffey is still alive, but 37
Percy considers him as a dead man. In Percy’s mind it is his role to be portrayed as a brutal guard. He emulates a violent man with arrogance and believes that he has to demonstrate his power over to the prisoners and he says and does as he pleases with little regards to others. Percy is excluded from the other guards because of his hateful and arrogant behaviour.
Since his hatred to Delacroix is accumulated, Percy begins to think that human life is not worthy, especially Delacroix’s life. It is described in the bad death of Eduard Delacroix. His execution is terrible. Everyone who can see this execution will agree that Delacroix’s execution is inhumane and cruel. It because
Percy sabotages the execution. Delacroix’s life seems nothing for Percy. He plays human’s life as if toy. In the night before Delacroix’s execution, a terrible event happens between Percy and Delacroix. It involves Delacroix’s mouse, Mr. Jingles.
It is possible because of this incident Percy plans to take his last revenge on
Delacroix. Paul Edgecomb describes it very clearly in his narration.
Just as Mr. Jingles reached the spool—to intent on it to realize his old enemy was at hand—Percy brought the sole down on him. There was an audible snap as Mr. Jingles’s back broke, and blood gushed from his mouth. His tiny black eyes bulged in their sockets, and in them I read an expression of surprised agony that was all too human. (261)
It makes Delacroix scream with horror and grief. Mr. Jingles lying on the linoleum. Percy leaves the dying mouse without feeling guilty to Delacroix. At that time John Coffey takes the mouse. With his healing power, John heals the dying mouse. Of course Percy knows nothing about it. He thinks that they play trick on him. Someone likes Percy will not forget about this. He is a kind of a 38
person who takes revenge for bad things that happen to him. This kind of person is dangerous since he cannot share his feelings to others. All uncomfortable moments drive him mad. His mind is full with negative things.
Delacroix is one of the victims of this kind of person. The execution, which is supposed to be the last way of the prisoners to leave the world in peace, turns into and awful and cruel execution, for example, when there is no water running down in Delacroix’s cheeks in last seconds nearing to the execution.
There was no water running down Del’s cheeks from out of the cap. The sponge is dry. (292)
In an execution, the sponge is supposed to be wet. The wet sponge is used to deliver the electric pulse to the body faster, so that the condemned person will not feel too long painful execution. He will die directly. What follows are the description of Delacroix’s execution. It is described by Paul Edgecomb himself, as the narrator and the executor of the execution.
The humming lost its steadiness and began to waver. It was joined by a crackling sound, like cellophone being crinkled. I could smell something horrible that I didn’t identify as a mixture of burning hair and organic sponge until I saw a blue tendrils of smoke curling out from beneath the edges of the cap. (293)
It shows that something unnatural happens in the execution. Paul realizes that there is something wrong.
Delacroix began to jitter and twist in the chair, his mask-covered face snapping from side to side as if in some vehement refusal. His legs began to piston up and down in short strokes that were hampered by the clamps of his ankles. At first, when Del began to scream, the witnesses didn’t hear him. But, those of us on the platform heard him, all right—choked howls 39
of pain from beneath the smoking mask, sound an animal caught and mangled in a hay-baler might make. (294)
If capital punishment is ever justified, surely, in order to retain any of the moral high ground, to avoid committing exactly the same wrong doing as a punishment for which someone is being killed, it must be done as humanely and decently as possible.
Referred to the execution of Eduard Delacroix, the question that will soon arise is in which part the execution is called humane and decent. The fact that happens is the execution that runs cruelly and terribly. To torture someone to death would precisely be failure to respect the humanity of someone else and ourselves. We would be guilty of exactly the same crime we think is wrong enough to justify torturing someone to death. In his last way to leave the world,
Delacroix is supposed to get a peaceful execution. Death is already a terrible thing. So, why the process to die is made cruel. It is the same as giving double punishments. First, the condemned persons receive the death as the punishment.
Second, the method of death punishment is the same as punishment. It is what
Delacroix receives as his compensation of doing such a crime.
A.2.Unfair Trial
The mentally ill, poor, males, and racial minorities are over represented among those executed. It is a story about John Coffey, one of the prisoners in The
Green Mile who is condemned to death. John comes to the Louisiana State
Penitentiary’s death row facilities because he is accused for raping and murdering 40
twin nine-year-old-girls. He is described as giant, Black, and silent. The narrator,
Paul Edgecomb, described John Coffey from his appearance at the first time they met.
John Coffey was Black, like most of the men who came for a while in E- Block before dying in Old Sparky’s lap, and he stood six feet, eight inches tall. He wasn’t all willowy like the TV basketball fellows, though—he was broad in the shoulders and deep through the chest, laced over with muscle in every direction (10-11)
It is clear that John Coffey is a Black status has driven him into unfair trial. It always happens that Blacks are discriminated against. When we read a postcolonial text or literary story, which tells about Black and White. It is always
White who becomes the master and Black becomes the slave. Such is not fair, since it happens and happens without stopping. From the very beginning, the paradigm of Black under White is like a ‘fixed thing’. It cannot be changed.
This racial discrimination also happens in The Green Mile. It seems that
Stephen King does not want to be left behind in inserting this prejudice and unfairness in his story. Racial issue is one of the world’s significance issues since people need to be careful when dealing with this. Not least because this problem is very sensitive. There have been many victims who died because of this problem.
John Coffey is labeled a “Negro” by his attorney and in the southern culture of Louisiana in 1932, this is a doomed status. John is considered nothing since Black is ‘exiled’ at that time. The conversation between the narrator and the attorney below will make the ‘label’ meaning understandable. 41
“ In many ways, a good mongrel dog is like your Negro,” he said. “You get to know it, and often you grow to love it. It is of no particular use, but you keep it around because you think it loves you.” (202)
“ In that way also Sir Galahad was like you Southern Negro, who will not do those things for himself.” (203)
John Coffey’s attorney compares John to a dog that bit his child’s face and this even further into the three societal reaction perspectives. Society labels the individual and the individual begins to identify with the label. Lastly, the individual lives with the label and John Coffey is labeled without further ado. The attorney keeps labeling John Coffey as Black and not worthy of a man. It is also what the Chief of Trapingus County thinks.
“ And if you’re thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, senor. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we’re awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.”(466)
In trial, Blacks are discriminated against. In John Coffey’s trial, there is no
White lawyer intents to help him except for money. It is already preconditioned that the label of Black is always to place Black People in the lower status than their White counterparts. It is not fair at all since the subject to compare is only on the race.
A.3.No Chance of Rehabilitation
In this part, it is best if Delacroix’s story is presented here. It is because
Delacroix has experienced the character development. He gets it through his relationship with the good guards in E-Block. They are Brutus “Brutal” Howell, 42
the handsome and somewhat impetuous Dean Stanton, the veteran Harry
Terwilliger, and the narrator of this story Paul Edgecomb.
Since the first time Delacroix arrives at Cold Mountain, he has made a good relationship with the good guards there, except with Percy Wetmore, a newcomer who is a sadist and coward. The guards are those who help Delacroix with his mouse. They also give Delacroix a chance to show Mr. Jingles’s attraction to the staff in Cold Mountain as a gift before he is executed. To remember on how Delacroix joined in E-Block is useless, since there is nothing good in it. It is a record of an awful crime. Delacroix begin to experience to be a better man when he starts to build a relation with the guards. There is an understanding, which exists between most of the guards and the prisoners. The prisoners are getting ready to die, and the guards do their best to respect the remainder of the prisoners’s lives. It is showed through Delacroix’s relationship with the guards. They do their everyday life like friends. One thing that separates them is only their status as prisoners and guards. But, of course, they build the relation with certain limitations. For example, the guards still do their responsibilities as guards. They know the limitation and what their status means.
Therefore, the relation between the prisoners and the guards can work well. It can be seen through the way the narrator tells about Delacroix.
Delacroix had wept briefly after turning in—he did most nights, and more for himself than for the folks he had roasted alive, I am quite sure—and then had taken Mr. Jingles, the mouse out of the cigar box he slept in that had calm Del, and he had slept like a baby the rest of the night. Mr. Jingles had most likely spent it on Delacroix’s stomach, with his tail curled over his paws, eyes unblinking. It was as if God had decided Delacroix needed 43
a guardian angel, but had decreed in His wisdom that only a mouse would do for a rat like our homicidal friend from Louisiana. (48)
The narrator, Paul Edgecomb, tells about Eduard Delacroix as if he tells about his good relative. He knows what Delacroix feels the way someone knows his or her friend’s feeling. Paul tells about the mouse since its role is central and has a double aspect. The mouse highlights the humanity of the prison guards. The mouse, which is adopted literary and took care by Delacroix, entertains them and the guards give him food. It is clear described how good the relation between
Delacroix and the guards. The guards realize that Delacroix’s life is no longer again since the date of the execution is nearing. It makes them doing their job more seriously than before. They do things that can help Delacroix to receive his life’s condition, which is no longer again. The mouse is the only one thing that can make Delacroix feel calm down. But, during their assistance to Delacroix, they are also entertained by the mouse’s presence.
Delacroix has turned to be a good man, even now he loves a mouse as if his own family. Knowing that Percy tries to kill the mouse makes him sad. He pays attention to the life of a little creature which means nothing if he is out of the prison, though in the past he dared to kill and murder. Human can change; it depends on the environment where they live and with whom they make relationship. Delacroix has proven that he can change to be a better man. It is supported also by the guards. In the story, Paul narrates his regret of Delacroix’s execution. 44
It was the way you got them into the chair sitting in the end of The Green Mile with their sanity intact. I couldn’t keep all those promises, of course, but I kept the one I made to Delacroix. As for the Frenchman himself, there had been hell to pay. The bad’un had hurt Delacroix, hurt him plenty. Oh, I know what he did, all right, but no one deserved what happened to Eduard Delacroix when he feel into Old Sparky’s savage embrace. (73)
Experiencing to be a good man does not guarantee Delacroix gets a pardon in punishment. He stays to be executed. To be a better man is just a process while he lives in the prison waiting for his execution. Execution must be continued. It is different with imprisonment punishment. The prisoners still have a chance to prove that they have changed when they are released. It can be said that capital punishment takes the chance of rehabilitation. It is impossible for corpses to make rehabilitation.
A.4.Execution of The Innocents
This part is best analyzed through the story of John Coffey. At the first reading of the novel, the readers are convinced that John Coffey is really guilty.
He is condemned to death because of raping and killing the twin-nine-year-old- girls, Cora and Kathe Detterick.
The one who finds that John Coffey is not guilty for the first time is the narrator, Paul Edgecomb. He finds the fact that it was not John Coffey who did the raping and murdering. He does not believe that John did such kind of cruel thing. It because John behaves like a child sometimes. Paul describes his surprise when John asks something that is usually asked by children when they are going to bed. 45
“Do you leave a light on after bedtime?” he asked right away, as if he had only been waiting for the chance. (18)
I blinked at him. I had been asked a lot of strange questions by newcomers to E-Block—once about the size of my wife’s tits—but never that one. (18)
The narrator describes John Coffey whose mannerisms are similar to that of a child. He is soft-spoken, extremely polite, and afraid of the dark. This kind of person is impossible to do such a crime. By doing many investigations himself,
Paul finds that it was not John Coffey who did that crime. It was done by someone else who later comes to the E-Block because of another crime, William Wharton.
Janice, Paul’s wife, does not believe that John did the crime.
“All right, we’ll leave it,” she said. I just can’t imagine why John did it, that’s all. It’s not as if he is violent by nature. Which leads to another question, Paul: how can you execute him if you’re right about those girls? How can you possibly put him in the electric chair if someone else---“
Paul’s wife, Janice, knows the fact that John Coffey is not guilty at all. She becomes so angry when knowing that John is not guilty and they cannot do something to help him, since the rule of the capital punishment is already fixed.
Many convicted murderers are later found innocents, and have been pardoned.
However, it is impossible to pardon a corpse. Human life deserves special protection. The supporters of the death penalty think that the only best way to guarantee that protection is to assure that convicted murderers do not kill again.
The only one way is by doing capital punishment. It will be a serious problem when the innocent had been executed and later it is found that he or she is not guilty. The question is who will take the responsibility for the mistake. If the innocent has family, it will be more tragic. 46
Ironically, John Coffey has healed several people from their illness and those people cannot do something to help him. John has cured Melinda Moores, the warden’s wife, from her brain tumor. DOE (Date Of Execution) paper has come for John Coffey. It creates a dilemma for the warden and the guards who will run the execution. They will execute the man who helps them. Moreover, he is not guilty at all. John’s condition, which is innocent, and Melinda who is helped by John are described well in the quotation below.
She’d had her own DOE papers handed to her by those doctors, but John Coffey’s had torn them up. Now, however, it was Coffey’s turn to walk the Green Mile, and who among us could stop it? Who among us would stop it? (464)
The attempt to help John Coffey is already too late. His case will not be opened again. Moreover, the punishment that goes to him has been fixed. The only thing that they can do is to try their best to accompany John Coffey in his last time living in the world. John deserves to get a good treatment during his last days in the prison, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
A.5.Legalizing the Act of Killing
It is like questioning the value of life since killing people is easy. It is done by the guards in the execution. Even it is hard, but they are able to do the killing, since they have access to do it. This part will be analyzed through the guards’s characters since they are the executors. 47
Paul Edgecomb, the narrator, has sent about 78 men to be executed. It is true that it is his job, but stopping the life of 78 men is not easy. It fights against his belief in God. He must be strong mentally and morally.
In the eyes of God, killing others is wrong. There is no such rule in the world that killing others is allowed. Capital punishment shapes a mentality to kill for people. If capital punishment is opened its cover, something that is left is ‘the act of killing’. Capital punishment is like a euphemism that softens the word
‘killing’ into a more proper one since it deals with legal justice. Whatever the methods and the reasons, it takes human life. In the story, there is apart that shows, indirectly, Paul’s disagreement to the act of capital punishment.
There was never a time during my years as block superintendent when all six cells were occupied at one time—thank God for small favor. Four was the most, mixed black and white (at Cold Mountain, there was no segregation among the walking dead), and that was a little piece of hell. (4)
Even Paul Edgecomb as the superintendent is not comfortable with the job that he does. He considers the prison, where the prisoners live, as a little piece of hell. It is true that he runs the government law to punish the criminals. But, the method, which is used, is by stopping the life. It is the same as killing. In other words, Paul has killed people so far. He has done ‘the act of killing’ which is in his religion as a Christian is forbidden to take other’s lives. Mentally, Paul can do the killing, an act that he never imagines he can do.
However, because there is a law named capital punishment, it makes human have the power like God, to take life. It teaches human to kill. It opens the 48
paradigm that killing is allowed although in capital punishment only. However, it creates unconscious mind of the permission to kill. Since it is an unconscious mind, human can do it without being realized. Unconsciously, they begin to legalize ‘killing’. Murdering crimes happen because this kind of mind influences the criminals. They will not imagine that in their crime they can kill, while in their plan they just want to steal, rob, rape, etc. it proves that spontaneous reaction is influenced by the unconscious mind. Capital punishment creates an unconscious mind ‘allow to kill’.
If capital punishment is justified, sooner or later people will receive this kind of punishment as a usual punishment. It means that capital punishment will be the same as other punishment. Of course the criminals who receive capital punishment are the most dangerous ones. Once capital punishment is receiver by people, at the same time, their mind will also receive ‘the concept of allowing to kill others’. Capital punishment or death penalty is the act of taking human life as a punishment and the consequences of the crime.
It is fine if ‘the concept of allowing to kill others’ is only in the context of capital punishment and in the other contexts people will consider that that killing others is wrong and sinful. However, human’s mind is so complicated. Human’s reaction toward something is fast and unpredictable. They do things that are forbidden.
The dangerous thing is when ‘the concept of allowing to kill others’ is restored in their unconscious minds. It will be part of their fixed mind that 49
someday they will do it without being realized. It is the same as the concept of breathing, because it has been fixed in their mind. The same also happens when we cry if we experience a sad moment. Or, it is the same as people paradigm that connect women with kitchen. It is part of their unconscious mind. They do it without realizing it because in their mind they have dealt and agreed with ‘the concept of allowing to kill others’.
When the readers of this thesis or the novel The Green Mile question about the reason why the guards always dare to execute men, the answer has been explained above. Capital punishment created a mentality to kill. Paul Edgecomb himself does not want to do the execution. However, it is his job. Perhaps, at the first time working in E-Block, Paul was afraid of doing the execution. It speaks about human life. Who dares to take human’s life except God? Paul must have his own justification why he dares to be the executor. He may say that it is part of his job. Although it is hard, he keeps doing it. He may also say that he does the job that has been done by someone else before. There had been a former guard before him who ever did the execution. If that former guard could do it (taking the life) and the state or government was no problem with that, so does Paul. Perhaps this kind of justification can calm him down and he can always continue his job and finish it well. In brief, Paul has a mentality to kill because of his job. The creation of Paul’s mentality to kill is influenced by his career as a guard in death row.
Below is Paul’s feeling of having such kind of job in Depression Era where it was very difficult to find job at that time. So, the only one way to survive at that time 50
is by keeping the job. This situation is experienced by the narrator of the story,
Paul Edgecomb.
I suspect there are people who wouldn’t understand why that was. Even after I’ve said, but they would be people who only know the phrase Great Depression from the history books if you were there, it was a lot more than a phrase in a book, and if you had a steady job, brother, you would do almost anything to keep it.” (124)
Paul does not want to do his job to execute the inmates. Morally, it fights against his heart. However, Paul keeps doing the execution since his job is important for financing his family.
Reading the story of The Green Mile and the analysis in this thesis, it is known how Paul Edgecomb’s character is. He keeps his principle, loves others by treating them the same as he treats himself. However, this kind of person dares to take others’s lives. Why? It is his job to do so. Paul fights against his heart and his principle to do the job. Paul agrees to do his job because it is legal. He agrees with this taking of life in his job only.
It will be dangerous if the agreement of ‘the concept of allowing to kill’ is received by people who have criminal intention. They will no doubt to kill their targets. Foe example in the robbery case which takes dead victims. In the story, which is narrated by Paul Edgecomb, the prisoners are convicted mostly because of murdering. Eduard Delacroix is sentenced to die because raping and murdering.
The Chief is sentenced to die because he killed a person when he drunk. William
Wharton, a prisoner who comes later, is sentenced to die because of murdering also. He is the most dangerous person. Even he is still 19 years old, but his 51
criminal records have showed what kind of person he is. Below is a little description about Wharton by the narrator.
“Crazy-wild and proud of it, has rambled all over the state for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Kill three people in a holdup, one a pregnant woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man.” (49)
Why is it so easy to take human life? Who teaches them to kill? The answer is no one. So, how can they dare to kill others? It because there have been others who have done the act of killing before. It is also the mentality to kill is universally taken and agreed. Such action then comes to people’s unconscious minds. It becomes part of mind.
From the discussion of this first section of the analysis, there are five things that are the badness of capital punishment. They are lowering the value of human life and throwing away humanity, unfair trial, no chance of rehabilitation, execution of the innocents, and legalizing the act of killing. Next, the badness of capital punishment will be contextualized with the situation and condition in
America during the Depression Era and with the world in general. It will be the contextuality of capital punishment in Depression Era by considering the situation and condition both in fiction and reality. It can be seen in the next section of this chapter. 52
B.The Contectuality of the Badness of Capital punishment in The Green Mile with the Situation and Condition in America during Depression Era and with the World in General.
Situated in the Depression Era, the story of The Green Mile does not want to loose its elements. Socio historical background in which the story occurs is one of the important elements worthy of examination.
To review briefly the background which is in the Depression Era, it is the time when America collapsed, especially in economic field. Although it just in one sector only, it influenced other sectors. Everything was hit by the Depression effect. It damaged the United States both physically and psychologically. It ruined thousands of business people and hurt millions of laborers. It destroyed the dreams as well as the jobs. People did many things and everything in order to survive. The system of capital punishment occurs during Depression Era and continues until present. The contextualization of the badness of capital punishment in The Green Mile with the reality in Depression Era and with the world in general can be found in this part.
B.1.Lowering the Value of Human Life, Throwing Away Humanity
Opponents of the death penalty usually argue that it is inhumane, or even that it constitutes a form of torture. Those who make this argument commonly insist that, in addition to violate the right to life, the death penalty is also contrary to the right to be free from torture or inhumane treatment. Percy, who is described 53
as sadist and brutal guard, treats all the prisoners as if they do not have the life value as human beings and less humane. Below is the example of Percy’s treatment toward one of the prisoners, Eduard Delacroix.
He came with an unexpected bang. The door leading to the exercise yard slammed open, letting in a flood of light, there was a confused rattle of chain, a frightened voice babbling away in a mixture of English and Cajun and French (a patois the cons) at Cold Mountain used to call da bayou) and Brutal hollering, “Hey! Quit it! For Chrissakes! Quit it, Percy!” (121- 122)
Percy treats Delacroix in inhumane way as if he deserves to receive that kind of treatment. Before receiving his real punishment, capital punishment,
Delacroix has received other punishment, bad treatment from Percy Wetmore.
Although it does not torture him the way the electric chair will torture him, it tortures his feeling.
Some arguments about the humaneness of the death penalty apply only to specific methods of execution. Of methods of execution currently in use the electric chair and the gas chamber are widely seen as producing great pain and suffering in the victim. The suffering caused by a method of execution is also often exacerbated in the case of “botched” executions. Those who make this argument also insist that the knowledge of one’s impeding death causes tremendous psychological suffering. This suffering, exacerbated by the long period often spent by convicts in the United States on death row, have together been described as the death row phenomenon, which is considered by some to be a form of torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_debate).
In the story of The Green Mile, the method of execution is by using electric chair. It is the method where the condemned person is put to death by delivering electric pulse into his body. For several minutes the electric pulse is delivered until he died. The heartbeat is cheeked. When there is still heartbeat, the 54
electric pulse is delivered again. Imagining the process of doing the execution, people will agree that it is a torture.
An essay by Vasil Gluchman entitled “Humanity and Moral Rights” shows that human beings have hope for their rational being and surviving just through the fulfilling of humanity, its principles and respect for human dignity. There are also other issues that are external conditions for the preservation of human beings as well as life. Every human being must have a desire to be treated properly as human. Prisoners have the same hope also, that is to be treated as human being and respected. But, their status as prisoners has lowered their value as human.
Their life is not as worth as the life of free people. In The Green Mile, Percy is the one who considers that the life value of the prisoners is nothing.
“Fucking faggot! I’ll teach you to keep your hands off me, you lousy bumpuncher!” Whap! Whap! Whap! And now Delacroix was bleeding from one ear and screaming. I gave up trying to shield him, grabbed him with one shoulder, and hurled him into his cell, where he went sprawling on the bunk. Percy darted around me and gave him a final hard whap on the butt—one to go on, you could say.” (122)
Percy, as a guard, thinks that he has the right to do everything he wants toward the prisoners. When he has a little accident with Delacroix, he acts as if to kill Delacroix. The value of Delacroix’s life is nothing for Percy. The situation and the condition in prison do not support Delacroix at all. As a guard with bad personality, Percy is not a good company for the prisoners to spend their last days before the execution. 55
Reffered to the real case happen in America in 1932, the case of
Scottsboro boys can be a proper example. Scottsboro boys are nine young Blacks who are convicted to death because of throwing off young hobos and raping two women. All the victims are Whites. However, the case is not strong because the crime is just assumed. There are no witnesses who see that the Scottsboro boys do the crime. They are assumed to do the crime. The story is based on A People and
A Nation: A History of the United States (1984).
One afternoon in March 1931, a freight train pulled into the yard at Paint Rock, near Scottsboro, Alabama. When the train stopped, armed sheriff’s deputies arrested nine young blacks, charging them with roughing up some white hobos and throwing them off the train earlier in the day. When two white women who were removed from the same freight claimed that the blacks had raped them. (390)
They were treated as if people who do not have life value. If it is still a claim or assumption they should be treated like a human. Every human being has dignity, and people must respect it.
Based on the source in Current Issues and Enduring Questions (1996), the book taken as one of two non-literary texts, capital punishment is not humane.
On June 22, 1984, the New York Times published an editorial that sarcastically attacked the new “hygienic” method of death by injection, and stated “execution can never be made humane through science.” So it is not the method that really troubles opponents. It is the death itself they consider barbaric (322).
The same as Delacroix’s execution. It is awful and cruel. To kill or to take human life is wrong. It is more wrong to do such kind of method to take life.
Humanity is questioning here. Is it humane to take human life? People must 56
respect his or her own life. So, why should they take others’ s lives so easily? It is the same as they do not respect their own lives.
Finally, the death penalty harms society by cheapening the value of life.
Allowing the state to inflict death on certain of citizens legitimizes the taking of life. The death of anyone, even a convicted killer, diminished all people.
Punishment may and should be administered with respect and love for the person punished.
It must be remembered that criminals are real people too who have life and capacity to feel pain, fear and the loss of their loved ones, and all the other emotions that the rest of the other people are capable to feel. There is no such thing as a humane method of putting a person to death irrespective of what the
State may claim. Every form of execution causes suffering for the prisoners, some methods perhaps cause less than others, but be in no doubt that being executed is a terrifying and horrible ordeal for the criminal. What is also often overlooked is the extreme mental torture that the criminal suffers in the time leading up to the execution. How would a person feel knowing that he or she were going to die tomorrow morning at 8.00 a.m.?
B.2.Unfair Trial
Discriminatory practice also occurred during Depression Era. Mostly, the
Blacks were the subjects to be discriminated against. The discrimination happened very badly that the Blacks had no chance to earn money and continued their living 57
properly. As stated in A People and A Nation: A History of the United States
(1984) about discriminatory practice toward Blacks in Depression Era.
Blacks, women, and the unskilled lost jobs first; whites and the managerial personnel were let go last. Discriminatory practices based on race and gender were accentuated. Whites displaced many blacks as servants, and Atlanta fires its black sanitation workers to replace them with whites (377).
Blacks have suffered long both physically and mentally because of the discrimination on them. African American men as likely to receive the death penalty than nonminorities. It is still fine if the discrimination only occurs in searching job although it is bad. But, discrimination also occurs in trial. The worst is when the trial ends in death penalty. Since it deals with life, it becomes more sensitive thing. The story of Scottsboro boy in A People and A Nation: A History of The United States (1984) explains about discrimination based on race in trial.
Patterson was an innocent victim of racial hatred. The courageous Horton overturned the jury’s decision. (390)
In Depression Era, Black status is doomed. Patterson and his friends face this racial problem. Since they are Black, it is very difficult for them to get a proper treatment. It is not their fault if they live in Depression time. It is not their fault also that they are Blacks.
Hammersmith, a reporter in The Green Mile portraits well on how Whites discriminate Blacks. Hammersmith himself is a White and he also discriminates
John. It could be known through the narration by Paul Edgecomb below. 58
Hammersmith, the reporter, Hammersmith who had been to college in Bowling Green, Hammersmith who like to think himself as enlightened, Hammersmith who had told me that mongrel dogs and Negroes were about the same, that either might take a chomp out of you suddenly, and for no reason. (348)
It is true that Blacks have been discriminated and it happens in long time.
But, it will be unfair when the discrimination toward Blacks also occurs in trial, especially in capital punishment. It is the topic of life. When life is discussed, it will end in the conclusion that every human being has the right toward his or her own life. It is said that they have the same proportion in life. Therefore, the
Whites and the Blacks are in the same proportion in life. Unfortunately, there is no same proportion in life for Whites and Blacks in the eyes of Sheriff Homer
Cribus. He is the sheriff whose territory becomes the location where the raping and murdering of two little girls happened.
“Cribus is the only one who can reopen the case, and Cribus doesn’t want to mess with what he thinks of happy ending---‘it was a nigger’, thinks he, ‘and not of our’n in any case. Beautiful, I’ll go up there to Cold Mountain, have me a steak and a draft beer at Ma’s, then watch him fry, and there’s and end to it’.” (477)
The question is why there should be discrimination in court for the Blacks, since the Declaration of Human Rights states that every human being has the right to have life. It is not relied on what race, gender, religion, nationality, etc. all have the same right. Here, Janice, questions the right of life had by John Coffey.
Janice ignored him. It was Brutal and me she was looking at, mostly me. “Do you mean to kill him, you cowards?” she asked. “Do you mean to kill the man who saved Melinda Moores’s life, who tried to save those little girls’ lives? Well, at least there will be one less black man in the world, won’t there? You can console yourselves with that. One less nigger.” (480) 59
Janice is so angry when knowing that John Coffey will be executed soon.
Janice knows that John Coffey is not guilty. Janice owes John for curing her husband, Paul, from urinary infection. Janice also knows that John has healed
Melinda Moores, her relative, from brain tumor. She is so angry that she cannot do something to help John. It is unfair for John to get such a punishment. How could his case not be reopened because he is Black? There is always much unfairness for the Blacks. When it is over is never known. The reason why many people oppose capital punishment is because they feel it is discriminatory in its practice.
George McKenna and Stanley Fiengold in their book Taking Sides:
Clashing Views on Controversial Issues (1989) state that death sentences are imposed not out of the crime committed, it is said, but out of hatred of Blacks. Of the 3,859 persons executed in the United States in the period 1930-1967, 2,066 or
54 percent, were Blacks. More than half of the prisoners now under sentence of death are Black. In short, the death penalty, we have been told, “may have served” to keep Black people, especially Southern Blacks, “in a position subjugation and subservience.” That in itself is unconstitutional. (183)
It seems that American juries have shown an increasing tendency to avoid imposing the death penalty except on certain offenders who are distinguished not by their criminality but by their race or class. At the time of John Coffey it happens. Justice is essentially a matter of ensuring that everyone is treated equally. Opponents of capital punishment also argue that the death penalty should 60
be abolished because it is unjust. Justice, they claim, requires that all persons be treated equally. The requirement that justice is to be served is all the more rigorous when life and death are at stake. Many people have been sent to death penalty. They are nearly always poor and disproportionately Black. It is not the nature of the crime that determines who goes to death row and who does not.
People go to death row simply because they have no money to appeal their case, or they have a poor defense, or they lack the funds to be witnesses to courts, or they are member of a political or racial minority. Most of the convicted persons are poor and illiterate, who cannot afford a competent lawyer. The defense lawyers provided by the State are often incompetent or/and do not take serious interest in the case. The story of one of Scottsboro boys in A People and A Nation:
A History of the Unites States, Patterson, will give further explanation.
But because court-appointed lawyers had offered little defense for the youths, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions (1932) on the grounds that the accused had not been granted adequate legal counsel. (390)
The imposition of the death penalty has resulted in racial bias. In fact, the race of the victim has been proven to be the determining factor in deciding whether to prosecute capital case.
The story in The Green Mile notes that most of the inmates there are from non-White people. John Coffey is a Negro, Eduard Delacroix is a Cajun
Frenchman, and Arlen Bitterbuck is a Native American. It is only William
Wharton who is White. The status as non-White is clear described in quotations below. 61
Then the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, council elder of the Washita Cherokee as well. (110)
Delacroix’s mouse ran back and forth from one of the littlr Frenchman’s shoulders to the other. (15)
B.3.No Chance of Rehabilitation
Capital punishment does not reintegrate the criminal into society; rather, it cuts off any possible rehabilitation. The sentence of death, however, can and sometimes does move the condemned person to repentance and conversion. Of course capital punishment does not rehabilitate the prisoners and return them to society. But, there are many example persons of condemned to death taking the opportunity of the time before the execution to repent, express remorse, and very often experience profound spiritual rehabilitation. Many of those sentenced to death could be rehabilitated to live socially productive lives. Carrying out the death penalty destroys any good such persons might have done for society if they had been allowed to live.
Damien P. Horigan, Esq in his essay “Buddhism & Capital Punishment,
Angulimala-sutta” states that rehabilitation enables the convicted criminal defendant to realize his or her mistakes and to attempt to avoid them in the future.
In Buddhism terms, a rehabilitated offender, even a murderer, will remember his or her Buddha-nature. For society, reforming a wrongdoer means regaining a productive member who can somehow contribute to the general welfare
(http://www.engaged-zen.org/articles/Damien P Horigan-Buddhism Capital
Punishment.html). 62
There are three prisoners that are told by the narrator in The Green Mile.
They are John Coffey who is Black, a Cajun Frenchman Eduard Delacroix, and a
Native American Arlen Bitterbuck. One more prisoner is William Wharton. He is not really good in behaviour since he always makes troubles to the guards and the other prisoners. He is a White that means belonging to major racial group.
However, he is not smart in using his White status to behave well and make progression during his life imprisonment. On the contrary, the non-Whites do many progressions during their life imprisonment, but, unfortunately, their status is still discriminated against. They behave well during their staying in the prison.
Furthermore, Eduard Delacroix has experienced development in his character.
Capital punishment violates the belief in the human capacity for change. Eduard
Delacroix has changed but it means nothing since he is going to be punished. It just remains as a part of his short living in the prison. He does not receive a pardon since his good change means nothing for a raper and murder who will be executed like him.
The only one chance for the inmates is to spend their last time before the execution well. In the story of The Green Mile, Eduard Delacroix is given a chance to spend his last day to make a mouse attraction. The guards realize that
Delacroix’s life is no longer. Giving Delacroix a chance in his last day is the guards’s gift for Delacroix.
Brutal appeared to consider. “Naw,” he said at last. “He’s gonna be good, ain’t you, Del? You and the mouse, both. After all, you’re gonna be showing off for some high muck-a-mucks tonight.” (224) 63
Delacroix is given a chance to spend his last day by making a mouse attraction with Mr. Jingles. For those who are getting close to death, doing something is very meaningful. It is what Delacroix feels.
We have no guarantee that future government will not release offenders, who were imprisoned years previously, on the recommendations of various professional “do-gooders” who are against any punishment in the first place.
Twenty or 30 years on it is very difficult to remember the awfulness of an individual’s crime and easy to claim that they have reformed. The Scottsboro boys is best example to explain this part. It is according to their story in A People and A
Nation: A History of The United States (1984).
In 1936 Patterson was retried, found guilty, and given a seventy-five-year sentence. Four of the other youths were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the state dropped charges against the remaining four. Not until 1950 were all five out of jail – four by parole and Patterson by escaping from his work gang. (390)
Being bad does not mean cannot change. It can change if there is a belief that someone can change. It just needs chance and belief. The only proper object of punishment is the reformation of the criminal. Scottsboro boys’ case is a real example on how a chance of rehabilitation is very useful. At first, they are condemned to death. Finally, they can receive punishment that does not need their lives taking. Someone will show his or her changing when he or she is given a chance to change. The way they show their changing is by giving them time, time to live. If there is no time, it means there is no chance for them to change since change is seen through the process. Process needs time. 64
B.4.Execution of the Innocents
This part is best analyzed through the story of John Coffey who is found as the innocent in his case. However, he is convicted to be executed. The sentence of death may be improper if it has serious negative effects on society, such as miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life. The death penalty makes it impossible to remedy any such mistakes. If, on the other hand, the death penalty is not in force, condemned persons later found to be innocent can be released and compensated for the time they wrongly served in prison. However, it is impossible to release condemned persons who died because of being executed. A special attention should be directed to the fortunately much smaller number of cases in which innocent men were actually executed. There are many cases about miscarriages justice. An example of Scottsboro boys’s case as it is noted in A People and A Nation: A
History of The United States.
New trial opened in 1933, again with all-White juries. Medical evidence showed that the women had not had intercourse on the train. (390)
Those who do not deserve to be punished death were died. Later, it is known that they are not guilty at all. It can be a serious problem since human life cannot be played as if it is a toy. Below is what Brutal wants to say when he knows that John is not guilty.
“ This is a nightmare,” he said. “We’ve got a man who may be innocent— who probably is innocent—and he’s going to walk the Green Mile just as sure as God made tall tree and little fishes.” (354) 65
John is found innocent and nothing can be done to help him. The guards cannot do anything because they do not have the authority to change the rule and the law. They must continue their task to do the execution. Executing a convicted person who is responsible for his crime is far more easy than executing a condemned person who is innocent. If the condemned person really guilty, the executor can make their justification that it is their task to do the execution.
However, what kind of justification the executor can make to execute a condemned person who is known not guilty at all. Stopping someone’s life that is in fact dangerous criminal is already hard. It is life that is taken, not a thing.
Furthermore, it will be more difficult and harder to stop someone’s life that does not have a mistake at all.
B.5.Legalizing the Act of Killing
Death penalty powerfully reinforces the idea that killing can be a proper way of responding to those who have wronged someone. Only by putting murderers to death society can ensure that convicted killers do not kill again.
Hammersmith thinks that to kill is better than to give a chance to life. He does not want to take the risk. It is described in the quotation below.
I think we have to be humane and generous in our efforts to solve the race problem. But we have to remember that your Negro will bite again if he gets the chance, just like a mongrel dog will bite if he gets the chance and it crosses his mind to do so.” (206) 66
Killing a murderer is not much restitution for the surviving loved ones.
That action can never bring back the dead victim. Even if such miracle could occur, how to compensate for the emotional trauma suffered?
Edward I. Koch in his essay “How Capital Punishment Affirms Life” in the book Current Issues and Enduring Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Argument, with Reading (1996) gives an example about a persons who dare to kill.
Last December a man named Robert Lee Willie, who had been convicted of raping and murdering an 18-year-old woman, was executed in the Louisiana state prison. In a statement issued several minutes before his death, Mr. Willie said: “Killing people is wrong….it makes no difference whether it’s citizens, countries, or government. Killing is wrong.” Two weeks later in South Carolina, an admitted killer named Joseph Carl Shaw was put to death for murdering two teenagers. In an appeal to the governor for clemency, Mr. Shaw wrote: “Killing is wrong when I did it. Killing is wrong when you do it. I hope you have the courage and moral strength to stop the killing.” (321)
Above are examples of convicted persons who are executed because of murdering. The point is why they dare to kill? Who teaches them to kill? Or do they have ever imagined before that they will kill or murder in the future? The answer is NO. They do not dare to kill, no one teach them, and they have never imagined before to kill. They learned from the experience. Even convicted person s such as Willie and Shaw stated that killing is wrong. They ever did the killing and they said that it is wrong.
Someone else did it before. Indirectly, the thought of killing comes to their minds, and unconsciously their minds legalize that killing is allowed. They do not 67
realize it until the fact is found that they have killed. At first, they are surprised and shocked after knowing that they can kill. But then, they begin to find their own justification. They find their reasons why they kill and then justify the reasons. Below is the example on how human can kill other although at the beginning he or she does not have the intention to kill. In the story of The Green
Mile this situation happens to Arlen Bitterbuck, a Washita Chief.
Then, it was time for the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, in reality no chief but first elder of his tribe on Washita Reservation, and a member of the Cherokee Council as well. He had killed a man while drunk—while both of them drunk, in fact. The Chief had crushed the man’s head with a cement block. At issue had been a pair of boots. So, on July seventeenth on that rainy summer, my council of elders intended for his life to end. (99)
It must not be in Chief’s mind before that he can kill. However, the fact speaks different. A man died because of him. In the other hand, the taking of life which is done by the Chief is not the first killing happens in the world and done by human. There were persons who did it before. Furthermore, it has been done since the early time when the first human beings were alive. It is taught from the act which was done by Cain when he killed Abel.
Furthermore, “the act of killing” has been legalized through the system of capital punishment. Although capital punishment is done through the legal law, but it is not in the people’s mind that it is done based on law purpose. It has been fixed in their unconscious minds that killing others is allowed whether it is done legally such as capital punishment or illegally such as murdering. It is also what in the guards’s minds who take the role as the executors. They learned from the 68
former guards that stopping the life of others is allowed since it is supported by the law and the government. The guards make their own justification to lessen their guilty feelings. They do the execution because it is part of their jobs; punish the criminals by taking their lives. According to the law, it is enough to compensate their crime with such a punishment. Through their job, to do the capital punishment, the guards have learned to kill others. Process of human life has proven that something can be learned through experiences. It is accumulated in their unconscious minds. Someday, unconsciously, they will do what they have learned. 69
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
From the analysis in the previous chapter, it is clear and understandable that capital punishment is bad and deserved to be called evil. There are some proves that strengthen the reason why people should disagree on capital punishment. Some examples are also drawn, both from the novel and several non- literary texts, in order to provide complete material to support the argument.
In this world, there are always two sides for everything, including for capital punishment. There are people who oppose the capital punishment since it tortures the ones who receive the death penalty. There is no humane aspect in this form of punishment. It can never bring back the victims and make them alive again. It only adds the list of the dead. On the contrary, there are also people who support the death penalty. Most of them are the family of the victims. They demand that the death of their family must be compensated with the killer’s life.
Life is paid with life. This is the only thing that can make the victims’s family become calm down. In the novel The Green Mile, it is faced by John Coffey when he is accused for the rape and murder of the twin-nine-year-old little girls, Cora and Kathe Detterick. The family does not know the fact which is found by Paul
Edgecomb that John Coffey is not guilty at all. The important thing for the family is that their daughter’s killer is punished as heavy as possible. At the execution, they mock John and show their hatred toward him.
69 70
Based on the case above, it is found that capital punishment is bad. Before the execution, the condemned person has faced his or her own punishment, the guilty feeling inside their heart. Mentally, they are sick for the victims’s family’s revenge or people’s rejection for them.
That capital punishment is bad is proven through five studies found in the analysis. They are the reasons why many people reject the system of capital punishment as the punishment system. Capital punishment in its process does the lowering the value of human life and throwing away humanity. How can an alive man is treated the same as corpse. Not least because of their punishment, that is death penalty. With this punishment, sooner or later the condemned persons will die. It means that they will be corpses. It is used by one of the guards in the novel,
Percy Wetmore, to show his power as a still long living man and as a guard. He treats all the prisoners badly as if their value of life is nothing. Percy thinks there is no difference between condemned persons and corpses. Condemned persons will soon be corpses after being executed. He has no humanity feeling toward others. It is clearly told in the novel on how Percy treats Eduard Delacroix and tortures him anytime he has a chance, and also when he ushers John into E-Block.
The most fatal one happens in Delacroix’s execution. At the beginning Percy just wants to make a little trouble in the execution. He sabotages the execution by using the dry sponge which is supposed to be wet. Actually, he does not know what will happen if he puts the dry sponge in the execution. He just tries and plays and wants to know what the result. It is as the little punishment for Delacroix for his laughing on his fool behaviours. However, the execution runs so badly. It is 71
not the same as in Percy’s mind before. It is far crueler. Delacroix was burned alive. There is no humanity in the execution, the punishment that is supposed to run well and as the last way of the inmate to leave the world run so badly. The value of life is nothing. Delacroix’s life is priceless.
Punishment is not always fair. For the same crime case, the criminals will receive different punishment depending on the location, race, wealth, etc. For those who are poor and cannot pay for the lawyer, they just receive their punishment without having a chance to verify their case. Moreover, they will not have a chance at all when the victim is from rich family. Race is also included in this unfair system. It is noted in the story that most of the inmates in E-Block are
Negro, Frenchman, and Native American. They are described as good prisoners.
There is only one White in the prison named William Wharton. He is described as dangerous and bad prisoner. It is found also that actually John Coffey is not guilty at all. The matter is on his trial in Trapingus County. There, the Blacks are considered nothing. They are in a very low status. John does not have a good lawyer who really concerns of his case since he is poor and also as a Black. His lawyer is only a lawyer who received a loan. He just needs to finish his case as soon as he can and receives his payment. It is very ironic for John Coffey. His
Black label has driven him into a place that does not deserve for him. Being compared to the reality, the Depression Era is also the same. At that time the
Blacks were discriminated. Moreover, the situation and condition where the economic system was collapsed, the primary group, which was White, always got the first (jobs, foods, shelters, etc). In the world in general, this discrimination still 72
continues. People will not forget on how Mandela tried years to abolish apartheid system in Africa.
There is no chance to get the rehabilitation for the criminals once they are executed. It is impossible to give a chance for corpses. Actually, human beings are part in the living creature in this world. Living creature such as human, plant, and animal can change if the situation and condition demand them to change. Living creature is flexible and can change according to the circumstances. Plants can be created into a high quality plants and very expensive in price. Animals can be trained to behave such as circus animals and pets. God creates human in the higher status that the previous two creatures. Human have mind. Learning from this, human are supposed to do better since they are in the higher status. People can change if they are given chance. So do the criminals. They can change. They must choose to change to be better and not repeat their crime if they are given two choices. Choices are between receiving the death penalty as the punishment or change to be better with the note that they will not repeat their crime. In the novel, the inmate who experiences character development is Eduard Delacroix.
Completely, he lives a good man during his imprisonment. He never makes any troubles. He even loves and take care a mouse, something that he never did when he was a free man. His crime for raping and murdering in the past is too big if compared to his new living in prison. He very concerns about a mouse’s life. He even feels very sad when Percy tries to kill his mouse. Delacroix learns to appreciate life when he is in the prison and when he takes care of the mouse that is later named Mr. Jingles. In the prison and as a prisoner, Delacroix experiences 73
changing. He is no longer Delacroix who dares to rape and kill. However, this is only part of his living in the prison. Although he has changed in behaviour and in character, it means nothing for the government. A raper and a killer are always being known as his label until he died. For this crime, the criminal must be punished according to the level of the crime. There is always a compensation for a crime. Rehabilitation is a very expensive thing in a trial.
Execution of the innocents is very possible. Since the case is not finish examined and left. The prisoners must receive any punishment given to them. But, it will be a different case if the case is examined until it is finished and found who the real criminal is. The Green Mile tells the story of John Coffey. John Coffey is poor and he comes from a Black race. Paul Edgecomb finds that John is not guilty at all. But, it is already too late to examine John’s case since the time of the execution is nearing for a couple of days. People whoa re met by Paul Edgecomb to help to reopen John’s case seem not willing to help him. It is because John is
Black and it is not worth enough to help Blacks at the time. Sheriff Cribus considers that John’s case is appropriate to his wish. That is to punish Black who does a crime and no need to investigate it more. John Coffey is found innocent and it is annoying for everyone who knows John and his goodness. John is described having a healing power as the God’s gift. He helps every dying living creature to live again as long as there is a chance. It cannot be imagined that someone who helps others to get their life can rape and kill. In the real case, there are many prisoners who are later found innocent and released. Capital punishment minimalizes the chance for the innocent to get their freedom. It is already too late 74
to release prisoners whoa have been executed. Something that is left is only the regret from the innocent family.
Capital punishment or death penalty legalizes the killing. It is like permission that killing is allowed since it is done behind the power of law and government. Killing is killing. It takes human’s life. Once capital punishment is accepted, it opens the paradigm that human is allowed to take others’s life. Killing is allowed when it is legal through the government permission such as capital punishment. But, it is not what is recorded in people’s minds. Killing is accepted whatever the reasons and purposes. If the government that should be the people’s example can do this ‘act’, why people cannot do the same? It becomes a new paradigm for people that killing is allowed and it is united with other paradigms which have come before, such as the concept of breath, killing mosquitoes when they are flying around, the world is round, girls are identical with dolls, etc. if it is so, people must be more careful. This paradigm is fixed in their unconscious mind and will show up anytime, anywhere. At first, people will sure that people like them are impossible to kill. However, at a certain circumstance, they are found guilty for murdering. Without being realized, they bring this concept and paradigm in their mind everyday. If the situation and condition support them to reveal their unconscious mind, it will show up.
The guards as the executors in the novel experience this paradigm. At first, before they work in E-Block, they do not know that they will deal with the taking of life in their work. They work as guards and as the executors of the prisoners. It 75
is their job that forces them to do the execution. They put anew paradigm in their mind that killing others is allowed in the name of law and government. The capital punishment, which is legalized by the government, had given them a concept that killing others is allowed. However, in the real world, this paradigm is taken not only by the executors of the execution, but also taken by the civil people. They kill based on their own justification. For example when they find someone who is doing crime, they make justice by themselves. They hit and killed the thief without reporting him to the police. There are many justifications which are made to do the act of killing. It is one of moral problems in the world. People dare to kill others in order to take revenge for their family. People are becoming uncivilized. Their moral attitudes are lower and lower.
Concerning with the badness of the capital punishment, the writer wants to raise the readers’ awareness toward the issue of capital punishment. It has been debated for years in many places, and it is never over. It is better to rethink again the system of capital punishment. If it is kept to continue, the badness as mentioned above have to be faced, whether we are ready or not. Life is very important since human beings only have one chance to have life. For everything which is related with life, it needs to be concerned very deeply. Death is already miserable, why should the way of death is made miserable also? 76
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Book References:
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th ed). Orlando: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.
Barnet, Sylvan and Hugo Bedau. Current Issues and Enduring Question: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Argument, with Readings (4th ed). Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2nd ed). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Birenbaum, Harvey. The Happy Critic: A Serious but not Solemn Guide to Thinking and Writing about Literature. London and Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1997.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Collins. English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
Das, Bijay Kumar. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002.
Fowler, H. W. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.
Guth, Hans P. and Gabriel L. Rico. Discovering Literature: Stories, Poems, Plays (2nd ed). New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc., 1997.
Hamalian, Leo and Frederick R. Karl. The Shape of Fiction. New York: McGraw Hill, 1978.
Holman, C. Hugh and William Harmon. A Handbook To Literature. New York: Macmillan Company, 1986.
Horton, John and Andrea T. Baumeister. Literature and The Political of Imagination. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 2000. 77
King, Stephen. The Green Mile. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
McKenna, George and Stanley Fiengold. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Political Issues (6th ed). New York: The Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., 1989.
Norton, Mary Beth, et al. A People and A Nation: A History of The United States (brief ed). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.
Perrine, Laurence. Literature: Structure, Sounds, and Sense. New York: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.
Pickering, James H. and Jeffrey D. Hoeper. Literature; Introduction: Reading, Studying, and Writing about Literature (2nd ed). New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1987.
Platt, Nathaniel and Muriel Jean Drummond. Our Nation From Its Creation: A Great Experiment. Englewood: Prentice Hall Inc., 1964.
Roth, John K. International Encyclopedia of Ethics. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publisher, 1995.
Trimmer, Joseph H. Writing with A Purpose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
Online References:
Bumgardner, Stan and Christine Kreiser. “Thy Brother’s Blood”. Capital Punishment in West Virginia. Vol. IX No. 4 and Vol. X No. 1 (March 1996).
Coke, Tanya E. “Reappraising Death: The New Debate over Capital Punishment”. Ideas for An Open Society. June 21, 2002.
Dougherty, Sarah Belle. “The Effect of Capital Punishment”. Sunrise. October- November, 1989.
Horigan, Damien P. “Buddhism and Capital Punishment”.
Kuhlken, Gary. “The Green Mile”.
Bentham, Jeremy. “Rationale of Punishment”. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12565a.htm (November 20, 2006)
“Capital Punishment Debate”.
APPENDIX
Appendix 1: Summary of Stephen King’s The Green Mile.
The whole story is set in 1932. Paul Edgecomb is a guard at Cold
Mountain State Penitentiary and he is responsible for the E-Block. It is a block which is used for the criminals to spend their imprisonment days before they are executed, and it is usually called the death row. In this story, the block is separated from the rest of the prison. There are only six cells in the block, but there has never been a time when all six cells are occupied at one time. The wide corridor up to the center of E-Block is floored with linoleum.
There are five guards on that block. Paul Edgecomb, the narrator, Brutus
Howell, Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, and Percy Wetmore. The last is a brutal, stupid, and misuses his position as a guard. He is the nephew of the governor’s wife. No one dares to complain about him for fear of losing his own job.
This story tells about the life of the prisoners and the guards. John Coffey is one of the prisoners there. He is condemned for raping and murdering twin- nine-year-old girls. He is huge, like a child in a way, and soft spoken. Another prisoner who comes after John Coffey is William Wharton, who considers himself as ‘Billy the Kid’. John has a special talent. He can heal people by putting his hands on them. So does with Paul Edgecomb, who has a bad urinary infection. He puts his hands on Edgecomb and afterwards he is healed. The same thing he does with ‘Mr. Jingles’, a mouse belongs to one of the inmates, Eduard Delacroix, a
Cajun Frenchman who is condemned to death for raping and murdering. 80
Delacroix once found the mouse in his cell. Mr. Jingles is the last creature with which Delacroix has a kind of ‘relationship’. Percy Wetmore once steps on it and this is no accident but only pure wickedness. John Coffey takes the mouse and heals it too. From this moment, all the guards believe in John ‘s ability to heal.
Knowing this, Paul and the other guards take John Coffey out of prison for a night. They go to Hal Moores’s house. Moores is the warden in Cold Mountain.
His wife has a brain tumor. John cures Melinda, Hal’s wife, from her brain tumor.
For this night journey, the guards do not take Percy with them. They locked him in restoration room as a part of his punishment for making Delacroix’s execution run terrible.
Percy and Delacroix have a bad relationship since Delacroix likes to laugh at Percy’s foolness. Delacroix just laughs at Percy’s foolness, but Percy considers it as a humiliation. Anytime he has a chance, he tries to hurt Delacroix, including
Delacroix’s mouse. In Delacroix’s execution, Percy tries to sabotages it by using dry sponge and not the wet one. It makes Delacroix’s body is not electrocuted well, but it burns. It makes the other guards hate Percy since their job is to make the last days of the prisoners peace and calm.
The situation in the block is more tense since one of the prisoners, William
Wharton, always makes troubles. When John walks the corridor before his night journey, his hands are hold once by William Wharton because he walks too close to the William’s cell. He got a vision from it. The vision makes him to be proven not guilty. John knows that the one who raped and murdered the twins is William 81
Wharton. Because of this, John does not release the bugs which are always released from his mouth after he heals people. The bugs are as the representation of illness and they are released every time John finishes to heal people. However, it does not happen after he cures Melinda Moores’s illness. He keeps them in his mouth. The guards think he will die. When Percy is released from the restoration room, and he walks too close to John Coffey’s cell, John uses this chance to grab
Percy and transfer whatever inside his mouth into Percy’s mouth. It makes Percy doing a crazy thing. He draws his gun and shoots William Wharton many times until he died. No one knows the cause of Percy’s acting except the guards, and they keep this as secret. Because of this, Percy is put to Briar Ridge Mental
Hospital, the place where Percy is supposed to work after he is out from Cold
Mountain State Penitentiary. He is not in as an employee but as a patient. What happens to Percy and William perhaps, as a punishment for them. Percy has made
Delacroix’s execution run terrible and William has raped and murdered the twins.
Although it is known that John Coffey is not guilty, he is executed. Paul and the other guards cannot do anything to prevent John’s execution. Paul asks himself if he has the right to take the life of someone who is not guilty and has got such a gift from God.
Paul Edgecomb narrates the story years later after he is not a superintendent in E-Block. John Coffey’s execution is his last job. He lives in a nursing house and his age is above a hundred years. His long age is part of John
Coffey’s gift that is transferred to him when John cures him from urinary infection. 82
Appendix 2: The Story of Scottsboro Boys in 1932 according to A People and
A Nation: A History of the United States.
For black American, the early depression years are ones of great trial.
Scottsboro become a celebrated civil liberties case that symbolizes the ugliness of race relations in the Depression Era. One afternoon in March 1931, a freight train pulled into the yard at Paint Rock, near Scottsboro, Alabama. When the train stopped, armed sheriff’s deputies arrested nine young blacks, charging them with roughing up some white hobos and throwing them off the train earlier in the day.
When two white women who were removed from the same freight claimed that the blacks has raped them, an angry mob gathered. Within two weeks eight of the
“Scottsboro boys” had been convicted of rape by all-white juries and sentenced to death. The ninth, only twelve years old, was favored by a hung jury. But because court-appointed lawyers had offered little defense for the youths, the Supreme
Court overturned the convictions (1932) on the grounds that the accused had not been granted adequate legal counsel.
New trial opened in 1933, again with all-white juries. Medical evidences showed that the women had not had intercourse on the train. Nevertheless, the first defendant up for retrial, Haywood Patterson, was once again found guilty.
Judge James Horton, who had stated that under American law “we know neither black not white,” was convinced that Patterson was an innocent victim of racial hatred. The courageous Horton overturned the jury’s decision. 83
In 1936 Patterson was retried, found guilty, and given a seventy-five-year sentence. Four of the other youths were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the state dropped charges against the remaining four. Not until 1950 were all five out of jail – four by parole and Patterson by escaping from his work gang.