Responding to Evil

By Alicia McBride on 05/02/2011 @ 11:30 AM

Tags: Afghanistan, War Is Not the Answer

Today, I've been part of several conversations that circle around the issue of evil. Thinking about how to respond to someone like Osama bin Laden, who has committed horrible crimes, makes you look into yourself for answers to questions about what evil is and whether it can be redeemed. It's one thing to say that you can speak to the Light of God in someone who has relatively ordinary faults, it's another to speak to it in someone whose willful actions have caused death, destruction, fear, and mayhem.

Bin Laden's killing was in many respects a large-scale application of the death penalty, another place where we have to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions about whether vengeance and distance from a person's human-ness, despite its many failings, is conscionable. I was reminded of a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, where Terry Gross spoke with David Dow, a lawyer who has represented more than 100 death row inmates in his 20-year career. She asked him what he meant when he said "I believe in evil."

Prof. DOW: I do believe in evil. I believe that there are some people who are just bad and they're never going to be made good. And I think I say in the book, I hope I say in the book, that I don't know how they got to be that way. I don't know whether they were born that way or whether they were broken at such a young age that that's how they came to be that way, but from the point of view of society it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter why a person is inveterately bad. And I think that there are people like that. I don't think that we need to be executing them. But I do believe that they're people in prison who can not possibly be made good - who can not possibly be rehabilitated.

GROSS: And what's your role as a defense attorney when you're representing somebody who you not only believe is guilty but who you believe is evil?

Prof. DOW: My role as a defense lawyer is to try to persuade the court -the judges - that my client should've been sentenced to life rather than death. And I will say this, that even in those small number of cases where I've been representing somebody who I really believe is or was an evil person, even in those cases, there were appalling constitutional violations. And one of the things that I noticed about those cases is that the fact that my client seems to be evil, seems to make it easier for the judges to ignore the fact that there were constitutional violations. They just don't care about it. They say, here we have a bad person; this is a bad person. There's no way this person is ever going to be fixed or better or rehabilitated. Let's just be done with him. And I represent those people because I don't accept that analysis. I don't think that that's the way United States legal system is supposed to work. Even my bad evil clients are human beings who are entitled to have their rights protected.

You can read the full interview here.