"I AM BECOME DEATH" *
an englishman once said, "tell me what a man does and i will tell you what he is."
i grew up in a household influenced by that protestant work ethic. my town once flooded and one of the coal trains coming through was stranded on the tracks. my dad walked on the top of the boxcars to get to work . he was around newsprint all his life. he died of a rare cancer that only struck people in certain occupations, one of them being newspaper printing. tell me what a man does and i'll tell you what he is.
for nineteen years all i've done is murder cases. i know murder well and i know little else. i am still fascinated by every case i get. i never get tired of them . i can be obsessive-compulsive and murder is a good subject for my personality.
of course there is pathos in every murder, some more than others. but in evey case there is horror, violence, the end. you become very aware of the finality of death. survivors often parrot one of the religous sayings like "he/she's in a better place," or "we'll be together in the next life." i can't help feeling jaded when i hear that time and again when my work belies the sentiment and only reinforces the opposite, the finality.
you do your job for nineteen years, you immerse yourself in every case. you meet the next of kin. to do it for that long you have to develop some distance.
it's a little jarring looking at death scene photos the first time. but that quickly goes away. they're just pictures. for a very long time, i've been able just to look at them for their evidentiary worth, not for the broken human bodies that are the reason i have this job in the first place. i can eat lunch and study the photos without being bothered.
scene visits were once a different thing for me. seeing a "live" dead body made me squeamish. if i could avoid it i wouldn't view the body, but that is not possible at most scenes. but even this changed after one homicide call.
one sunday afternoon i had my baby boy alone at home and was just starting to watch a football game. i was relaxed and enjoying life when the beeper went off. i cursed. i was exasperated. i had to call around to friends to get someone to babysit. as i drove to the scene i got more aggravated at the imposition and by the time i got there i was in full bloom.
i remember it was a domestic murder. that frustrated me even more. i am not a very jealous person so when i hear that a MURDER has been committed out of jealousy i become contemptuous. "if i can't have him/her nobody will." that is the mantra of all "domestics" and i know i should be more understanding but it angers me to hear it. this murder was at the apex of that senselessness.
a mother came home from church with her two children. her estranged husband confronted her at the house. they quarreled. he pulled out a gun and shot her. right in front of the kids.
he then went inside the house and shot himself in the living room. i remember he had fallen awkwardly, his legs bent under him. the gun was large caliber, a .45. the bullet tore a big hole in his shirt. his eyes were open.
the cops had already turned on the tv set before i got there. i sat on the couch--his couch--propped my feet on his coffee table and watched the game on his television with his body right underneath me. i was angry at him for what he did, for the reason he did it, for what he did to his children and for ruining my sunday afternoon. "fuck you," i said to him in my head. "i don't give a shit about you."
i have never been that callous since, but the point is the work had changed me a little. i have not been as squeamish around the destroyed bodies since then. now i was able to contemplate a scene and a body in strategic terms alone. what can i do to make the case better? what problems can i head off?
that's good for my work but if the emotion of even murder is subsumed to analysis and rationality then emotionally and psychologically, murder becomes "normal"; it is one's job, it is part of one's routine and i wonder if that has effected my own morality and what i view as acceptable. tell me what a man does and i will tell you what he is.
we are the philosophical children of descartes and kant and the whole rationalist tradition. our criminal justice system is certainly built on that foundation. "feelings of bias, sympathy and prejudice must not influence your verdict in any way," is what every criminal jury is told. the pictures of the broken and wrecked human bodies, the anguish of the family, the terror of the witnesses, the jury is to detach themselves from all that.
and because they must at the end stage of the process, those at the earlier stages--the detectives, the prosecutors, the defense attoneys, the judges--must also detach themselves from it.
jurors can get back to their morally normal lives after a week or two. but we must go on to the next case. there is no return from the dark side.
maybe the long term effects of this work are not all bad. it has made me see shades of gray where previously i had only seen black or white, but maybe too it is a moral and emotional carcinogen like the newsprint chemicals that killed my dad.
i seldom have hatred toward the murderers. almost always, when it's all over, i shake their hands, sometimes we embrace. for my colleagues that is odd behavior but it is not that i condone what they've done. unless they're truly evil, i view the whole case as sad.
in my experience--in my opinion--the murderers who are truly evil are rare. if there were no drugs and alcohol, if there was no jealousy, if men's testerone level wasn't so high, if they didn't get into fights, if THEY could seperate the emotional from the rational and not react violently, if all those things could be changed then a lot of murders wouldn't happen and i don't think those who kill for those reasons are necessarily evil.
"not evil" does not mean "not immoral, or "not criminal" certainly, and i gladly seek to have them punished severely for what they do but i do seperate them morally from reggie who liked to beat old white women to death with his bare hands. i honestly don't think that is moral relativism but if you combine that view with the change in my emotions to corpses, i wonder if it hasn't had an effect.
a colleague told me one time that over the last few years he had begun questioning housewives in jury selection about their daytime tv viewing habits because he was concerned that those who watch those shows get exposed to so much aberrant behavior that murder wouldn't seem so bad or a defendant's bizarre story might be accepted as normal and he didn't want people like that on his juries.
i thought it was a brilliant point but if we have concerns about viewers of those shows, what about us? we don't just watch it on tv. aberrant behavior is our job. our minds force us to think a certain way. the body isn't just a horror but a piece of evidence. a witness's terror is not a primal human reaction but something that needs to be conveyed convincingly in court.
i remember thinking about my job one time and recalling president reagan and the iran-contra scandal. he traded arms for hostages but somehow, in his mind, a mind that his hand-chosen biographer found "unfathomable," he truly believed he hadn't. "who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes."
reagan was an actor. his career before politics was playing a role, "lying." as an actor that is what one does. you pretend to be someone you're not. you convincingly display emotions that are not really there. if one does that in one's job then it must become easier to do it in other area's of one's life. lying becomes normal. tell me what a man does and i'll tell you what he is.
it's obviously the same thing for people like undercover cops and intelligence agents. there too your job is to lie. your life may depend on how well you do it. when you can so successfully erase one of the first morality lessons we are taught, "thou shalt not tell a lie," it becomes easier to do it in all other areas of life.
in my own case i make compromizing my opponent an uncommonly large part of my work and i am successful at it. it's been enormously helpful and it's easy for me. i use friendship and collegiality to loosen lips and learn secrets. i plant disinformation. i flatter, ingratiate, and feign laziness to lull my opponents. i draw them into apparent confidences so that i can use the faux intimacy to my advantage. i enjoy it. but to do all of that successfully you have to compartmentalize your emotions. you have to be cold, even ruthless. you have to be a good liar.
but if those compartments are so tightly shut, if the emotions are so successfully subsumed to strategy then maybe there is a blunting of emotions in other areas of life and again, the prohibition against lying, a bedrock of my own morality growing up, no longer has anywhere near its old effect.
all of this has resulted in my creation of a new dictum, "the two most overrated things in the world are the truth and 'i'm sorry'." the latter is useless in my view, doing more good for the speaker than for the listener. the former is not black and white for me anymore. sometimes the truth is used as a sword to wound others. we'd never say "my, you're ugly," to another person and then justify it because it was the truth. there are countless examples like that. and just as many where there are morally gray areas between the truth and the lie.
i think all of this is true. i believe all of the examples and arguments are reasonable but i wonder about the cumulative effect of my job, of whether the circuit breaker on my outrage meter has been readjusted too high, of whether the necessary blunting of emotions in dealing with murder has effected my emotional ability in other areas, of whether my acceptance of lying and nuanced views of murderers have not taken a toll on other aspects of my life.
* from the bhagavad gita
-benjamin harris
PUBLIC OCCURRENCES
