Poetic Justice

Often, while trying to explain my rejection of the death penalty , I use the term “poetic justice,” that great narrative satisfaction that comes in certain stories like the clicking shut of a well-made box. And just as often, I’m asked for an example.

Well, here for the record, is a report from out west :

The telephone company had been burying lines. To allow traffic to pass, they dug up half the road at a time and put up warning barriers with flashing lights to direct traffic to the safe side . . . . [But] pranksters had moved the flashing lights to the good side of the road. Speeding late at night and way over the legal blood alcohol limit, [two] ranch hands drove straight into the hole and died.

Because of the moved lights the sheriff’s accident analysis turned into a criminal matter. Crime scene analysis of tire tracks and footprints on the dirt road revealed that the pranksters were the ranch hands themselves, on their way to the bar.

Doesn’t that story end exactly the way it wants to end—the way we need it to end to achieve our narrative satisfaction? Ah, yes, poetic justice, the clicking shut of the box: Every once in a while, the world cooperates.

I just don’t think we can make the world cooperate by execution—by trying to roll our own poetic justice.