Can hating the sinner mean fewer sinners?

In 2001, back when I was a real estate reporter, a colleague and I went up to Fishkill to interview Abe Hirschfeld, the developer, former New York Post owner and one of the great flakes of New York City, who at the time was an inmate in the state prison there, having been convicted of trying to hire someone to kill his business partner, Stanley Stahl.
Abe was always a great interview, and the setting — the visiting room at the state pen — is unmatched for important Journalism-with-a-capital-J. In truth, the interview was hardly a coup: Hirschfeld’s publicist had set the whole thing up. But a month later, The New York Times conducted its own prison interview with him, and the reporter snarkily wrote that Abe cited our trade journal story as evidence of his continuing importance. I was the office hero for a day.
Sitting across from this smelly and half-insane 81-year-old man, I wondered if prison was the right place for him, for here was someone who had long since gone to sea. At one point he claimed credit for President Bush’s victory in Florida, and he shared with us his idea for his next condo tower, which he hoped to build in Midtown Manhattan and that would feature retractable outside walls, you know, for fresh air. I remember wondering if he wasn’t too kooky to be truly evil.
At the time, I was sorry that the interview took place across a table in what looked like a middle school cafeteria: no cubicle, window and telephones; no iron bars in sight. But that gave us the opportunity to observe the other visitors. It was as you’d expect: some little kids, some lawyers, lots of wives. One middle-aged couple near us sat across from each other, she in cheap leisure clothes, he in prison blues, and said nothing to each other for the entire hour. They just cried softly and avoided eye contact.
Back at the office, I read the transcript of Hirschfeld’s trial. Stahl’s widow testified that the stress of the ordeal with Hirschfeld had led to his fatal heart attack. That cast the interview in a different light. Further, since Hirsch-feld had turned his prison’s visiting hour into a press gaggle, he couldn’t have spent a lot of time learning his lesson, and nobody who read our story, or the one in the Times, would have gotten the idea that he was having anything but a splendid time in prison. (He was released after serving two years, and died in August of 2005.)
It was how unrepentant Abe seemed to be — in contrast, perhaps, to the man at the next table — that I kept thinking about as I read the Feb. 11 Times Magazine story about lethal injection. It was a typical Times story: slanted toward abolition, it cited the usual horror stories of convulsing convicts and how valiant doctors now refuse to take part. But the token contrarian, a New York Law School professor named Robert Blecker, argued that the problem with lethal injection, which he compared to the process used to euthanize cancer patients and sick pets, is it’s too kind. “How we kill the people we hate should never resemble easing excruciating pain for those we love,” he argued.
Hate? That’s a word whose meaning has changed significantly. It’s now mostly reserved for racial issues, so it’s a sentiment we’re afraid to express and an emotion we don’t like to confess to feeling. But in hindsight, I imagine it summed up what Mrs. Stahl felt for Abe, and I doubt that reading his jailhouse interviews lessened the feeling.
Last week I asked an expert on both grief and the law about his feelings on deterrence. Neil Flynn, the father of Katie Flynn, the little girl murdered by a drunk driver two summers ago, happens to be a litigator. He said his views on the law and punishment had not changed since he became a victim of one of the region’s most notorious crimes. “There are three philosophies of penology: retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation,” Flynn said last Friday. “We know from years of experience that rehabilitation doesn’t work. Even before I became a crime victim I knew it was nonsense.”
For near-at-hand evidence, Flynn pointed to the man he would be forgiven for hating, Martin Heidgen, who is awaiting sentencing for his drunk-driving murder. As the Herald’s Mike Schnitzel reported in some editions last week, Heidgen’s mother claimed that the case’s notoriety made it impossible for her son to get a fair trial, an idea that, in wrenching testimony, Flynn called insulting.
On Friday, he said that if Heidgen received the maximum sentence — life in prison — it would act as a deterrent that would save lives. “People still drive drunk because they know that for the first offense they’re just going to pay a small fine,” Flynn said.
But while he conceded that he wanted Heidgen’s remaining days to be uncomfortable and few, Flynn said he was not comfortable with calling his feelings toward Heidgen hatred, exactly. “I do want to see Heidgen dead...” he said. “He’s not a candidate for rehabilitation as long as he thinks of himself as a victim, and from everything we’ve heard he’s still complaining that he’s a scapegoat for an overzealous prosecutor … But hatred isn’t appropriate. We’re better than that. Scorn, instead. All good people should turn their backs on people like him.”

Doug Miller is editor of the Long Beach Herald. Comments? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.