Essay in miniature: The injustice of Ken Lay's early exit

~The Enron executive's sudden death freed him from his long prison sentence. Sam Dolnick explores the logic on justice and mortality.

When Ken Lay died early this month, it seemed the Enron king who got away with so much -- until he finally didn't -- had saved his most dramatic coup for last.

The man whom millions blamed for cheating them had cheated blindfolded Justice, not to mention the countless saps who depend upon her to even the score. You could almost picture Lay sitting atop an Uncle Scrooge pile of money in the sky, taunting us with a wet raspberry from beyond.

Did he get off easy? After all, he's the one who died, and here we still are, eating ice cream and petting our dogs. So why do we feel like the chumps?

In America, we prefer criminals to be punished according to the conditions we dish out, not theirs or those of their weary organs. Those of us who play by the rules want control over those who don't. To change the terms of the contract, as Lay did by dying, robs us of some of our self-righteous comfort and ease.

Lay isn't the first public figure to sneak out from under the collective spiteful gaze. When the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic died during his U.N. war crimes trial, he robbed the Hague -- and, by extension, the world -- of its opportunity for reprisal.

The trial, the first of its kind, was designed to prove that the rule of law is more powerful than tyranny, war or genocide. When Milosevic died in March, before the verdict was reached and the sentence imposed, that lesson was rendered academic.

This curious desire for control finds its clearest expression on death row. There, inmates are kept on suicide watch. If the state is planning to execute them in the morning, why should we care if they die in their cell the night before? Perhaps it's not the punishment we're after as much as the power to control it -- and the opportunity to take satisfaction in our administering of it.

We want our villains punished on our terms. No matter how irreversible his final act was, the terms on which Ken Lay did it were his own.

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