Truman Capote revisits the 1959 Holcomb, Kansas, tragedy and recreates the surrounding of the monstrous Clutter murders in his contentious non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, along with that, he recalls extensive the manhunt and trials that followed. Capote wrote the book to demonstrate, what he views as, the “cold-blooded” cruelty of the death penalty in the United States. However, opposite to Capote’s intentions, through his long attempt to argue against capital punishment as the severest form of a criminal 's sentence, Capote’s shown empathy towards any murderer, not just that of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, actually works towards his stance’s demise once he shifts the novel’s concentration to the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men’s
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Andrews landed on Death Row after months of daydreaming about how he was going to brutally kill his family members. In November of 1958, Andrews murdered his mother, father, and older sister by calmly lodging .22-caliber bullets into their bodies. His reasoning? Andrews’ father owned farmland valued at roughly two hundred thousand dollars, and Andrews’ yearnings to wear, “gangsterish silk shirts and driv[ing] scarlet sports cars,” (312), had devoured him to the point where he came to the conclusion that, “murdering [his family] seemed the swiftest, most sensible way of implementing the fantasies that possessed him” (312). During his subsequent trial, the psychiatrist staff of the Menninger Clinic had diagnosed the eighteen year old with, “schizophrenia, simple type” (315), meaning that he experienced a such separation of thinking and feeling, that he, according to Dr. Joseph Satten, a member of the diagnostic team, “felt no emotions whatsoever” (316). This lack of emotion explains how Andrews was able to murder his family for selfish reasons and not feel as if it was morally wrong. There are now medications available for aiding the effects of schizophrenia, but there is no cure that would be able to permanently alter this belief of Andrews because one cannot be successfully transformed if one doesn’t want to be. His mild case of schizophrenia had affected him in such a way that he felt it was, “just as right to kill his mother as to kill an animal or a fly” (316), hence a mental defect leading to a non rehabilitatable moral deficiency. Therefore, sentencing Lowell Lee Andrews to capital punishment was both moral and justified because of his demonstrated inability to be
Andrews landed on Death Row after months of daydreaming about how he was going to brutally kill his family members. In November of 1958, Andrews murdered his mother, father, and older sister by calmly lodging .22-caliber bullets into their bodies. His reasoning? Andrews’ father owned farmland valued at roughly two hundred thousand dollars, and Andrews’ yearnings to wear, “gangsterish silk shirts and driv[ing] scarlet sports cars,” (312), had devoured him to the point where he came to the conclusion that, “murdering [his family] seemed the swiftest, most sensible way of implementing the fantasies that possessed him” (312). During his subsequent trial, the psychiatrist staff of the Menninger Clinic had diagnosed the eighteen year old with, “schizophrenia, simple type” (315), meaning that he experienced a such separation of thinking and feeling, that he, according to Dr. Joseph Satten, a member of the diagnostic team, “felt no emotions whatsoever” (316). This lack of emotion explains how Andrews was able to murder his family for selfish reasons and not feel as if it was morally wrong. There are now medications available for aiding the effects of schizophrenia, but there is no cure that would be able to permanently alter this belief of Andrews because one cannot be successfully transformed if one doesn’t want to be. His mild case of schizophrenia had affected him in such a way that he felt it was, “just as right to kill his mother as to kill an animal or a fly” (316), hence a mental defect leading to a non rehabilitatable moral deficiency. Therefore, sentencing Lowell Lee Andrews to capital punishment was both moral and justified because of his demonstrated inability to be