Today, my list of contents is being blocked in order to obstruct access to my own essays. This makes revising my work impossible. I expect computer attacks and insertions of "errors" after posting this short story. "Errors" are usually inserted in waves over the first several days that a new item is posted with the goal of maximizing psychological harm as I make identical repairs and corrections many times. Thereafter, "errors" are inserted at irregular intervals, again, to maximize the anxiety-effect and frustration-inducement. There are dozens of intrusions into my computer every day from New Jersey government and private computers. The goal is censorship and maximing psychological "touchless" torture of the victim for the purposes of bringing about a mental breakdown and collapse. I doubt that this effort will succeed with me.
I believe that the subject of evil is important and underexamined. Nearly every statement made by the protagonist-narrator of this text has been made to me in life and during Internet debates with ethical skeptics, nihilists, or "relativists." I have kept copies of many such exchanges taking place on-line. I would not be surprised to discover that persons advocating views not all that distant from those set forth below are officials in America's "Soprano State." Those who are interested in these disturbing literary themes are directed to:
Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (New York: Warner Books, 1979).
John Banville, The Book of Evidence (New York: Warner Books, 1989).
Sebastian Faulks, Engleby (New York: Vintage, 2007).
Mitch Smith & Monica Davey, "Two Men From Elite Universities Charged With a Killing 'Dark and Disturbing,'" The New York Times, August 21, 2017, p. A11.
Alan Cowell, "Ian Brady, Unrepentant Killer of British Children, Dies at 79," The New York Times, "Business Section," May 17, 2017, p. B14.
Mike Ives, "Life Sentences for British Banker in Murder of 2 Persons," The New York Times, November 9, 2016, p. A11.
William Glaberson, "Trial of 2nd Man Will Revisit the Horror of a Triple Murder," The New York Times, November 11, 2010, at p. A29.
"Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?"
State v. Carlos R. Mendoza
Affidavit in Support of Motion for Reconsideration of Death Sentence and Appeal for Clemency
Filed before the Supreme Court of
________________________ .
Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10
I, Carlos R. Mendoza, being duly sworn hereby depose and say:
1. I am awaiting execution in accordance with a death sentence imposed after multiple convictions for the murders of several persons.
2. My "termination" at the hands of state officials is scheduled for not later than 24 hours from the signing of this official document. I submit this Affidavit in support of the legal brief seeking reconsideration of my sentence and appeal for clemency prepared by my attorney and his assistants which is to be filed not later than 9:00 A.M. on the day of my scheduled execution.
3. These "murders" of which I am convicted were only one part of a larger criminal conspiracy and chain of events in which I am said to have "participated." The United States Attorney's Office has described me in legally filed documents as a "Kingpin" and "career criminal." I am highly flattered by these descriptions and colorful epithets even as I must decline the honor that they bestow upon me.
4. I am, your Honors, merely your humble servant. I am a minor felon. I am a "poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." I am as nothing in comparison with the evils done, every day, by ladies and gentlemen -- such as yourselves, perhaps? -- whose decisions and judgments result in death and suffering on such a colossal scale as to defy description in words, making any crimes attributed to me insignificant. It has been noted that "nations and states are but robber barons writ large." (Adam Smith) I am merely a robber baron writ small.
5. The United States of America does not deny responsibility for the deaths in the last decade of more than 1 to 2 million persons in the Middle East alone, including 500,000 children; millions of native Americans were killed in the conquest of a continent; millions more persons of African ancestry were enslaved and killed in developing the world's largest economy during the past several centuries; hundreds of thousands died instantly through incineration at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; more than one million succumbed in the Pacific to U.S. colonialism; thousands died and are still dying in Vietnam as a result of U.S. efforts in that country that included chemical as well as germ warfare. Many thousands continue to die in Pakistan from U.S. "robot" bombs -- as reported (or ignored) -- in America's daily newspapers. Hundreds of thousands have died and continue to die in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan from "secret" U.S. missions. My achievements are insignificant by comparison with "your" deeds, distinguished judges and justices, ladies and gentlemen. I am only an amateur in crime. All of you are the true professionals in the art of murder.
6. Dr. Johnson remarked that "nothing so concentrates the mind as the knowledge that a man will be hanged in the morning." I have little hope that this appeal for clemency will be successful. I am cooperating with my lawyer's efforts because he seems so interested in the research and arguments to be submitted to the court and officials deciding the matter that I would hate to disappoint him by ignoring or trivializing his effort to save my "worthless" skin. We have grown very fond of one another, my lawyer and I. At least, I like him. My lawyer regards me with fascinated "horror." Unlike many of you in the so-called "world of normality," my lawyer -- who is my age and even resembles me, physically, if not morally -- understands that "there but for the grace of God go I."
7. I share in the human condition, ladies and gentlemen. I am one of you. Your horror and dread at my actions (or at my existence) emanates from this suppressed knowledge. Admit it, you see yourselves in me and others like me. You are as much attracted as repelled by what you see in me. We need each other. No saint without a sinner, eh? No judges or lawyers and laws without criminals and violators of laws. I notice that my lawyer nods his head in agreement as these words are taken down by a typist or court reporter for transcription. Think of ancient drama or literature, if you like, or the sad poetry in court documents and filings, the foul residue of miserable lives exhaled (like a miasmic cloud) from places such as the establishment where I now find myself placed by cruel fortune and the vicissitudes of a deeply flawed legal system. Justice is only to be found in heaven. On earth we have a surplus of laws. Happily, I am surrounded by books. Finally, I have the leisure to read and a little time to think.
8. I am a man who is about to die. I must make my peace with my killer, society, even as I endeavor to justify my life with mere words. A final meal, a cigarette, some last words. These are poor consolations for the misfortunes of fate. My lawyer's eyes sparkle with pity. He pities me. I pity him. My life's final act is anticlimactic, scripted by Henry Fielding and (somehow) unfolding in the wrong century. I would have fared better in the eighteenth century -- or earlier still -- as a Spanish pirate sailing the high seas.
9. This is what psychologists call "lack of proper affect" or "insight," failure of moral imagination, inability to appreciate the pain of others, a poverty of feeling and empathy. I am a Republican. I believe in money -- our only true God -- also in punishment for criminals. Criminals enjoy committing their crimes, your Honors, just look at Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, or Mr. Trump. They -- no, we -- deserve all that is meeted out to us. So many criminals are lawyers and judges, elected officials and businessmen, even prosecutors and cops -- many of these social frauds were on my payroll. I have little sympathy for hypocrites concerned about the "ethics" and "souls" of their neighbors in Soprano States. After all, what is to be expected from this monkey race of killers and carnivores? Not much: 98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees. Indeed, we are "50% identical to the banana. ... Homo sapiens, according to current evolutionary theory, exists primarily as a container for inactive bacteria which have been successful in the struggle for survival. ... Laws of Newtonian elegance can't apply to human behavior. Bananas aren't motivated by 'cause and effect.' Ask one." Engleby, pp. 109-110.
10. My lawyer is about my age, fifty years-old. He lives in a modest non-descript place a few miles from the courthouse. He is in debt up to and beyond his eyeballs to pay for the education of his only child. He has few possessions in comparison with what I have enjoyed. My lawyer is also a Republican. He does not have sex with young and very beautiful women. I have delighted in the pleasures of women of every kind and from every nation in the world, almost on a daily basis. He has never owned a very expensive watch. I have possessed exquisite jewelry of every kind. He has never travelled the world. I have been everywhere in Europe. I have also visited at least some parts of every continent, including Asia and Africa, mostly on business. I know what it is like to have money and power.
11. I drove a Mercedes Benz, the most luxurious model ever made. My dull and average-looking lawyer has only a very modest Japanese car. I have dined in the finest restaurants with famous faces surrounding me. He eats at home with his pleasant wife of thirty years. He dreams of nights that he cannot afford in great concert halls and theaters. I have been to all the great theaters of the world. We debate philosophy and cultural issues. He believes in goodness and love. I do not. My death may arrive tomorrow. His death (and yours) will arrive soon enough -- if it has not arrived already without your noticing the fact -- usually, death arrives before most of you have done much living. I pity all of you.
12. We "live" in different worlds of value, my lawyer and I. The boredom of his life would have killed me ages ago. I have very little confidence that my well-meaning attorney (or any judges) will appreciate all I have to say. My question to you, your Honors, is whether you or he -- this totally insignificant and flawed person, struggling to be good, with his silly books of ethics and love of art, my "inferior" in every sense of the word -- have truly lived or whether all of you will die without savoring this precious gift of life? Am I making this appeal "for" life? Or is my lawyer and are all of you with him begging for some of this "authenticity" or Nietzschean elan that I embody? Who is to be pitied? Me? Or you? How are we as "sacks of protein and water" different in the end from one another whether we are criminals or cops? How could we possibly matter to the universe?
13. My lawyer lives in an orderly world, in linear time, real spaces, and genuine emotions. I thrive upon chaos and quantum mystery. Like Milton's Lucifer, I "rule in hell" whereas he serves in heaven. I am rich in life-force. How many of you can say the same? Not many, I promise you.
14. Experts and courts demand an explanation for my actions and life choices. Their theories are laughably absurd. This demand misses the point of the enterprise: "Evil," one meddlesome English critic reminds us, "has, or appears to have, no practical purpose. Evil is supremely pointless. Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity. In this, it resembles God, who if he does turn out to exist" -- I shall discover the answer to this question soon enough! -- "has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being. ... Farce is human action stripped of meaning and reduced to mere physical motion. This is also what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews." Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 84-87.
15. One of my colleagues in business described persons as "meat puppets," things of no consequence to be moved about by men like us. We are the gods. They -- all of you -- are animals and nothing more. You are "collateral damage," like those millions of brown people who must be murdered to further America's national interest. No one claims that my life has been dull or average. I can truthfully assert -- with my hand on my heart as I do so -- that few persons have found my conversations or company boring. I am blessed with a strong dose of what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as "life-energy." Heidegger understood the need for affirmation of the moment. A single act of gratuitous cruelty that produces a victim writhing in agony is what nature intends for all of us. To deny the luxurious pleasures derived from the destruction of "little" lives is mendacious. Admit your addiction to hurting the "little people" who make the world turn. After all, to those who dare to act greatly or seize what must be theirs all is permitted. All is permitted.
16. We are carnivores, killers, takers, aggressors. We take pleasure in fulfilling our aggressive natures. This is what the blood-stained god of creation must have intended. Humanity is not made in the image of any loving God's compassion. The very suggestion of such an ethics of love is utterly absurd. Hitler had some excellent points even if he got a little carried away at times. Who is to say that Hitler was wrong? Morality is subjective. Goodness is relative to the individual and his or her situation: " ... the strong man is also the free man, ... while the subjected man, the slave, [like my earnest attorney,] lives dull and oppressed. -- The theory of freedom of will is an invention of the ruling classes." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale, s. 9.
17. An invention of the "ruling classes" is what morality always will be. Yes, morality is a tool for the oppression of the people -- simple people and fools who deserve what they get from the likes of me. Much the same must be said of laws. They are for the masses not the masters of men. I was (the past tense is now necessary!), in life, a master of men. I was an "Overman." I will not end my life by grovelling to small men and women. All of you fine ladies and gentlemen are the cave in which I dwell. Right and wrong is all about power. You may kill me, but you cannot be like me and you want, desperately, to be like me. This explains why so many of you follow me and are fascinated by me, or others like me, who rule over nations and states everywhere in the world. I have lived and now I will die, greatly, loudly, proudly. I could not have borne a small and trivial life. This violent death at the hands of the state is much better. "Who would fardles bear? ..." Not I, your Honors, not me -- never.
18. I suppose some comment is desired from me concerning the murders of which I stand convicted. Very well. Let us savor the delicious details. I was forced by the relatively few gainful financial opportunities of my early life to operate a business in which credibility is vital. I cannot permit a rival (or employee) to absond with my goods or cash. Otherwise, you can be sure that others will attempt to do the same. My life unfolded in a world without the regular and predictable institutional responses that would have allowed me to forego self-help. In other words, I could not go to the cops for help. Hence, I was the cops.
19. Now many persons in such a position in America hire what are known as "subcontractors." There are "garbage disposal experts" who solve these problems for a small fee in what used to be called "the Underworld." I could have formulated a "coalition of the willing." I preferred -- even delighted -- in doing my own sanitary work. I admit that what I will now describe will seem "evil." However, I do not believe in "evil." The word is a relic of a religious age that is no longer needed. "The world is everything that is the case." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) Evil is not an item that is found existing, empirically, in the world. Evil is a concept deposited in human affairs by persons. Evil is a hypocritical concept. Evil is subjective. The winners in every war or conflict define what is evil. Had the Nazis or Japan won the Second World War there would have been "Virginia" and not "Nuremberg Trials." Besides, the word "evil" should not be applied to me. I am merely more honest than most people. I take what I want. I get rid of my competitors. I survive. This is what nature intends, ladies and gentlemen. I am in compliance with the strictures of evolution. How can anyone blame me for that? I am only a "survivor."
20. "What rats do when a member of a strange rat clan enters their territory or is put in there by a human experimenter is one of the most horrible and repulsive things which can be observed in animals." Konrad Lorenz writes of the immediate attacks and slow dismerberment of these rodents by others who bite, claw, tear at the stranger, usually over a long period of time, deliberately prolonging the agony: "Only rarely does one see an animal in such desperation and panic, so conscious of the inevitability of a terrible death, as a rat which is about to be slain by rats. It ceases to defend itself. One cannot help comparing this behavior with what happens when a rat faces a large predator that has driven it into a corner whence there is no more escape than from the rats of a strange clan. ..." "Rats," in On Aggression (New York & London: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 161-163. (American prisons duplicate the conditions of overcrowded rodent environments to perfection, probably deliberately, with predictable consequences in terms of inmates' suicides and frequent violence.)
21. American experts in psychological torture have devised techniques aimed at reproducing this breakdown in defensive and coping capacity in persons not convicted of any crimes through frustrations and anxiety. They have improved upon Nazi techniques. Persons lay down and die, if subjected to such excruciating torments over a sufficiently long period, except for a few annoying individuals who do not seem to fit the pattern of so-called "normality." I hate when people refuse to be victims. I detest persons who disobey me. I hate everyone who thinks he is smarter than me. They need a little humility. No offense: "Anglos are not smart enough to be philosophers." I am a true philosopher. I do not bother with all of the books my lawyer reads. His constant study shows a lack of originality. All my lawyer does is to quote from his readings and then to comment on them in formulating his opinions. I am my own source of quotations.
22. "It has been noted that the existence of evil is only a 'problem' in the philosophical sense if one presupposes that Nature is an essentially benevolent enterprise or that it is the creation of an essentially benevolent deity or deities. If one makes no such presupposition, then evil's existence ceases to be a philosophical problem. But it does not necessarily cease to be a mystery. Indeed, one can never fully explain the existence of evil merely by denying the alleged benevolence of the universe. One must also provide a completely adequate account of the ultimate origins of human suffering. ... " Timothy Anders, The Evolution of Evil (Illinois: Open Court, 1994), at pp. xii-xiii.
23. I am compelled to agree with Professor Anders. "Suffering" by victims is indeed a crucial component of this mystery. How pleasant it is to savor the suffering of another. The exquisite flavor of a dying person's pleas for mercy and recognition of one's demonic "power" -- power over life or death, power to bestow favors or inflict pain and frustrations, eternally, for no rational reason, control over others, establishing one's infinite superiority -- like the demon, Malbus, in world mythology. I am still amused by a woman's attempt to escape death by offering sex and the look of shock on her face as a bullet was fired into her belly. I did not know there was a child in that woman's body. This knowledge, I must say, would have added to the pleasure of the experience. The look of absolute loss and devastation in a person's face as his or her children are murdered is really funny. The realization in a man's face that everything he loves has been or will be destroyed is priceless. I try to force them to see that everything they believe is nonsense. There is no truth. You can do whatever you want. I know what Vikings felt when they sacked a city. I understand Cortez as he raped and burned native women. These men must have been very much like me. These are the men who made empires and built mountains of gold. These are successful men. My lawyer admires artists and philosophers, scientists and great jurists. Such men and women are only servants of the wealthy and powerful. Money is the meaning of life. Genius is something I can buy like a hundred-dollar haircut. Violence is the ultimate sexual experience.
24. I entered my rival's home with some of my employees. I tied him to a chair. I took everything of value, material and non-material, raped his woman, murdered his children. After enjoying their bodies and turning them over to my people as a reward or bonus for the evening's work, I allowed my would-be usurper to die, slowly, by bleeding to death from several gun shots to the lower portions of his body. As he was surrounded by his dead family members, I snapped a photo, after posing the group in a touching family composition. I think of these murders as my humble creation of a work of art. My masterpiece. I then set fire to the establishment. Some of the victims may have been alive before the flames engulfed them. I wish that I had brought marshmellows to roast in the flames. I certainly succeeded in sending a message to any others contemplating a "revolution."
25. This evening's entertainment was strictly a "rational means to achieve a desired goal." David Hume would say that I am utterly rational. Psychologists suggest a career in politics. This lovely scene has been repeated 70 to 100 million times in the twentieth century. We are well on our way to similar or, perhaps, even greater numbers of victims in the new century. Am I so unusual? Am I really a monster? Or do you see in me only the monstrosity in human nature -- a human nature in which you share? I am merely the other side of you. Do what you like to my body. I have enjoyed my fun. I have lived. Living is killing, eating, fornicating, excreting one's victims. Morality and human compassion are things for weak persons like all of you. When you speak of human nature, remember that (whatever other aspects of humanity are postulated) you will also have to deal with me. There will always be someone like me.
The foregoing statements are true to the best of my knowledge. I am aware that if any of the foregoing statements made by me are wilfully false, I am subject to punishment.
s/Carlos R. Mendoza
Carlos R. Mendoza, Inmate No. 45587, Appellant.
Signed before me this 21st day of September, 2010.
s/Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.
Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.
Decision of the State Supreme Court in State v. Carlos R. Mendoza, et als.
Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10
PER CURRIAM:
Appeals for Clemency and Motions for Reconsideration of all Death Sentences have been brought before this tribunal in the above captioned and related matters. The state legislature has enacted a statute that forbids the imposition of the death penalty in this jurisdiction prior to the filing of these appeals and requests. All pending death sentences of persons convicted of murder in this state will be and hereby are commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole subject to review by appellate tribunals in the event that new evidence of factual innocence surfaces in any of these matters at any future time. Accordingly, the Appeals and Requests by these Appellants are rendered moot and are hereby dismissed. So Ordered.
Dated and Signed by All Justices this 1st Day of November, 2010.
