The speculation about Zacharias Moussaoui's has ended, knowing that he will be imprisoned for the rest of his life. Peggy Noonan is displeased because he didn't get the death penalty.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

[…]

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

[…]

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

Peggy may think that we wimped out by not sitting his ass down in the electric chair and pulling the switch. But she's overlooked a couple of things.

First, crazy or not, Moussaoui wanted to die, to become a martyr for the twisted harabahist ideology of a fascist Islamic cult. We denied him that 'honor'. He will rot away in a prison cell, out of sight and with no contact with the outside world for the rest of his life.

Second, by sentencing Moussaoui to life in prison at the federal Supermax facility in Colorado, we have done far worse than put him to death. He will be in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. He will have no visitors. He will have no contact with other inmates. He will be locked in his cell 23 hours a day. The only persons he will see will be the guards who will deliver his meals three times a day or escort him to a room for his daily 60 minute exercise period. That is it. He may, on occasion, be visited by some law enforcement or governmental official, but that's all. No friends. No relatives. No imams. Nobody.

To reiterate, we have done far worse than kill him. We have made him a non-entity, a living ghost who will quickly fade out of the the public's memory. And then he will die, as the presiding judge said, quoting T.S.Eliot, “with a whimper.”

I can think of no better fate for him.

Addendum: Do not think that because I believe he received an appropriate sentence that I am against capital punishment. I am not. I believe there are crimes so heinous that death is the only remedy. As I said above, in Moussaoui's case we denied him what he sought and in the process did more than kill him. We made him insignificant, something he feared far more than dying.