Sympathy for a Killer Most people believe that everyone gets what they deserve. That all bad actions deserve consequences. To many, that is what the so-called “justice” system is for. Criminals are supposed to be punished by the law, but is it always fair to the criminals? What if one of those criminals had an awful life growing up and just was unable to stay out of trouble? It is just this question that Truman Capote addresses in his book, In Cold Blood. Throughout the book, Capote creates sympathy for Perry Smith while claiming the justice system is flawed in the way it punishes the wrong people. Perry Smith did not live the happy childhood that he deserved, abandoned by his family at a young age he was forced to live at a terrible orphanage. “The one where Black Widows were always at me. Hitting me. Because of wetting the bed...They hated me, too.” (Capote 132). In this specific orphanage, Perry was beaten by the nuns that own the place. The short sentences within this quote truly emphasize the dramatic and horrible conditions that Perry had to live with in the orphanage. Sympathy is created with this quote because no one wants people to have to go through those types of experiences. What’s worse is that after leaving the orphanage, he wound up in a children’s shelter that was almost as worse as the orphanage where a nurse would nearly drown him. Again, the sympathy for Perry’s youth is created. Capote creates sympathy for Perry’s criminal record, by talking about Perry’s life. It seems that his record was an extension of the godforsaken environments in which he had to grow up in. At the very end of his life, which is also the end of the book, Capote keeps true to creating sympathy for Perry when it is his turn to be hanged, Capote describes what is happening with a certain kind of detail that brings out the good inside of Perry. “His expression was sober. His sensitive eyes gazed” (Capote 340). The sympathetic diction in describing how
