June 13
USA:
Episcopal leaders push to abolish death penalty across the country
When Gov. Dannel Malloy signed a bill in April making Connecticut the 5th state
in 5 years to abolish the death penalty, Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut
Bishop Suffragan James Curry’s attendance at the ceremony testified to the
influence of Episcopal leaders on ending capital punishment in the state.
Curry and other members of the diocese had worked with the Connecticut Network
to Abolish the Death Penalty since the 2005 execution of serial killer Michael
Ross, the 1st prisoner put to death in New England in 45 years.
Abolishing the death penalty became “a very, very contentious issue” in
Connecticut after 2 recently released prisoners invaded a home and “brutally
murdered” 2 girls and their mother in 2007, he said.
“In the midst of that, it was very hard to have a conversation in this state
about not demanding the death penalty for such horrific crimes,” Curry said.
“It was also a time in the church where we started to shift the conversation
from that this is punishment to [that] the death penalty is really about the
kind of statement we want to make about what we want our society to be.”
The Episcopal Church officially has opposed the death penalty for more than
half a century, and its advocacy is gaining traction as momentum builds across
the country to end capital punishment. Bishops and other church leaders are
writing letters, joining coalitions, testifying before legislators and publicly
demonstrating their opposition to the death penalty.
17 states and the District of Columbia have ended capital punishment. In total,
3,189 people remain on death row in the United States, including some in
Connecticut and New Mexico, which repealed the penalty without making it
retroactive, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Episcopal Church first passed a resolution opposing the death penalty in
1958, said Alexander Baumgarten, Episcopal Church director of government
relations. “It’s been reaffirmed in multiple conventions since then, so our
position as a church has been clear for a long time.
“I think the fact that we’ve seen a recent pattern of bishops and other leaders
in the church in the dioceses of the United States raising the profile of our
advocacy is a reflection of the climate in which public opinion in the United
States seems to be moving against the death penalty for the 1st time in a
number of years.”
A 2011 Gallup poll showed about one in three Americans opposing the death
penalty, a 19 % drop in support for capital punishment over 17 years and down
from an all-time high of 80 % supporting it in 1994. Baumgarten attributes the
trend to an understanding of “the inherent flaws in the application of the
death penalty.”
Repeated studies, for example, have documented that capital punishment does not
deter crime, he said. The death penalty also carries inherent racial and
socio-economic biases and the chance of killing innocent people, he said.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center:
-Studies indicate the chance of being sentenced to death is much higher when
murder victims are white, and a 1998 study reported a pattern of race-of-victim
or race-of-defendant discrimination or both in 96 % of states where race and
the death penalty had been reviewed.
-More than 130 people have been released from death row since 1973 with
evidence of their innocence, with an average of five people exonerated annually
from 2000 to 2011.
“As people start to understand the complexities of how the penalty is applied
in practice,” Baumgarten said, “I think we start to see people who on its face
might not be opposed to the death penalty now start to say: As a matter of
applied justice in this country, this doesn’t really work.”
While the Episcopal Church has an official stance against the death penalty,
this primarily is a state issue, and church abolition efforts have originated
mostly at the local level, noted Baumgarten, who works in the church’s
Washington, D.C., office.
“It’s not something that I think has been driven by central structures of the
Episcopal Church or central governing entities of the Episcopal Church,” he
said. “Bishops and congregations and leaders in the dioceses have looked at the
church’s historic stance on this and applied it to the - context that’s
evolving around them.”
Cooperative efforts
In Connecticut, the diocese worked with the Connecticut Network to Abolish the
Death Penalty on legislative efforts that fell short more than once before the
governor signed the April 25 bill abolishing the death penalty in the state.
Then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed a bill in 2009. A 2011 abolition bill failed by
two votes in the state Senate.
The 2012 bill ended the death penalty, but not for those previously convicted –
including the 2 men sentenced to death for the high-profile 2007 murders.
“It’s a flaw in the bill,” Curry said. “I think that’s going to be a legal
battle.”
During the push for the successful abolition legislation, the Connecticut
network helped organize conversations in churches around the death penalty, he
said. “We started organizing letter-writing campaigns to state representatives
and senators. We made ourselves available for conversation. We were lobbying at
the legislative office building.”
The diocese also partnered with the church’s Washington, D.C., office, sending
alerts through a Connecticut public policy network.
The diocese’s public witness included inviting clergy to renew their vows
during Holy Week this year while participating in a Stations of the Cross
service that meditated on issues of justice in society and particularly on
abolishing the death penalty. Between 175 and 200 people participated, mostly
Episcopal priests but also some clergy from other denominations, Curry said.
“We had one rabbi join us - It speaks to the power of this issue and the power
of the coalition, because the very language of our Stations of the Cross was
unsettling to him.”
While they walked in prayer, the last senator needed to pass the abolition bill
held a press conference saying she had changed her mind after opposing similar
legislation last year, Curry said. The church made a difference in the bill’s
passage, he said, from the letter writing to the image of 3 Episcopal bishops
and numerous clergy in their cassocks processing through the state capital.
“For me, the other reality is that the church learned that we have the
possibility to affect public discourse by staying true to who we are and by
creating alliances with other groups like the Connecticut Network to Abolish
the Death Penalty, and that’s a learning that were going to keep as we’re
looking into social justice,” said Curry. ” We need to always keep looking
beyond ourselves, outside of ourselves for other voices that we can ally with.”
In the Diocese of Montana, Bishop C. Franklin Brookhart Jr. belongs to the
Montana Abolition Coalition, an umbrella group of religious and other
organizations seeking to end the state’s death penalty. He has written
editorials and letters to legislators opposing the death penalty and testified
before a state Senate committee.
“It’s difficult in some ways because, in doing this, you have to speak to
people with a broad range of ethical and religious backgrounds,” he said. “It’s
easiest for me simply to speak as a Christian.”
He raises issues such as whether the death penalty is justice or vengeance; how
accurately it can be applied; whether it deters crime; and whether it serves
the common good. He views the death penalty as “morally corrosive to a
society,” he said.
“I think we have to say that there is no question from the Scriptures that the
state has – the traditional phrase is ‘the power of the sword’ — to do this,
but is it in this day and age really a Christian witness to say let’s kill
people? I don’t think it is.”
Like Curry, he believes the church’s witness makes a difference.
“I believe there is power in being a bishop and speaking on behalf of the
church. I know I get listened to more carefully because of that,” he said,
adding, “The other side is, I think that for some people it is easier to
dismiss me: Well, what would you expect a soft-headed Christian to say?”
The Montana legislature meets for 90 days every 2 years, and death penalty
abolition is an issue every session, he said. “It nearly got through last
time.”
“Every time it comes up - the idea of the death penalty seems to have less
power and appeal to it, and it will come up again this time when the
legislature meets in January 2013,” he predicted.
Episcopal leaders advocate against the death penalty in other states as well.
As president of the Ecumenical Leaders Group of the Central Maryland Ecumenical
Council, Diocese of Maryland Bishop Eugene Sutton most recently led a march to
Maryland’s State House following an early-morning Ash Wednesday service at St.
Anne’s Episcopal Parish in Annapolis, said Sharon Tillman, diocesan
spokesperson. The Feb. 22 event culminated in a press conference and
discussions with religious leaders and legislators.
In 2008, at an anti-death-penalty rally in Annapolis, Sutton said, “There is no
room for state-sponsored killing and state-sponsored revenge. To kill and to
revenge for the killing of another person contributes to a cycle of killing. …
Love is doing what is right precisely when it is hard. Jesus taught his
disciples to go beyond an ‘eye for an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth,’ for that
would inevitably lead to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others would call
an ‘eyeless and a toothless society.’ Instead, he taught us to love even the
unlovely and stop the cycle of violence.”
In the Diocese of Los Angeles, Bishop J. Jon Bruno and Bishops Suffragan Mary
Douglas Glasspool and Diane Jardine Bruce endorsed the SAFE California Act,
which will replace the state’s death penalty with a sentence of life in prison
without chance of parole as the maximum punishment for murder.
Helping to recruit signers in the successful petition drive to get the
initiative on California’s November 2012 ballot were the diocesan Program Group
on Peace and Justice Ministries, the diocesan PRISM Restorative Justice
Ministries and All Saints Church, Pasadena, and St. Michael and All Angels
Church, Studio City, among other congregations, said Robert Williams, diocesan
canon for community relations.
Diocese of California Bishop Mark Andrus also has supported abolition efforts.
In the Diocese of Ohio, the Rev. Will Mebane, canon for Trinity Cathedral in
Cleveland, testified in February before the Senate Judiciary Committee to
support a bill to abolish the death penalty.
In Kansas, Episcopal and other bishops have participated in letter-writing
campaigns and other efforts encouraging abolition of the death penalty.
Theology of justice work
Such efforts are consistent with the church’s mission, Baumgarten said.
“If we look at the catechism in the prayer book,” he said, “it tells us that
the church lives out its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the gospel
and promotes justice, peace and love.”
“As Episcopalians, as Anglicans, we would understand the promotion of just
structures in society and peace in God’s kingdom on earth as something that is
central to the mission of the church, not a distraction from the mission of the
church,” he said. “We would be remiss if we did not look at what our faith says
about justice and peace and then work for it in the world around us.”
Curry agreed.
“Our biblical witness is about transforming the world, and it’s not about
hoarding the good news of God’s redemptive love,” he said. “I think that we
have to be out in the world and that one of the primary reasons for church
community is to equip every single Christian to take that faith out in their
own lives. So I have great respect for legislators who are living out their
faith or social workers or organizers. It’s almost counterintuitive that clergy
would feel they can’t do that.”
Church polity allows Episcopalians to shape the church’s stance on
public-policy issues, Baumgarten noted. “One of the important things about the
Episcopal Church’s system of governance is that there really is a straight line
from the congregational level to the General Convention level. … Everybody has
the ability to participate in the church’s discernment of where it stands on
particular issues.”
This doesn’t mean that every Episcopalian must agree with every stance the
church takes, as Brookhart noted.
“I think our church has the sense that we don’t expect everyone to agree with
the official so-called positions,” he said, adding that there’s no “punitive
side” for disagreeing with General Convention resolutions on public-policy
issues.
“On the other hand,” he added, “I think it’s important to say that there are
some issues that are important enough that the church needs to make a witness
about it, even if a substantial minority of its members don’t agree.”
And that witness doesn’t remain at the institutional level.
Advocacy is part of the mission of every person of faith including
Episcopalians, Baumgarten said. “It’s not uniquely the role or responsibility
of churchwide structures or bishops or church leaders.”
“That comes from our understanding of baptism,” he said. “That comes from our
understanding of the commands of Jesus. That comes from our understanding of
mission and Anglican theology. And so our [Washington, D.C.] office exists for
the purpose of equipping Episcopalians to engage in the ministry of advocacy in
their own contexts.
“In one sense, we provide a representative face of the church in Washington on
an ongoing basis,” he said. “But in the most important sense, the heart of our
work, the heart of our ministry as an office, is to equip Episcopalians around
the country for their own ministry of advocacy.”
(source: Episcopal News Service)
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