May 5
USA:
After Oklahoma screwup, U.S. should end cruel death penalty: Editorial
Oklahoma's botched execution - in which a murderer writhed for close to an hour
before dying - underscored America's brutal reputation on the world stage.
Among western democracies, only the United States still puts convicted
criminals to death.
The shortage of lethal-injection drugs that led to Tuesday's ham-fisted job is
a direct result of worldwide economic sanctions, targeting what is seen as
barbaric U.S. policy. Just as we use trade restrictions to punish the likes of
China, Iran and North Korea for human rights abuses, Europe has blocked our
purchase of drugs used for capital punishment.
Most civilized nations already believe the death penalty is cruel and unusual.
Oklahoma's screw-up gave them crystallizing proof.
The mystery is why more Americans don't agree.
Typically, we justify executions as acts of justice, not vengeance.
The killers scheduled for death in Oklahoma last week were candidates for both.
Clayton Lockett, whose sentence was so painfully carried out, was convicted of
raping and murdering an 18-year-old woman who stumbled into a kidnapping.
Charles Warner, whose execution has been delayed, raped and killed his
girlfriend's infant daughter.
No one would argue Lockett and Warner don't deserve punishment. Even those who
oppose the death penalty would concede theirs are the kinds of crimes it was
meant for. But it's cases like these - unimaginably violent killings that
create a thirst for revenge - that can also sap our capacity for mercy.
The death penalty's failings are many: It hasn't worked as a deterrent, even in
Oklahoma. The poor and minorities receive death sentences disproportionately.
By the time New Jersey abolished it in 2007, capital appeals had squandered
hundreds of millions of public dollars. And while 60 % of Americans still favor
executions, Gallup found in 2013, that's a 40-year low.
Most disturbing, however, is how often the system fails: DNA has exonerated 144
condemned prisoners, and a new study estimates that one in 25 inmates on death
row were wrongly convicted.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared a moratorium, finding its uneven use
unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. Today, the imbalance of death sentences -
by race, class and jurisdiction - remains uneven and unfair. The Oklahoma
fiasco only reinforces its cruelty.
The alternative - life without parole - is just and severe. Moreover, it allows
for the possibility to correct a mistake.
It's time for the Supreme Court to step in again - 1st with a nationwide
moratorium, and ultimately an end to capital punishment as an Eighth Amendment
violation.
This isn't a show of mercy for criminals. Rather, it's a question of our
national conscience.
When it comes to capital punishment, America must set aside its desire for
revenge - even when the desire is understandable - and show the world we're
capable of more civilized fairness, charity and reason.
(source: Editorial, Newark Star-Ledger)
****************
Death Penalty: Justice or Inhumane?
Death penalty controversy is nothing new in the United States. The debate over
whether or not it is an effective means of justice or an inhumane ending to an
individual's life continues to rage on from many different aspects. In most
recent events, President Barack Obama has called for a Justice Department
inquiry into the application of the death penalty, or capital punishment as it
is also commonly known, nationwide after the botched execution of an inmate in
Oklahoma on Tuesday.
The latest botched execution involved Clayton Lockett, who was convicted of
murder, rape, kidnapping, and burglary in 2000. It took 43 minutes for Lockett
to die after being given a lethal injection, during which time he was subjected
to violent convulsions and suffered a massive heart attack leading to his
death. Lockett was already a 4-time felon when he was convicted of a multitude
of serious offenses in 2000. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has called for an
investigation into Lockett's and state-run executions, as well as issued a stay
on the execution of Charles Warner, who was scheduled to be killed by the same
drug cocktail that caused Lockett's protracted suffering. In fact, Warner was
scheduled for execution with the same cocktail later that same night as
Lockett. The White House implied on Wednesday that Lockett's protracted death
might have violated the provision against cruel and unusual punishment
established in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
While the debate over whether or not the death penalty is an effective means of
justice or an inhumane ending to an individual's life, proponents on both sides
of the debate are prepared to state their cases. One proponent of capital
punishment who will not be silenced is Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian, who is a
Republican lawmaker who petitioned to have impeachment proceedings initiated
against state Supreme Court justices for their hand in halting Tuesday's
execution, and whose strongly worded pro-death penalty comments have ignited
controversy. While on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are death penalty
opponents like Eugene Robinson, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, who
wrote a column about capital punishment in the wake of Lockett's botched
execution. Robinson stated: "When I read about the crimes Lockett committed, I
wish I could support capital punishment." The writer continued, "When I read
about what Lockett did, I want to strangle him with my own hands. But revenge
is not the same thing as justice, and karmic retribution is not a power I trust
government to exercise. The death penalty has no place in a civilized society."
Obama said the death penalty is appropriate in some cases, including mass
murder and murder offenses involving children. However, he also pointed out the
contention that the use of executions could often reflect racial bias.
Moreover, he pointed to the numerous exonerations of death row inmates over the
years, especially since the advent of widespread DNA evidence testing methods.
As a result of these contentions as well as an established history of botched
executions nationwide, Obama has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to analyze
the death penalty's application process. Moreover, the Justice Department is
investigating how executions are carried out with a special focus on issues of
race and wrongful convictions.
The botched execution in Oklahoma of Lockett has once again helped renew the
debate over whether or not the death penalty is an effective means of justice
or an inhumane ending to an individual's life, as outraged death penalty
opponents claimed cruel and inhumane treatment, capital punishment proponents
defended the need for justice, invited court challenges, and attracted
worldwide attention. In response, the Justice Department has launched a review
of state-run executions of death-row inmates following President Obama's
directive in the wake of a botched execution earlier this week in Oklahoma.
Similar to one it has been conducting on federal capital punishment, the agency
would begin a review of state-run capital punishment programs. Federal
executions are uncommon, yet there has been a moratorium in place since 2011
while the Justice Department reviews its policies. Does the same fate await
state-run death penalty programs? Will a moratorium be put in place regarding
certain capital punishment methods and protocols? Does the sense of justice
continue to outweigh the potential for inhumanity in death penalty
applications? It appears only time and careful review will ultimately answer
these queries.
(source: Leigh Haugh, Guardianlv)
********************
Death penalty is unchristian
The recent and ghastly botched execution of a man in Oklahoma has rekindled my
thoughts on capital punishment -- a practice outlawed in most civilized
countries. Indeed, most of the industrialized world looks with horror on the
United States, in this regard, as a primitive and backward country.
Just in passing fact, capital punishment was banned in the Netherlands in 1870,
in Costa Rica in 1877, in Colombia in 1910. In allowing the death penalty, the
United States stands with Libya, Uganda, Cuba, Egypt and Equatorial Guinea,
among our other peers.
It's a sad commentary on justice in this country that, in a nation so plagued
by capital murder, we should make it a state practice as well. Do we not see
the connection? You would guess that a nation obsessed with guns and violence
-- just read the papers -- might at some point notice that when the state
participates in this brutality, there is a tacit agreement that the most
complete response to provocation is death.
2 of the greatest writers of the19th century, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy,
passionately opposed the death penalty. Both were also Christians, and they
understood perfectly well that the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that,
under the old dispensation, an eye for an eye was appropriate. But Jesus said
bluntly that not only should we never kill anyone, but we must turn the other
cheek, resisting evil in a nonviolent way. This wasn't something Jesus imagined
was up for grabs.
Dickens, the Shakespeare of the novel, argued against capital punishment on
many grounds, but he was especially concerned about the matter of determining
guilt in such an absolute way. Can we ever really know for sure that someone
did something? The death sentence is inevitably delivered by "men of fallible
judgment, whose powers of arriving at the truth are limited, and in whom there
is the capacity of a mistake or false judgment."
Tolstoy wrote a stirring essay in 1908 called "I Cannot Be Silent" in which he
described a multiple hanging, and found it repulsive on every level. He noted
the priest who attended the execution and how he mumbled something about God
and Christ to the condemned.
After a vivid account of the hanging, he says with an ironic twang: "All this
is carefully arranged and planned by learned and enlightened people." He notes
that the government who commits this killing is involved in the process "from
the lowest hangman to the highest official -- all support religion and
Christianity, which is altogether incompatible with the deed they commit."
Incompatible indeed. It has always struck me as bizarre that many of those who
object most strenuously to abortion because it involves taking a life will
quite happily condone capital punishment, as if this is somehow not taking a
life. Does it make it less immoral for the individual, in its collective guise
as "the state," to kill someone? Killing is killing, and when you give this
ugly deed an official name -- capital punishment -- it's still killing, and is
grotesque for a supposedly humane nation to condone such a practice.
As if we needed reminding, our Constitution bans punishments that are deemed
"cruel and unusual." In the eyes of the civilized world, murder is cruel and
unusual punishment, best left to vigilante outlaws, the criminally insane and
rogue states. State-sponsored murder fosters a culture of violence that
permeates our society, creating a punitive state of mind that does nobody any
good. And it has surely proven ineffective in preventing further killings.
Indeed, it generates them.
(source: Jay Parini; WSBT news)
********************
President Obama Should Get the Feds Out of the Death Penalty Business
*President Obama said he was deeply troubled by the application of the death
penalty in the U.S. and said that he'd ask Attorney General Eric Holder to
review the problems with it.
The retort from some was that the death penalty is a state matter and there's
absolutely nothing the White House can do about it and by inference there's no
reason for him to stick the federal government's nose in it.
It is a state matter. But it's also a federal matter. And there is much that
Obama and Holder can and should do about that.
The reasons for that are easy to find. Since reinstatement of the federal death
penalty in 1988, various U.S. attorneys general have sought the death penalty
for more than 400 defendants. Nearly 75 % of those defendants have been
non-white. The overwhelming majority of them have been African-American (more
than 1/2). The standard pro-death penalty push back in these cases is that
blacks supposedly commit more frequent and heinous crimes than whites and
therefore deserve to get a death sentence.
This is nonsense. Death sentences are sought by local federal prosecutors and
imposed by juries. And the prosecutors that seek them the most are concentrated
in a relatively handful of districts. When prosecutors in those districts seek
the death penalty in a case this automatically expands the jury pool from the
residents within the county where the crime was committed to the residents of
the considerably larger federal judicial district that encompasses it. This
almost always insures that a capital case jury will be predominantly white and
as countless studies on juror bias have shown, juries with few or no blacks are
more prone to convict when the defendant is minority, and especially black, and
impose the death penalty. The result is predictable. More than sixty percent of
those on federal death row are non-white and in almost all cases their victims
were white.
The grotesque racial misapplication of the death penalty was underscored more
than a decade ago by none other than the Justice Department in its own
assessment of the death penalty. It found that between 1995 and 2000, 80% of
all cases in which a U.S. Attorney requested permission to seek the death
penalty involved a minority group defendant; 72% of the cases where the
Attorney General authorized a capital prosecution involved minority group
defendants; and U.S. Attorneys sought death-authorization twice as often in
cases involving black defendants and non-black victims as in cases involving
black defendants and black victims. The gaping racial unfairness in the federal
death penalty prompted a flurry of congressional bills at the time to either
abolish or put a moratorium on the federal death penalty. They went nowhere.
Then Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold kept the heat on for an end to the federal
death penalty. In 2007, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Constitution Subcommittee, he held a hearing on oversight of the federal death
penalty. He lambasted the Justice Department for the lack of transparency in
the decision-making process about the death penalty and of course, the blatant
racial disparities in which federal prosecutors are most likely to demand the
death penalty and which defendants they chose to demand the death penalty for.
A subsequent bill he introduced to ban the federal death penalty went nowhere.
The 2 disturbing reasons for that remain unchanged. One is publicly stated:
fear of crime. Even though crime figures are way down, the fear of crime isn't.
That fear is fueled by high-profile shooting rampages, a crime-gorged media
that stuffs the public with mega-doses of crime and violence stories,
politicians who pander to crime fears to get votes, and a Supreme Court that
still flatly rejects any far reaching consideration of the death penalty.
The other far more frightening reason why the death penalty is still alive and
well is privately whispered: race. The death penalty has always been America's
ultimate legal weapon against black men accused of violent acts (mostly against
whites). According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund which has meticulously
tracked the obscene racial disparity in the death penalty for decades, between
1930 and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been
African-Americans. In the states, blacks are still far more likely to get the
death penalty then a white when the victim is white. As the figures horridly
show, the federal government has hardly been immune to imposing the death
penalty on blacks when their victims are white.
The Justice Department study more than a decade ago called the federal death
penalty hopelessly flawed and tainted with racial bias. It's worse than that.
It's a terribly racially warped punishment reserved almost exclusively for
blacks and Latinos.
By openly admitting that there are "problems" with the death penalty, Obama has
opened up another dark corner of the criminal justice system that screams for
reform. That reform is to get the federal government out of the death penalty
business.
(source: Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a
weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network)
******************************
The Problems With the Death Penalty Are Already Crystal Clear----The president
has commissioned yet another study of lethal injections. He'd be better off
lobbying the Supreme Court and Congress to make changes.
The "real problem" with the death penalty in America today isn't a mystery. The
real problem is that we all know what the problems are but cannot or will not
muster the political will and moral courage to fix them. So while it is
laudable that President Obama took the time to say he is deeply troubled by the
botched execution in Oklahoma early this week - it beats saying nothing at all
- his solution, commissioning a new study from his attorney general, is mostly
a waste of time.
This is especially true since the study the Justice Department has announced it
will undertake - "a relatively narrow review," Peter Baker reported in The New
York Times - will focus only on lethal-injection procedures instead of
structural flaws. But the problems with lethal injections today are both
well-documented and indisputable: The procedures are shrouded in secrecy and
thus prone to error, as we saw last week when Oklahoma all but tortured Clayton
Lockett to death.
But the broader problems with capital punishment are well-known, too. The
application of the death penalty is racially disparate, geographically
arbitrary, and based upon the economic status of capital defendants. Nearly 40
years after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, the capital
regime is a mess. Ten days ago, Stephen Bright, president of the Southern
Center for Human Rights, laid it all out in a speech at the United Nations:
The death penalty is imposed in the United States upon the poorest, most
powerless, most marginalized people in the society. Virtually all of the people
selected for execution are poor, about half are members of racial minorities,
and the overwhelming majority were sentenced to death for crimes against white
victims.
Many have significant intellectual disabilities or suffer from severe mental
illnesses. Many others were the victims of the most brutal physical, sexual,
and psychological abuse during their childhoods and lived on the margins of
society before their arrests. Some are innocent.
They are subject to discretionary decisions by law-enforcement officers,
prosecutors, judges and jurors that are often influenced by racial prejudice.
Because of their poverty, they are often assigned lawyers who lack the skills,
resources and inclination to represent them capably in capital cases.
The president would accomplish more by encouraging a candid conversation about
these issues. But despite waning support for capital punishment and recent
evidence that America executes innocent people, it's unlikely this
administration wants to pick that fight now, with this Congress and this
Supreme Court. With a few notable exceptions, those 2 branches of government
have been hostile to even modest reforms to make the death penalty fairer and
more just.
Fairer and more just and quicker. The notion that it takes too long already to
implement capital punishment, expressed by Justice Antonin Scalia in February,
isn't likely to ease. Perhaps it is too much to ask that lawmakers and judges
remember that until just a few years ago, when the manufacturer of sodium
thiopental stopped making it, litigation over the manner of death was some of
the least controversial in death-penalty law. What's happening now is a new
problem, not an old one.
Still, there are at least two things Obama could do to help. In the name of
transparency, the Justice Department can begin urging the Supreme Court to
review and endorse current state-court challenges to lethal-injection secrecy,
so that state officials are forced to draw back the blinds on their work. And
in the name of accountability, the feds can urge Congress to adopt uniform
lethal-injection protocols while amending a federal law that has neutered
federal review of capital cases.
1. Lobbying the Supreme Court: Even as the controversy over lethal-injection
secrecy has spread from state to state to state to state over the past 3 years,
and even as the Justice Department is in the midst of a review of federal
procedures, the administration has refused to intercede on behalf of capital
defendants in recent challenges to dubious state rules. So far, the Justice
Department's proposed solution to the crisis over injection drugs was to ask a
federal appeals court to allow the importation of a drug that had been blocked
by the FDA and a trial judge.
The Justice Department could instead begin to file briefs supporting prompt
Supreme Court review of state challenges. The feds could argue that there is a
strong federal interest in bringing order to the chaos that surrounds lethal
injections and that the U.S. Constitution is implicated when states like
Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arizona, Georgia, and Louisiana refuse to provide
even basic information about the new, untested drugs they seek to use to
execute prisoners. The justices always are free to ignore the solicitor
general, but these appeals couldn't hurt.
We know that at least 3 justices on the Court are interested in taking one of
these injection challenges to further define the scope of a condemned person's
right to know the manner in which he will be killed by the state. In Taylor v.
Lombardi - the 1st case in Missouri since Herbert Smulls was executed while his
appeal was still pending - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia
Sotomayor all voted to stay Michael Taylor's execution. Would support from the
Justice Department have pushed Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy to do
likewise? The feds should try so we can know.
2. Calling for legislative action: The White House could formally ask Congress
to amend the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a law
passed in the angry wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. The law was designed to
curb excessive appellate litigation in capital cases - and it certainly has.
But, as legal scholar Lincoln Caplan recently pointed out, it also has
precluded federal judges from undertaking substantive review of capital cases
that are not frivolous. The law has been interpreted so broadly that is has
resulted in manifest injustices.
An amendment reanimating the writ of habeas corpus by limiting the scope of the
AEDPA, one that establishes a uniform national standard for lethal injections,
wouldn't just make it harder for states to hide shoddy executions. It would
make it more likely that federal courts could recognize and remedy wrongful
convictions in capital cases before the innocent are executed. Congress won't
go for it, especially in an election year, especially with the easy retort -
it's a states'-rights matter! - at hand, but this is the most direct solution
to the problem that arose last week in Oklahoma.
The Obama Administration could also decide, as it did the Defense of Marriage
Act, another dubious Clinton-era law, that it will no longer enforce the law in
cases in which its application violates the Constitution. The two laws are very
different, of course. The AEDPA involves at its core a standard of judicial
appellate review. But federal judges surely would take notice if, in some of
these capital cases, the Justice Department were to file a brief saying, in
effect: "If you are going to railroad this capital defendant, we want no part
of it."
(source: Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic)
****************
Federalism is the answer to the death penalty controversy
In the 1970s it was routine for conservatives to be vociferously in favor of
the death penalty. Crime was high, Democrats were against it (and on the wrong
side of public opinion) and courts - despite the clear language of the Bill of
Rights, which contemplated capital punishment - were deciding they could
judicially extinguish the practice. In 2014 crime is low, most Democrats are
not willing to publicly support its repeal and the courts have said the
practice per se is not constitutional. Moreover, the hassle - the expense of
endless appeals and the problem of obtaining a technique that is fast and
humane - and development of DNA testing that has freed some death row inmates
have made the death penalty a whole lot less attractive. Add to all that the
political reality that some 30 governors are Republicans who must struggle to
apply the death penalty in a way that meets muster in the courts and the court
of public opinion. You then must wonder how much longer the death penalty will
remain the default position even for conservatives.
Nathaniel Batchelder, with the Oklahoma Coalition Against the Death Penalty,
places a sign protesting the death penalty on Gov. Mary Fallin's office at the
state Capitol in Oklahoma City last week. (Steve Gooch/Associated Press via The
Oklahoman,)
Conservatives can maintain their constitutional argument that the death penalty
is permitted. Pro-life conservatives can maintain the moral distinction between
innocent life and execution of heinous criminals, thereby preserving
"pro-life/pro-death penalty" as an intellectually honest position. But they can
also say in practical terms the death penalty just isn't worth the hassle.
In some states the death penalty is politically popular and runs rather
smoothly. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said on Sunday on "Meet the Press": "I think we
have an appropriate process in place from the standpoint of the appeals process
to make sure that due process is addressed. And the process of the actual
execution, I will suggest to you, is very different from Oklahoma. We only use
one drug. But I'm confident that the way that the executions are taken care of
in the state of Texas are appropriate." He also made a sound point in taking
issue with the president's decision to take a "pause" on executions: "He all
too often - whether it's on health care or whether it's on education or whether
it's on this issue of how states deal with the death penalty - he looks for a
one-size-fits-all solution centric to Washington."
That is not only a valid criticism of the president, but points to the degree
to which issues that once dominated national politics - death penalty, drug
laws and gay marriage - can increasingly be seen as state matters.
Conservatives resist calling a "truce" on social issues, but in fact a
geographic truce of a sort is emerging. Texas can have the death penalty, tough
drug laws and outlaw gay marriage; Massachusetts can select the reverse on each
issue. It is not ideal for advocates who see these issues in strict moral terms
(e.g. the death penalty is itself murder; gay marriage is everyone's
fundamental right), but it is a way of managing increased polarization in our
political system. And it does allow changes in public sentiment to happen
gradually over time and therefore attain greater political legitimacy.
This process fails, of course, when federal courts take the decision out of the
states and nationalize the issue. No state can outlaw and severely limit
abortion, says the Supreme Court. The court invalidated every state death
penalty statute in the 1970s. In the case of gay marriage, the Supreme Court
took a decidedly different approach. And whatever you think of the muddled
jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court said
the federal government was neither going to insist on gay marriage everywhere
nor deny federal benefits everywhere to gay couples. The states were going to
work it out, and they are - with more states adopting gay marriage by
legislative action or referenda. Likewise, the Supreme Court in the Voting
Rights Act case said the federal government did not have the factual predicate
necessary to federalize voting rules in the pre-clearance states. If Congress
is going to micro-manage state voting procedures, they'll have to find real
evidence of continued deprivation of voting rights.
If conservatives truly believe in the 10th Amendment, the resurgence in
pro-federalism sentiment should be welcomed with open arms. If liberals think
the public is on their side in these issues, they should be grateful for the
opportunity to put issues into the political arena and let states register
approval with them. And if we want to reduce gridlock, paralysis and vicious
partisanship at the national level so as to focus on huge national challenges
(e.g. growth, debt, national security), federalism is a welcome safety value.
Once again it turns out that the Founders had a pretty good grasp of political
"factions" and how to manage them in a diverse democracy. We'd be wise to
encourage the federalism fad; it is a crucial aspect of our system for very
good reasons.
(source: Washington Post)
*************************
The role of the death penalty
Regarding the May 1 front-page article "Execution chamber becomes a
laboratory":
Oklahoma and the other death penalty states are struggling with the question:
What is the most rapid method to kill people that is constitutionally valid?
Their response is to have individuals untrained in clinical research perform
macabre clinical experiments using drugs of unknown provenance. Therefore, the
bungled execution of Clayton Lockett should not be surprising.
Ethics aside, the states are by definition performing human subjects research,
albeit research with a perverse outcome, that should be subject to myriad
federal regulations, including oversight by an institutional review board and
the subject's informed consent. Furthermore, prisoners are defined specifically
in federal law as a "vulnerable population" subject to increased research
scrutiny. Ironically, the ethics framework that guides clinical researchers is
called the Nuremberg Code and evolved from the 1946 trials of Nazi physicians.
Jonathan M. Zenilman, Baltimore
The writer, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins
Bayview Medical Center, is a member of the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review
Board, which oversees clinical research at the institution.
-----
In his May 2 op-ed column, "No humane way to kill," Eugene Robinson argued that
"the death penalty has no place in a civilized society" - that legally
sanctioned execution is the moral equivalent of murder.
Does that mean, then, that Adolf Hitler, whose crimes against humanity included
an attempt to extinguish entire peoples, and who caused a war at the cost of
many millions of lives and global suffering on an unprecedented scale, ought
not to have been condemned to death had he been brought to justice, but instead
should have lived out the remainder of his days imprisoned under the care of
the state?
Stephen Sauls, Severn
(source: Letters to the Editor, Washington Post)
*****************
Rethinking the death penalty
The death penalty is at the forefront of our news cycles once again. First the
Tennessee legislature, due to a shortage of the standard execution drug,
approved the return of the electric chair. Then, while experimenting with a new
drug combination, the state of Oklahoma botched an execution, causing the
victim to convulse for almost an hour, until finally dying of cardiac arrest 43
minutes after the first drug was administered.
Both of these stories exemplify "cruel and unusual punishments," and they must
be stopped by our government immediately, but what bothers me more than the
inaction of our government is the silent indifference of a large majority of
our Christian population. These stories should call us all to outrage at the
cruelty of our justice system that sees fit to kill people in order to
demonstrate that killing people is wrong.
So maybe it's time for us to give the death penalty a second look. I see 4
areas that Christians need to think anew about capital punishment.
1.) Life is sacred. Period.
If we claim to be pro-life we must declare that we are pro-every-life. We
defend the unborn child, the undernourished family, the war-scarred refugee. We
also advocate for and protect the life of the death row inmate, because life is
from God.
God is life, therefore anything that works to take life away is not of God. We
Christians ought to declare this truth to both the murderers who have taken
innocent life and to the state who, in a misguided pursuit of justice, is
performing injustice instead.
2.) What happens in darkness is evil.
The Bible tells us that God is light, and in God there is no darkness. It tells
us that we are to be stewards of that light, shining it into the darkest places
so that all may see. We're told that those who do their actions by night are
simply hiding the insidiousness of their ways, and that we should do only those
things that we are willing to do by light of day so that all may see our
actions and praise God.
I ask, then, what this has to say about the death penalty, which often happens
out of sight, by darkness of night, in some remote prison. We hide the death
penalty from ourselves because it is unsavory. It's not something we want to
think about. It's not something that we want to admit happens. In most cases,
it's not something that we ourselves would ever do.
How then, if we proclaim the God of light, can we argue the goodness of the
death penalty when we try so hard to hide it in the darkness of night? One
objection may be, "Well I don't do it, the state does. It's the state that is
hiding its actions." Leading to number 3... 3.) What the state does, it does on
our behalf.
We have this idea of the government as something foreign to ourselves, as
something "out there". "The state of wherever executed him." What we fail to
realize is that the state exists for us. The things that our state does it does
on our behalf. The phrasing of court cases demonstrates this very well: "The
people versus..." The courts convict and sentence people for us. Therefore the
death penalty affects us all, because with each State-sanctioned killing, our
silence makes us complicit to it. When the state kills, we kill.
4.) Jesus forgives, even when we are uncomfortable with the scope of that
forgiveness.
The Bible tells us that Jesus is patient, wanting everyone to repent and to
come into God's grace. We, however, are not so kind. We hunger for justice, but
we fail to understand that forgiveness is justice. Justice isn't necessarily
paying the price for what you've done. That can be part of it, but what justice
truly needs to be is the restoration of right relationships.
Jesus forgives to restore community among us and to restore right relationship
with God. We too should forgive, and that is why the death penalty is so
troubling. We are saying, in effect, that he is beyond hope, beyond redemption,
and we are ultimately and definitively denying that person reconciliation.
So please, give the death penalty a 2nd look. Maybe by our outcry, we can
remove this dark practice from our midst.
(source: ABP News)
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