Easter and the Death Penalty

Easter and the Death Penalty (April 27, 2003)

"This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all." 1 John 1:5

In a short time, perhaps this week, the Supreme Court will begin to hear the case of Delma Banks, Jr. who on March 12 came within 10 minutes of execution when word came that the high Court would review his case. As columnist Bob Herbert said in the Times, his case underlines many of the things wrong with the penalty.

In recent years the Presbyterian Church has spoken out with increasing conviction in opposition to the death penalty in our country. By doing this the Church knows it runs counter to where most people are. Polls taken after the death of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, put support for the death penalty at over 70 percent. This figure has declined since then, but it is still high.

It boggles my mind how a country which prides itself on being so civilized can still have this barbaric practice on the books.

There's no better time than the Sunday after Easter to say that the Church and society are basically at two different points on this. With the death penalty - the only irreversible penalty -- it is clear that punishment is divorced from any idea of redemption of an evil doer and becomes solely revenge. There is no way such a view can be squared with the basic message of the Cross. The New Testament says clearly God did not take revenge on us "while we were yet sinners" but that Christ died for us.

One of the basic ingredients of the message of the early Church was that the One who had been raised by God on the third day had been crucified as an innocent man. Peter says the same in his first sermon in the book of Acts. Pontius Pilate told the crowd "I find no fault in this man." The two thieves on either side of Christ on the cross agreed that they were both condemned justly but this man had done nothing wrong. The many errors of our current system imply that society is sometimes repeating Calvary. And you and I - not only the state - are society.

A few years ago one of the most popular movies was "The Green Mile", about a huge black man with extraordinary powers of bringing people and animals to life or healing who was unjustly and wrongly condemned to death for killing two little girls. No one could miss the strong anti-death penalty message of the film. Some say that support for the death penalty began to go down after "The Green Mile" came out. The story of a mild-mannered, loving individual with life-giving powers who dies a cruel death in an electric chair had obvious parallels also with the story of Jesus.

Opposition to the death penalty is a common thread running through many Christian churches as well as Jewish organizations. From a faith perspective, the death penalty is simply intolerable.

Most of you receive our Presbyterians Today magazine which in the March issue focused on capital punishment and on the statements of General Assemblies of our denomination. One of the most recent statements, in 2000, called for a moratorium in light of "strong evidence that the death penalty is applied in a racist manner."

Racism is one of the issues in the case of Mr. Banks. He is black. The victim, the prosecutors, and every member of the carefully selected jury were white. This sounds like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird all over again.

Since 1976 blacks have been six to seven times more likely to be murdered than whites, with the result that blacks and whites are the victims of murder in about equal numbers. Yet 80 percent of the more than 840 people put to death in the USA since 1976 were convicted of crimes involving white victims, compared to the 13 percent who were convicted of killing blacks.

Amnesty International says studies show the criminal justice system "places a higher value on white life than on black life."

There is, also, no good evidence Mr. Banks committed the crime of killing a 16-year-old boy in a small town in Texas in 1980. Facts uncovered since, according to Bob Herbert, shows he is most likely innocent. However, the question of his innocence will not be before the high court. The issue is gross misconduct by prosecutors and ineffective legal assistance.

Witnesses against him were hard core drug addicts who had much to gain by lying. One was a paid informer, and another was a career felon who was told that a pending arson charge would be dropped if he performed "well" while testifying against Mr. Banks.

Evidence which would have helped Mr. Banks was withheld. The district court in Texas found that Mr. Banks received ineffective legal assistance. Mr. Banks had no prior criminal record and has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. But still the state of Texas was ready to kill him on March 12 if the Supreme Court had not intervened.

In his Times column, Bob Herbert said: "It is time to pull the plug on the death penalty in the United States. Shut it down. It is never going to work properly. There are too many passions and prejudices involved (and far too many incompetent lawyers, prosecutors, judges and jurors) for it to ever be administered with any consistent degree of fairness and justice."

A study done last year by Columbia University documented an extraordinary number of death penalty cases tainted by "egregiously incompetent" defense lawyers, by police officers, and by prosecutors who withhold evidence from the defense.

So many flaws were discovered in Illinois that the governor declared a moratorium on state executions. A man named Anthony Porter spent 16 years on death row in Illinois and came within 2 days of execution until Northwestern University law students found irrefutable proof of his innocence.

Is there a noticeable difference in the homicide rate in states with the death penalty and those without? The answer is yes! The states without the death penalty have a noticeably lower rate of homicides. Of the 27 states with the highest homicide rates, all but two have the death penalty. North Dakota, which does not have the penalty, has a lower homicide rate than South Dakota or Wyoming. Massachusetts has a lower rate than Connecticut. West Virginia, which doesn't have the death penalty, has a 30 percent lower homicide rate than Virginia, which has it and has one of the highest rates of execution - after Texas of course - in the country.

No country in the European Union has the death penalty. The incidence of violent crime is far lower in every European country than in the U.S.

No one is in favor of "coddling" criminals. Life sentences are totally appropriate - and a lot cheaper, which is hard for many people to understand but is absolutely true. With life sentences, you don't have the endless appeals and costly hearings which are constitutionally mandated before a life can be taken.

With the death penalty you also get the kind of absurd jockeying for the right to try capital cases, as was the situation with Mr. Malvo and Mr. Mohammed in the spree of nationwide shootings that ended up around the capital. Capital punishments brings, it seems to me, a certain amount of glory to zealous prosecutors and districts, who end up vying with one another. It also, I think, appeals to some criminals' desire for publicity and a misguided martyr complex. This would be much less apparent if the death penalty were replaced by the relative anonymity of life sentences. Life sentences won't get you as much ink in the tabloids or air time on Fox News.

And what about closure for the people whose lives have been shattered by the loss of a loved one? The Presbyterians Today article captured, I think, the essence of the Christian view in the statement by an elder, Linda White, whose daughter was murdered in 1986 but who now joins anti-death penalty vigils in Texas (of which, as you know, there are a lot). She says she has forgiven the perpetrator of the crime. "Forgiveness means different things to different people," she says, "To some forgiveness means it doesn't matter any more. That's not true. For me, forgiveness is letting go of the negative power that corrupts the rest of my life."

St. John tells us that this is the message: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. We are called to walk in the light. Capital punishment is state sponsored "darkness". I agree with Bob Herbert. The death penalty is a "rotten edifice, and you will find terrible problems no matter where you look."

It is time to shut it down.