Death penalty revisited

Last year I watched a TV program that told the heartrending true story of a man who spent 25 years in prison for murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit. He was finally released through DNA testing and the tenaciousness of a lawyer involved in the Innocence Project, an organization committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA evidence.

More recently I heard Curtis McCarty, who had been on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for 19 years, speak in Kansas City, Kan. Because of prosecutorial and forensic misconduct, McCarty was convicted of murder in the late 1980s. After being retried three times, he gave up any hope of being exonerated. Then an FBI investigation found that the Oklahoma Police Department had falsified DNA evidence in several cases, including his. He was finally exonerated in 2007. He received no compensation from the state, and his record has not been expunged – so he is unemployable.

These are two of the 144 people released since 1973 with evidence of their innocence, according to the October 1993 Staff Report of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights (with updates from the Death Penalty Information Center).

Our criminal justice system is broken. Too many innocent people have been in prison for years, some even executed, due to the withholding of evidence or plain prosecutorial ineptitude. A disproportionate number of people of color are incarcerated, many because of their inability to afford competent lawyers or because of prejudice on the part of law officials. Even when people are proven innocent and released, some states provide no compensation for the injustice done to them. Their records are often not expunged, making employment impossible.

From Amnesty International: “Twenty years ago, 37 countries actively implemented a death penalty. This number had fallen to 25 by 2004 and was at 22 last year. Only nine of the world’s countries have executed year on year for the past five years.”

The United States ranks fifth among the countries of the world in the number of executions, and is one of the few developed countries that still retain the death penalty.

Most states retain capital punishment as a legal option. Currently, 33 states still can use the death penalty. Of those, only 25 have executed anyone in the last 10 years. However, the current use of lethal injections for execution is now proving problematic because many European drug companies are refusing to supply the approved chemicals, and the recent botched execution in Oklahoma proves what can happen when non-approved drugs are used.

The death penalty is inhumane. It is a fact that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime. Those who are truly guilty of heinous crimes should be sentenced to life in prison without parole, a punishment that has proven to be less costly than capital cases, due to the appeals, retrials, paperwork, and lawyer fees involved in the latter. Too many innocent lives have been ruined because of mistakes made by imperfect humans in charge of the system.

When we look back at Jesus, an innocent man who was crucified because Jewish leaders were afraid of his popularity with the people, we can see how emotions can influence a conviction. Pilate, the Roman ruler at the time, had no evidence of any wrongdoing, but when some questioned his loyalty to Caesar, he succumbed to the pressure. Two thousand years later, things have not improved too much. Even with all our scientific analyses and supposedly impartial juries, innocent people get convicted. Because of this potential, it is long past time to repeal the death penalty in the United States.

Women religious have been working to raise awareness of this issue.

Sr. Helen Prejean, whose work was featured in the movie “Dead Man Walking,” has long been dedicated to this cause. Since 1984, Sr. Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (2004), which examines how flaws inextricably entangled in the death penalty system inevitably lead to innocent people being executed – and render the system unworkable. A new book, Where Justice and Mercy Meet, with a forward by Prejean, gives the history and solid evidence for Catholic opposition to the death penalty.

A number of religious communities have taken a corporate stance against the death penalty, too, including the Congregation of St. Joseph, the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, and many of the Dominican congregations.

The Congregation of St. Joseph has two sponsored ministries: Ministry against the Death Penalty and the Catholic Mobilizing Network to end the use of the Death Penalty. When someone is scheduled to be executed in the country, Benedictine sisters in Atchison and the Great Bend Dominicans toll the bell and pray for them. The Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Wichita co-hosted a panel in January which gave supporting evidence for abolishing the death penalty.

Sr. Therese Bangert, a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth, has been lobbying for over 20 years at the Kansas State Capitol to abolish the death penalty and serves on the board of the Kansas Coalition against the Death Penalty.

Sr. Colette Livingston, an Ursuline of Cleveland, Ohio, belongs to the Cleveland Coalition against the Death Penalty, whose activists gather signatures to petition against upcoming executions and stand in silent witness outside the death site the evening before an execution.

Sr. Kathy Cash, a Benedictine from Ferdinand, Ind., whose father was murdered when she was a child, gives talks and social justice education classes urging the end of capital punishment.

Sr. Mary Sean Hodges belongs to Californians Against the Death Penalty, one of the groups in southern California networking with other groups throughout the state to end the death penalty by putting the initiative on the ballot for the 2016 election.

Numerous more women religious are engaged in writing letters and emails and making phone calls to state legislators urging the repeal of this inhumane law. It is part of their dedication to the sanctity of human life and a witness to the mercy of God.  

[Barbara Mayer is a Benedictine sister of Mount St. Scholastica, Atchison, Kan. She is a freelance writer and poet and the editor of Benedictines magazine.]