Thoughts on the death penalty

I watched the man, a stranger, look at the Russian enamel crucifix hanging from the silver chain around my neck. Every few seconds he’d look at me looking at him, then look back to the crucifix. Finally, looking at me, he said, “Do you ever wonder if in another 2,000 years people will be wearing a guy in an electric chair around their necks?”

It’s an indelible moment.

I’m fairly certain the man meant his question to pack a wallop. And it did. Ten years later, it’s indifferent reduction of Jesus to “a guy,” to just one more common criminal and its commentary that our modern practices of capital punishment are just as barbaric as the Roman’s crucifixion are still very much with me.

Most recently, the question floated to the surface of my thoughts again while the world debated whether Stanley “Tookie” Williams should be executed for the murders for which he was convicted.

Two reporters framed the decision as one of “weighing vengeance and mercy,” a settling of scores versus clemency. In a story by Los Angeles Times reporter Scott Martelle, Martin Kaplan, associate dean for programs and planning at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center, described it as a situation of two competing and irreconcilable goods: “the good of retribution versus the good of redemption.”

Martin asked, “Which is more important: the lesson of criminal deterrence or the lesson of personal reformation?”

I could not help wondering if that really was the true dilemma and ultimate question.

If the state of California executed Williams (which as it turned out, in the early morning of Dec. 13, it did), would a lesson of personal reformation be irredeemably lost? If, instead, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger honored Williams’ request for clemency, would he necessarily be trading away a lesson of criminal deterrence?

I could not make the math of either of those equations add up.

And beyond those questions, there are so many more.

Is it impossible to separate a man’s claim of innocence from his claim of redemption, as the governor argued? Or is it as Sister Helen Prejean said in the movie, “Dead Man Walking,” confessing one’s wrongdoing is just one possible way to show remorse; another is “to show remorse with your life, what you do with your life”?

Are there “heartfelt moral and religious reasons to oppose capital punishment,” as Joshua Marquis, coauthor of “Debating the Death Penalty,” wrote in an opinion piece for the Dec. 4 Los Angeles Times’ Current section, of which several pages were devoted to the debate?

What is the poster-country for democracy doing still executing criminals in the 21st century? Does the death penalty really bring about justice for the victims? Or when we as a society take a life for a life, do we ourselves become murderers?

I could not discern a foundation, moral or religious, around which we could gather in consensus to answer these questions.

I did go looking for one. I asked a number of religious leaders and others who are regularly involved in ministry or in other community causes for their thoughts. With one exception, the religious leaders either didn’t return my phone calls or e-mails or they begged off sharing their thoughts -- or the official teachings of their faith -- regarding the death penalty. Five lay people from four faiths, the Sikh faith, Islam, Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, chose to share their thoughts with me.

The views of two Christians -- Jeff Ludington, a Presbyterian youth and college minister and Dee Wallace, a Roman Catholic laywoman -- were profoundly different. Ludington’s opinions shared more in common with those of Louai Jalabi, from the Islamic Institute of Orange County.

Their thoughtful and sometimes deeply personal responses, along with those of Jon Turner, a Buddhist, Arinder Chadha, a Sikh physician, and Sukh Chugh, also of the Sikh faith, provided me with far more food for thought than I can share with you in one week’s column. So this will be a column in at least two parts.

Wallace, a member of Saints Simon and Jude Roman Catholic Church in Huntington Beach, does not advocate the death penalty under any circumstances, and her faith community, she says, doesn’t either. “Jesus calls us to mercy, not vengeance, even to our enemy,” she wrote to me in an e-mail, referring me to a 21-page document titled “In a Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death.”

The document was produced by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and is available from the conference’s website, www.usccb.org. In it the bishops reaffirm their “common judgment that the use of the death penalty is unnecessary and unjustified in our time and circumstances.”

They give their reasons: “The sanction of death, when it is not necessary to protect society, violates respect for human life and dignity. State-sanctioned killing in our names diminishes all of us. Its application is deeply flawed and can be irreversibly wrong, is prone to errors, and is biased by factors such as race, the quality of legal representation, and where the crime was committed. We have other ways to punish criminals and protect society.”

The treatise contains the story of Kirk Bloodsworth, a man wrongly convicted of rape and murder, who spent nearly nine years in prison before DNA evidence proved his innocence. Bloodsworth is one of more 120 death row inmates who, since the 1970s, have been cleared of their capital crimes.

There are also statements from victims’ families who oppose the death penalty.

“No one in our family ever wanted to see the killer of our brother and his wife put to death,” writes Mary Bosco Van Valkenburg. It’s the conviction of Bud Welch, father of Julie Marie Welch, who was killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, that “more violence is not what Julie would have wanted. More violence will not bring Julie back. More violence only makes our society more violent.”

And clearly, the death of Stanley Tookie Williams won’t bring back Albert Owens, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, Yen-I Yang and Yu-Chin Yang Lin.

The way Wallace sees it, it’s reconciliation that leads to justice and justice that leads to peace, the peace she says we are “called to experience on earth and in heaven.”

To her, Williams, like anyone who does wrong, needed to make amends. But that didn’t include Deuteronomy’s exhortation to “show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

Ludington, who has in his life done both crimes and time, disagrees.

Next week: Christian and Islamic “eye for an eye”; Sikh and Buddhist karma.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.

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