California Bishops Statement on the Death Penalty September 28, 2010
California Catholic Conference Statement on Ending the Use of the Death Penalty in California
Most Reverend Gerald Wilkerson, Auxiliary Bishop for the San Fernando Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and President of the California Catholic Conference, released the following statement today expressing strong support for an end to the use of the death penalty in California and asking for clemency for any individual scheduled for execution.
The California Catholic Conference strongly supports an end to use of the death penalty and affirms the 2005 statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, which launched the U.S. Bishops Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty.
In light of the fact that California has scheduled the September 29, 2010 execution of Albert Greenwood Brown for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, Susan Jordan, in 1980, we implore all Californians to ask themselves what good comes of state-sanctioned killing. We recognize the profound pain of those who lost a loved one to violence and offer them our prayers and our consolation. However, nothing can undo what was done — even taking the life of the convicted killer. The infliction of the death penalty does not make for a more just society.
As Catholic bishops, we teach and preach the Gospel vision of a “culture of life.” We believe that each human person is created in God’s image. We are compelled to teach a consistent ethic of life and to speak publicly that the use of the death penalty does not protect human life, does not promote human dignity, and does not reduce violence in our society.
We recognize that human beings can and do commit grievous crimes, but we reject the use of the death penalty — especially when we can protect society with an alternate penalty of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In addition, of particular concern to us is the fact that the application of the death penalty is deeply flawed — with those who are poor or from racial minorities most often its subjects.
At this moment in time, we entreat Californians to ponder carefully whether the use of the death penalty makes our society safer. A moratorium is needed to evaluate whether the death penalty serves the common good and safeguards the dignity of human life. We are convinced that it does not.
A.L.A. Gives Up Death Penalty Work
Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work
By ADAM LIPTAK
New York Times
Published: January 4, 2010
WASHINGTON
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.
“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”
The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.
In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.
The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.
Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”
That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.
Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”
The framework the institute developed in 1962 was an effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary. It proposed limiting capital crimes to murder and narrowing the categories of people eligible for the punishment. Most important, it gave juries a framework to decide whom to put to death, asking them to balance aggravating factors against mitigating ones.
The move to combat arbitrariness without giving up sensitivity to individual circumstances is known as “guided discretion,” which sounds good until you notice that it is a phrase at war with itself.
The Supreme Court’s capital justice jurisprudence since 1976 has only complicated things. Justice Harry A. Blackmun conceded in 1987 that “there perhaps is an inherent tension between the discretion accorded capital sentencing juries and the guidance for use of that discretion that is constitutionally required.”
That was an understatement, Justice Antonin Scalia said in 1990. “To acknowledge that ‘there perhaps is an inherent tension,’ ” he wrote, “is rather like saying that there was perhaps an inherent tension between the Allies and the Axis powers in World War II.”
Justice Scalia solved the problem by vowing never to throw out a death sentence on the ground that the sentencer’s discretion had been unconstitutionally restricted.
In 1994, Justice Blackmun came around to the view that “guided discretion” amounted to “irreconcilable constitutional commands.” But he drew a different conclusion than Justice Scalia had from the same premise, saying that “the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.” He said he would no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.” The institute came to essentially the same conclusion.
Some supporters of the death penalty said they welcomed the institute’s move. Capital sentencing “is so micromanaged by Supreme Court precedents that a model statute really serves very little function,” Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation wrote in a blog posting “We are perfectly O.K. with dumping it.”
Mr. Scheidegger expressed satisfaction that an effort to have the institute come out against the death penalty as such was defeated.
But opponents of the death penalty said the institute’s move represented a turning point.
“It’s very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty,” Professor Zimring said. “But it’s the kind of bad news that has many more implications for the long term than for next week or the next term of the Supreme Court.”
Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan , said he recalled reading Model Penal Code as a first-year law student in 1970. “The death penalty was an abstract issue of little interest to me or my fellow students,” Professor Gross said. But he remembered being impressed by the institute’s work, saying, “I thought in passing that smarter people than I had done a sensible job of figuring out this tricky problem.”
Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.
“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” he said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 5, 2010, on page A11 of the New York edition.
Articles and Editorials
Italian Catholics Changed My Perspective on the Death Penalty
By Nancy Oliveira
The Tidings Online Friday, May 2, 2008
I was not always against the death penalty. Like earthquakes, I accepted the death penalty as part of life in California.
Growing up as a Catholic in Modesto, and then attending college at UCLA, including attending services at the Newman Center, I never heard my parents, teachers or priests talk about the death penalty, and I never explored the issue on my own. I was focused on getting through school, holding down a part-time job, getting married, and busying myself with my children's needs and schooling.
On that rare occasion that I heard something about the death penalty, I truly accepted it as a given, just part of a civilized society. I thought that if someone was on death row, they probably deserved to be there.
Then ten years ago, when my children were grown, I picked up and moved to Italy. I started volunteering in a soup kitchen run by a Catholic lay organization called the Community of Sant'Egidio, which began in Rome in 1968 to listen to and to put the Gospel into practice. One day, as I was serving up pasta to the homeless, I was approached by one of the Italian volunteers. He asked if I could help read some letters that they had received from death row prisoners in Texas and Georgia.
I was stunned. I wondered what they were doing with letters from American death row prisoners. I learned that they had been corresponding with death row inmates in America for 10 years, solely for the purpose of befriending them. And not only did they write letters, but they also included small amounts of money so that the condemned prisoners could buy stamps, paper and pencils. I learned that prisoners on death row are given nothing, and they are not allowed to work to have spending money like regular prisoners.
I was shocked. For 30 years I lived 15 minutes from San Quentin, which houses the largest death row in America, yet I knew virtually nothing about the reality of the death penalty.
I was very embarrassed that these hardworking Italians --- who, in addition to their regular jobs, volunteered thousands of hours to help the poor around the world --- knew everything about our death penalty, and I knew nothing.
In fact, these Italians even raised large amounts of money to help with the appeals of those they believed were innocent based on their own research.
It was from these kind-hearted Catholics that I began to learn the shocking facts about our death penalty system. They told me that 135 countries no longer use capital punishment; that the United States stands with the likes of China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan as the world's top executioners; and that 90 percent of the world's executions take place in these countries.
The most appalling fact I learned was that more than 100 innocent people had been released from death row after it was discovered that they had been wrongfully convicted. How had this happened in my very own country? And why hadn't I heard more about it?
These wrongful convictions are often attributed to incompetent defense lawyers, faulty eyewitness testimony, overzealous prosecutors, unethical law enforcement officers, false testimony from jailhouse snitches who received reduced sentences for their testimony, and false confessions extracted from suspects after tortuous hours of interrogation.
When I returned to the United States I began reading everything I could get my hands on about this issue. And the more I read, the more I realized that something was seriously wrong. Why were we wasting so much money and so many resources on a death system that was so inherently flawed and poses a real danger of executing innocent people when other alternatives, like life without parole, exist?
We urgently demand the recall of faulty cars and planes, harmful toys and risky prescription drugs that pose potential threats to the safety of our citizens --- we even recall tainted pet food. And yet our death penalty system has erred 128 times (that we know about), and we still send hundreds of people to death row each year. How could this be?
As Catholics, it is time for us to urgently work for the recall of the death penalty.
Nancy Oliveira has been a resident of San Francisco for 35 years. She has served in various community leadership positions and now serves on the board of Death Penalty Focus. For more information on Death Penalty Focus, visit http://www.deathpenalty.org.
The Death Penalty Diminishes Our Society
Articles and Editorials
The Death Penalty Diminishes Our Society
the Most Rev. John C. Wester
Bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City
published June 24th, 2010
By the time you read this, a firing squad will very likely have fired the shots to kill Ronnie Lee Gardner in the name of the State of Utah. Mr. Gardner was given the death penalty for killing attorney Michael Burdell on April 2, 1985, a terrible tragedy that compounded his 1984 killing of Melvyn John Otterstrom during a robbery. On Friday, June 18, Mr. Gardner’s appeals will no doubt have run out and he will have been executed. But while states have the right and the responsibility for protecting their residents, for Utah to take a life in our name diminishes all of us, because our society can clearly fulfill those obligations without resorting to the death penalty. From a purely economic viewpoint, it’s less expensive to incarcerate a murderer for life than to execute him. To those who would say that the cost is due to all the appeals, I would respond, “If you’re going to take a life you want to add to the appeals, not subtract from them, due to the gravity of the death penalty. And even then, despite all the technology, appeals and care taken, the state runs the risk of taking an innocent life, as has been shown by those on death row who have been exonerated.”
Since 1973, there have been 139 exonerations of death row inmates in the United States. As Christians, the thought of an innocent man being put to death in our name should be particularly abhorrent since Our Lord Himself was an innocent man condemned to die by execution. But all of this misses the point: the state should not be involved in executing prisoners in the first place since this violates the sanctity of human life and assumes prerogatives that belong only to God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is quite clear on this point (paragraphs 2267 and 2306). Once you take a life, you can’t give it back * only God can give life!
At the same time, I am very strongly in sympathy with the families of Mr. Gardner’s victims. While I was
in California I associated closely with groups that advocated for justice for families of murder victims. I saw firsthand the terrible tragedy and the ongoing mourning that takes place from such a violent act as murder. But as strongly as I feel for these people, I believe that the best way to support them is to give witness to the preciousness and the sanctity of life. God loves everybody, and that love admits to no exceptions. Our Catholic faith teaches us that life is a precious gift from God that must be respected and protected. We condemn and are abhorred by the acts of certain individuals, but we are called always to love and to forgive them as persons. We as Christians ask the state to not put a period where God has put a comma, but rather to allow the perpetrator time to repent and seek God’s forgiveness as well as the forgiveness of the victims’ families. It’s through forgiveness that we find true healing. The concept that the death penalty brings closure is a myth, in my view. We are never going to find true closure in this life but we’ll approach it most nearly through forgiveness. Until I have forgiven those who have offended me, the pain will weigh me down and be a heavy burden on my soul. Our Lord himself gave us the supreme example when he forgave his executioners while being crucified. The morality of the death penalty also comes into question when one examines how unevenly it is applied. A disproportionate number of people on death row are poor or persons of color. Also, while 35 states in the U.S. have the death penalty, 15 do not. In addition, 65 percent of executions are conducted by only five states.
As a deterrent, the death penalty also fails. It is my impression that most people murder someone else in one of three circumstances: in a fit of passion, while they are under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or when they plan the act of murder so well that they think they won’t get caught. In any of these three cases they’re not considering that they may incur the death penalty for their actions. Indeed, not only does the death penalty fail to deter capital crimes, it seems to me that it perpetuates an atmosphere of violence and death. As Jesus warns us, “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” That sword cuts both ways! Witness those countries that don’t have the death penalty and their lower incidence of crime than countries that do have it.
In their 1999 publication, “A Good Friday Appeal to End the Death Penalty,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states that "We cannot overcome crime by simply executing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of the innocent by ending the lives of those convicted of their murders. The death penalty offers the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life." All of us mourn the loss of innocent victims caught in the crosshairs of murder. But for the reasons stated above, I pray that our society can move beyond a system of justice that violates the long standing religious beliefs of many people, runs the risk of executing innocent persons, fails to deter and is applied unevenly. We are all brothers and sisters of each other with God as our Father, in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. I believe that the poet John Donne was correct when, in his famous poem, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” he shared the insight that each person’s death diminishes all of us precisely because we are all one in God and in our shared humanity. If Ronnie Lee Gardner’s execution goes forward on Friday, June 18, we will not have to “send for whom the bell tolls.” We will already know, and we and our society will be diminished once again.
