The Political and Religious Implications of Capital Punishment

By Michael Cope, Ruslan Deynychenko, Redouane Lahlou, Joseph Nickl, Carrie Nygard

Introduction/ A Fierce Ambivalence

There is much pain in these pages. There are, to begin with, crimes that defy description. Then there is the ensuing rage, horror, grief and fierce ambivalence. But also courage and incredible human spirit. I have been changed forever by the experiences that I describe here.

  – Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking– an oxymoronic title that only begins to express the formless issue of capital punishment. The ambivalence felt by citizens, scholars, politicians, priests, ministers, inmates, executioners, killers and victims is as laborious as life and as natural as death. After all, society is faced with a heart-wrenching catch-22. Is a man’s worst deed ancillary to his humanity, or is definitive judgment a service to the citizens whom he betrayed?

The United States’ debate on the morality and efficacy of capital punishment reached an important juncture on June 29, 1972. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional because in some cases it violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects citizens from “cruel and unusual punishment.” In July of 1976, however, the Court upheld the death penalty as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes, opening the door for Congress and state legislatures to make the death penalty an option again.

While more than half of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, the United States continues to use it in all but 12 states and the District of Columbia. According to Amnesty International, more than three countries a year have abolished the death penalty in law since 1976.

There were 85 executions in the United States in 2000, down 13 percent from 1999 when executions were carried out at an unparalleled rate: 98 people in  20 states or one execution every 3.72 days. In fact, almost half of the U.S.’ post-1976 executions (352) have taken place in the last five years.

Calls for moratoriums on the death penalty are gathering momentum across this country, as well as around the world. Moratoriums would temporarily suspend the death penalty while task forces discuss its fairness and future within civilized society.  

The recent push for moratoriums have sparked political and ethical debates everywhere. Political columnist and television newsman Bill O’Reilly recently said the death penalty isn’t “cruel and unusual enough.” He remarked in a recent interview: “I’m against capital punishment because I don’t believe it deters the crime it’s punishing. Also, I don’t believe society should come down to the level of killers. And which is worse, keeping someone in solitary confinement for the rest of his life or putting a needle in his arm when he’s already under anesthetic and he’s out in two minutes? I know which I’d take.”

The political and religious debates about the death penalty are thick and thorny. Even those who claim reverence for the death penalty would be hesitant, if asked, to pull the fatal switch, thus establishing reasonable doubt in even the most certain of minds.

Internationally, the non-profit group Moratorium 2000 recently presented United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan with a petition for a world-wide moratorium. The petition had more than 3.2 million signatures from 146 countries.

Annan took the opportunity to predict what the future holds for capital punishment around the world. “The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process. And I believe that future generations, throughout the world, will come to agree.”

The sharply divided discussion of this subject reflects deeply held values, whose roots intertwine in political and religious traditions. Arguments mix practical policy considerations with ideological commitments.  Often the facts of the matter get lost in the heat of the struggle.

Sanctity of All Life/ “Forgive Them Father…”

Much of the political ambivalence in the United States about the death penalty balances uneasily on a phrase used on both sides of the polarized debate—“the sanctity of life.” 

Opponents believe that capital punishment lowers the value of human life and brutalizes society.  The American Catholic Bishops, for example, have said that abolishing capital punishment would reaffirm that each person is a creature made in the image and likeness of God.  It would also be in accordance with the example of Jesus who both taught and practiced forgiveness.  The most important thing is that it would emphasize is that the best means for promoting a just society are intelligence and compassion, not power and vengeance.

But according to religioustolerance.org, one reason for supporting capital punishment is the value of human life; “It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life.”  Proponents contend that the death penalty provides an appropriate punishment to demonstrate that disrespect for human life will not be tolerated.  Regardless of race, gender and class, the one thing that all murders have in common, according to this argument, is that they don’t value life and never will. 

Deterrence and Retribution

In a 1985 article in the University of California-Davis Law Review, The Death Penalty Once More, Ernest Van Den Haag claims: “Capital punishment is likely to deter more than other punishments because people fear death more than anything else.” Others, however, insist that capital punishment deters no one and it is morally wrong.

From a utilitarian approach to crime, punishment is assumed to be necessary primarily to deter more crime. It is a means to justify an end: deterrence. From a Kantian prospective, moral reasoning argues that offenders should be punished because they deserve it. Since they stepped outside society’s rules, they should be punished as the only way to right the wrong they have committed. Punishment becomes an end in itself, not a means.

Deterrence and retribution are significant in any argument about punishment. They become even more important when the punishment is execution. 

According to its proponents, capital punishment deters potential criminals and reduces violent crimes.  The deterrence argument assumes that potential offenders are rational and calculating beings, who weigh execution as a possible consequence being caught, prosecuted and convicted. Research to support this claim, however, is weak.  Most violent crimes are committed in a moment of rage and irrationality by someone the victim knows--a relative, a friend or a co- worker

In Gregg v. Georgia, a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that reinstated the death penalty, Justice Potter Stewart implies that capital punishment might have deterred someone, somewhere from committing a crime, but he asserts it as an article of faith, not a proven fact. 

In fact, a study by Thorstein Sellin compared states that had death penalties with ones that didn’t and murder rates before and after the death penalty was abolished or reinstated. He found no valid difference in both cases.  He also found evidence that some states with the capital punishment laws didn’t actually carry out the death sentences.

Some studies have even found evidence that the death penalty correlates with an increase homicides:

•     In 1996, states with the death penalty had average murder rate of 7.1 per 100,000 population; states that had no death penalty had a homicide rate of 3.6.

•     A report of Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that during 1996, Southern states, where 81 percent of executions are performed, have an average murder rate of 9 per 100,000 population.  States in Northeast have 1 percent executions and a murder rate of 5.4.

•     A 1980 study of homicides in New York found that average number of murders increased in the month following an execution.

•     Canada’s homicide rate dropped 27 percent since death penalty was abolished in 1976.

•     FBI Uniform Crime Reports for 1995 reports that there were 4.9 murders per 100,000 people in states that abolished the death penalty.  There were 9.2 murders per 100,000 people in states that still have the death penalty.

Racial Disparities/ “A Pattern of Evidence…”

From the time of slavery, in which black people were considered property, through the years of lynchings, capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Sister Helen Prejean asked the General Accounting Office to review the empirical studies on race and the death penalty that had been conducted up to that time. The agency reviewed 28 studies regarding both race of defendant and race of victim discrimination. Their review included studies utilizing various methodologies and degrees of statistical sophistication and examined such diverse states as California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Texas.

The GAO’s conclusion in 1990 was unequivocal: In 82 percent of the studies, race of victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving a death sentence; i.e., those who murdered whites were found to be more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks. This finding was remarkably consistent across data sets, states, data collection methods, and analytic techniques. These studies underscore a persistent pattern of racial disparities, which have appeared throughout the country over the past 20 years. Examinations of the relationship between race and the death penalty, with varying levels of thoroughness and sophistication, have now been conducted in every major death penalty state. In 96 percent of these reviews, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination­– or both.

Race does not affect all cases equally. Notorious serial killers are nearly certain to receive the death penalty regardless of their race. In the most highly aggravated cases, the fact that the defendant is black is less of a factor pushing a case toward a death sentence. The same can be said for cases of very low severity: race is less likely to be a factor in cases where there is little inflammatory evidence.

But in the "mid-range" of severity (or aggravation), race plays a very significant role. When cases were ranked from 1 to 8 in increasing severity, cases in categories 1 (least severe) and 8 (most severe) showed little or no discrimination against black defendants. But in the middle categories, 3 through 7, the disproportionate treatment of black defendants, as compared to all other defendants, was quite pronounced. For example, in cases of level 5 severity, 25 percent of the black defendants received the death penalty, but only 5 percent of the other defendants received death, and the difference between these sentencing rates is 20 percentage points. At level 6 severity, the difference was 15 percentage points, and at level 4 severity, the difference in death sentencing rates was 11 percentage points higher for black defendants.

For the bulk of crimes, which are in the mid-level of severity, blacks who kill non-blacks are more likely to receive the death penalty than blacks who kill blacks, and they have a death sentencing rate much larger than the rate for defendants of other races who commit similarly severe murders of black victims.

In its 1990 report, the non-partisan U.S. GAO found “a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty.” The study concluded that a defendant was several times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white. This confirms the findings of many other studies that, holding all other factors constant, the single most reliable predictor of whether someone will be sentenced to death is the race of the victim.

Since 1977, the majority of death row defendants, over 80 percent, have been executed for killing whites. Underlying the statistical evidence is the differential treatment of African-Americans at every turn: from initial charging decisions to plea bargaining to jury sentencing, they are treated more harshly when they are defendants and their lives are given less value when they are victims. Furthermore, all-white or virtually all-white juries are still commonplace in many localities.

A study by Professor Jeffrey Pokorak and researchers at St. Mary's University Law School in Texas provides part of the explanation for why the application of the death penalty remains racially skewed. Their study found that the key decision-makers in death cases around the country are almost exclusively white men. One of the likely reasons for this discrepancy is that almost all the prosecutors making the key decision about whether death will be sought are white. Pokorak collected data regarding the race and gender of the government officials empowered to prosecute criminal offenses, and in particular, capital offenses from all 38 states that use the death penalty. The study, concluded in 1998, revealed that only 1 percent of the District Attorneys in death penalty states in this country are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. The remainder are white, and almost all of them are male.

More than half of the death sentences rendered in Pennsylvania are cases from Philadelphia, a city with only 14 percent of the state's population. Philadelphia's District Attorney, Lynne Abraham, was called "The Deadliest D.A." in a 1995 New York Times article. Eighty-three percent of those on death row from Philadelphia are African-American.

Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia that reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black.

These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes.

This examination requires a statistical analysis that takes into account such factors as multiple victims, the deliberate infliction of pain, and the background of the accused. The ultimate question is: "Among similar cases, is race a factor in whether death sentences are imposed against black defendants?"

The researchers consistently found substantial race-of-defendant disparities. The results of this bias against black defendants in Philadelphia is estimated to be an excess of 38 percent in death sentences for black defendants compared to all other defendants for similar crimes.

The raw data of death sentences in Philadelphia between 1983 and 1993, provide the first piece of disturbing evidence that race discrimination may be operating. The rate at which eligible black defendants were sentenced to death was nearly 40 percent higher than the rate for other eligible defendants.

Racial disparities can result through prosecutorial selection of which cases "deserve" the death penalty or from the action of juries in determining the final sentences, or from both. But before a disparity due to race can be established, a researcher must measure the race effects for crimes of similar severity committed by defendants with similar criminal histories.

Evidence of racial discrimination in the U.S. death penalty system has attracted worldwide attention. In 1996, the International Commission of Jurists, whose members include respected judges from around the world, visited the United States and researched the use of the death penalty. Their report was sharply critical of the way the death penalty is being applied, particularly in regards to race.

Atonement/ Good vs. Evil

One of the most widely debated aspects of the death penalty debate is the issue of atonement. Death penalty opponents claim capital punishment takes away the opportunity for death row inmates to atone for their sins. By imposing the death penalty, therefore, the government is simply invoking the same mistake that the prisoner made when he/she took the life of the victim by denying the opportunity for atonement.

The opposition does not agree. Supporters of the death penalty often weigh the possible good vs. the probable evil that will come from the prisoner. St. Thomas Aquinas, speaking in support of the death penalty, describes the basis of this argument when he says:

The fact that the evil, as long as they can be corrected from their errors, does not prohibit the fact that they may be justly executed, for the danger which threatens from their way of life is greater and more certain than the good which may be expected from their improvement.

            –St. Thomas Aquinas

In other words, it is more likely that more evil will come form the prisoner rather than any kind of atonement. In addition, the argument holds that if a killer has not repented when the sentence of death is upon him, then he most likely will not repent if he has years and years of life imprisonment. If the threat of death does not make the killer atone, it does not seem that much more will bring him/her to atone.

Death row inmates also have, according to the same theory, at the critical point of death, the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance. In Dead Man Walking, the murderer being counseled by Sr. Helen Prejean might not have come to atonement had he never been sentenced to death and therefore never been introduced to her. It was his pending execution that finally led to his repentance. One scholar and supporter of the death penalty, Robert Ingram, says that the "law grants to the condemned an opportunity which he did not grant to the victim, the opportunity to prepare to meet his God."

Biblical Imperative/ An Eye for an Eye

Exodus 21:23-25 says: "But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

According to this way of thinking, if someone murders another human being, he himself deserves to be murdered. Those who use this part of scripture for evidence of the justness of capital punishment, do so on the grounds that the killing of a human is an offense against God because human beings are made in the image of God.

The first mention of capital punishment as a penalty for murder is in Genesis 9:6, which says: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." According to God in this passage, the murderer has killed someone made in his own image and therefore deserves the same punishment.

Other supporters of capital punishment, who use the biblical imperative as grounds for their beliefs, do so on the basis of imposition. Almost all religious scholars agree that the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is a prohibition against individual cases of murder. However, there is no biblical prohibition against the government imposition of the death penalty in "deserving cases."  Furthermore, this claim says that government "imposition of capital punishment is required for deliberate murder," according to Dr. Charles Ryrie, author of Biblical Answers to Contemporary Issues & The Ryrie Study Bible, Exodus 20:13.  He views the death penalty as a worthy punishment and consequence for sin, rather than a means of vindication or revenge.

Opponents of the death penalty, however, have their Biblical own arguments. According to Sister Helen Prejean, spiritual adviser for several death row inmates and opponent of the death penalty, simply taking the biblical phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is using what she calls "biblical quarterbacking.” Sister Prejean, the character portrayed by Susan Sarandon the film Dead Man Walking, says people "toss in quotes from the Bible to back up what they've already decided anyway." The biblical imperative, according to Prejean's theory, is a perfect example of this. Death penalty opponents find other pieces of scripture to prove that there is not one explicit command on the issue of capital punishment.

There are actually two conflicting penalties for murder shown in Genesis. After Cain killed Abel, God specifically prohibited capital punishment. God says in Genesis 4:15: "…'Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.’ Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.”

Both sides of the issue, however, do use scripture in their arguments. One piece of scripture used to defy support for the death penalty based on the Biblical Imperative is John 8:3-11 when Jesus says: "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."  In this passage, Jesus is speaking to a crowd who is about to stone an adulterer because of her promiscuous behavior. This is perhaps the most famous and most widely used piece of scripture to oppose the death penalty on Biblical grounds. Opponents of the death penalty claim this is an overruling of the Biblical Imperative.

Some places were the death penalty is discussed in Scriptures:

            Leviticus 24:17  Numbers 35:16  Leviticus 24:21  Deut. 17:6

The depravity of John Lesko’s childhood in Pittsburgh during the 1960s rivals Oliver Twist’s misfortunes and misadventures in 1850s London.  But not even the genius of Charles Dickens could craft a happy ending from this story.
details

Throughout his years at Kiski Area High School, Travaglia – described as a tall, thin youth – was an active member of the swim team, marching band and symphonic band.  “He enjoyed school and his classes, especially music,” his wife Fran said, noting that school was a break away from his home life.
details