By J. Michael Parker, For Today’s Catholic

SAN ANTONIO • Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy members raised a common voice against the death penalty Oct. 24 at Trinity University’s Laurie Auditorium, one calling it “judicial murder” and all calling attention to a variety of injustices associated with it.  Several panelists in the two-hour program recounted their own personal experiences with survivors of murder victims, but each raised moral issues arising out of the racial and economic disparity in the use of the death penalty, and one citing statistics indicating that a variety of factors combine to deprive many defendants of true justice. No one, either on the panel or in the audience, spoke in favor of capital punishment. Listen to remarks from Bishop Cantu and Fr. Larry Christian on the TCC Podcast.

Karen Clifton, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic Mobilizing Network to End the Use of the Death Penalty, moderated the discussion, introducing the topic by asserting that “our country grossly overlooks the issue of the death penalty. Texans, particularly, have a responsibility to examine our system.” Texas alone accounts for 475 of the 1,272 executions that have taken place in the United States since 1976. “It’s known as the ‘death capital’ on the front pages of national and international newspaper, yet our own executions are often overlooked and featured on the back pages of our local newspapers,” Clifton said.

She characterized the Oct. 24 dialogue as the beginning of a larger public discussion that she hopes will engage interfaith clergy and congregants and prompt them to act to end the death penalty. Texans should care about the death penalty, Clifton asserted, because Texans’ reputations as well as local and county budgets are wrapped up in the practice of maintaining the death penalty. Besides the economic issues, Clifton she declared, capital punishment is simply unjust.

“The Innocence Project and others have brought to light numerous cases of wrongful convictions. Evidence is increasing that innocent people have been executed, and we know that others have lost decades of their lives by being wrongfully incarcerated.”

Clifton spoke of a co-worker whose daughter was brutally raped and murdered by two men. She said the grieving mother, animated by her faith, chose not to support the death penalty for her daughter’s killers — a decision Clifton said the news media and many people found “incomprehensible.”

“The scrutiny and criticism she faced in response to her decision to choose life called upon all her strength and her faith in a whole new way. Today, Vicki is a speaker and activist who still chooses life as her process to heal,” Clifton continued.

She said that among the encouraging developments in the campaign against the death penalty is the decline in executions in recent years, even in Texas. “The climate is shifting, prosecutors are more often seeking alternative sentencing and jurors are more often rejecting the death penalty for capital murder in favor of life sentences without parole.

“In the past seven years, we’ve seen a 70 percent drop in the numbers of new death sentences handed down in Texas. In 1999, 48 people were sentenced to death in Texas; in 2010, the number was only eight. Nationally, death sentences are down by 50 percent, and recent polling indicates that 61 percent favor alternative forms of punishment over the death penalty,” Clifton said. “Momentum is on our side in doing away with the broken capital punishment system.”

The Rev. Rashad Berry, associate minister of Canaan Missionary First Baptist Church, pointed out that between 1973 and 2005, 123 people in 24 states have been released from death rows after evidence of wrongful conviction was produced. He added that many poor defendants in capital cases are convicted and sentenced to death without benefit of adequate defense counsel.

Father Larry Christian, pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church, recalled being pastor in a small county seat south of San Antonio. His parish included the local district attorney, jurors and relatives of both perpetrators and the victims of murders in 1998. The previous year, Texas’ Catholic bishops had raised questions about wrongful convictions and the lack of equal application of the death penalty. Death sentences, he said, were heavily weighted toward the poor and ethnic minorities.

“It seemed if you had enough money, you could buy enough justice, so to speak,” the priest said. He recalled having to read Archbishop Patrick Flores’ pastoral letter on the death penalty from the pulpit, knowing that some congregants had direct association with the issues raised in the letter and would have different emotional feelings about what it said.

“The prosecutor believed in his heart that he was doing the right thing; the families of the victim were looking for some kind of justice. The families of the accused were frozen in fear, almost in terror. I had to reflect on how to approach all of them, how to be a shepherd of souls to each one of them.”

Father Christian said the bishops’ questions and the teaching of Pope John Paul II have influenced him. The Catholic tradition historically has allowed capital punishment in extreme cases as a way of protecting society from any further harm, but that Pope John Paul II publicly questioned whether such extreme circumstances exist in contemporary society when convicted murderers can be imprisoned without possibility of parole.

“By the time the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published, the church stated non-lethal methods are sufficient to defend people’s safety from the aggressor, and authority will limit itself to such means,” the priest said.

“My own journey has led me to move beyond the idea of justice as retribution to justice as something that must repair and restore.” He said society must move to an attitude of non-violence where the death penalty will not be needed to protect our society.

Retired Episcopal Suffragan Bishop Robert Hibbs said he was influenced in his opposition to the death penalty by his late father-in-law, Myrl Alexander, who had been director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “We’d sit up late at night and go around and around about the death penalty. Through him, I began to examine the issues of justification of the death penalty and rehabilitation: retribution, prevention of capital crimes, deterrence, the significant issues of addiction, discrimination, the economics of long-term incarceration versus lengthy appeals and access to competent legal representation.”

Long ago, he counseled an Austin man whose sister had been sexually abused, battered and thrown into Lake Austin, where she drowned. The brother was raging against two young men charged with her murder when Hibbs met him. “He wanted to commit a crime so he would be arrested and have an opportunity to attack — and he wanted to kill — those perpetrators.”

Walking along a riverbank together, Hibbs and the angry brother encountered two young boys, whom the bishop described as being of the same ethnic minority as the presumed killers. Hibbs said he asked the brother, “What do you think it would take to turn children like that into the two men who killed your sister?” He said the man wept and began to heal.

“I am now persuaded that there is no morally justifiable defense for the death penalty. Its continuance among us is itself ethically and spiritually reprehensible,” he declared, earning enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Elder Hilary Shuford, executive of the San Antonio-based Mission Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., said her concerns about the death penalty began with hearing discussions in the 1960s about the electric chair being cruel and unusual punishment.

“Capital punishment is wrong; it is state-sanctioned murder, and murder is immoral. My conviction has grown stronger through law school, 18 years of law practice and more than 10 years as a presbytery executive. How can a state in a democratic republic have more power than any individual, or all individuals who comprise that state? Each of us, as an individual citizen, is responsible for the actions of the whole. What is right for one is right for all, and what is right for all is right for one; therefore, if an individual cannot commit a homicide, neither should the state be able to commit a homicide.”

However, Shuford said, the standard death certificate filled out after each Texas execution routinely lists the reason for death as homicide. “What makes it worse is that this execution is premeditated homicide, or ‘murder in the first degree with malice aforethought.’” She also opposes it because, as a Christian, she believes in the sanctity of human life. “It is wrong to murder because God made and created human beings in his own image and likeness.”

It’s well-known, Shufer said, that the number of African American men incarcerated and sentenced to death dramatically exceeds their percentage in the general population. “I understand that 40 percent of the people on Texas’ death row are African American, while they make up only 12 percent of the general population,” she said. “This disproportionate treatment and great inequality with respect to treatment of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in the legal system has existed throughout most of our history and continues today in a systemic racial bias in the administration of criminal justice.”

Finally, she said, the fact that innocent people are put to death is intolerable. “Troy Davis was executed in Georgia (in October). The State of Georgia killed an innocent man. The witnesses had recanted, stating that they had been coerced by the police. With incredible advances, especially in DNA testing, innocent people are being released regularly.”

Shuford also noted that most civilized countries have abolished capital punishment and turning to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. The United States joins Iran and China among the few countries that still allow state-sanctioned murder.

Most mainline Protestant denominational general assemblies have issued official statements of strong opposition to capital punishment and asking members to become active in opposing the death penalty.

Rabbi Emeritus Samuel Stahl of Temple Beth-El said that while Jews are very individualistic, the vast majority of rabbinical associations oppose capital punishment. The State of Israel, since its founding in 1948, has executed only one person: Adolf Eichmann, the former Nazi official under whose authority the mass murder of some six million Jews during the Holocaust was implemented.

“In the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, we find hundreds of instances where the death penalty is mandated,” Rabbi Stahl said. “Both an incorrigible, stubborn and rebellious son and an adultress are to be put to death; even a person who kindles a fire on the Sabbath is to be put to death. However, later Jewish teachers, in the Talmud, inform us that these harsh laws were only to serve as severe warnings; they were not actually carried out. They’re in the Bible primarily to underscore the gravity and seriousness of these sins.”

In fact, he said, the Talmud, the most authoritative of all Jewish legal sources after the Bible, says that a Sanhedrin that executes a criminal even once in 70 years is considered especially callous and cruel. Two rabbis asserted that if they had been part of that Sanhedrin, they would not have allowed even one execution.

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As an heir to that tradition, Stahl said he personally finds capital punishment repulsive. The chief victims seem to be the poor minorities; the rich and the influential can obtain the best lawyers and avoid the death penalty. The death penalty brutalizes even those who administer it. “It arouses that part in each of us that is violent. It heightens our need to vent our wrath on the criminal but undermines our respect for human life.” The rabbi cited as an example the large numbers of people who volunteered to be in the firing squad that would execute Utah death row inmate Gary Gilmore, although only five participated. In January 1977, Gilmore became the first person executed in the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision that the death penalty was not inherently unconstitutional.

The most important objection, the rabbi said, is the possibility of error. Once a death sentence is carried out, it is irrevocable. “There is no greater tragedy than the loss of a single, innocent human life, the life of one who is made in God’s image.” He quoted an unnamed rabbi as asserting that “the death penalty stands in defiance of our efforts to work for a better society by non-violent means.”