9/3/2009
Repealing the death penalty
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| Repealing the death penalty |
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The drive to repeal the death penalty in Oregon has gained vigor, with Catholics in key roles.
“We need to share our Catholic teaching with courage and clarity,” says a memorandum sent to parishes last month from Mary Jo Tully, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Portland. “We need to reach out to our teachers and to our parishioners. We need to form and to persuade. We need to be advocates for change.”
Tully has joined other lay Catholics on the board of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
With statements from the catechism, Pope John Paul II, the U.S. bishops and most recently Portland Archbishop John Vlazny, Oregon Catholics are being urged to oppose execution as an affront to the sanctity of life as well as an illogical, ineffective and expensive public policy.
Catholic leaders say capital punishment encourages the idea that violence is an appropriate solution to social problems. In addition, new technology has exonerated scores of death row inmates nationwide, meaning that innocent people probably have been executed. DNA is no assurance that innocent people won’t be killed in the future — DNA evidence exists in only five to 10 percent of cases.
The death penalty has never been an effective deterrent to murder and, religious leaders say, has been applied arbitrarily and disproportionately against the poor and minorities. Opponents say it also diverts resources from effective criminal justice policies.
One part of the catechism says state acts of justice are meant in part to improve the offender and allow for possible redemption, even if it occurs within prison walls. The idea is linked to the Christian value of forgiveness, which comes straight from Jesus.
“If punishment is supposed to correct someone, you can’t correct them by killing them,” says Mary Ryan-Hotchkiss, a member of the peace and justice group at St. Pius X Parish in Portland. Ryan-Hotchkiss is getting active in the Oregon repeal campaign.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has opposed the death penalty for more than 25 years.
At a workshop last week at St. Andrew’s Parish, 17 people were urged to work in their churches to help parishioners match the resolve of their leaders.
“Pastors now need to hear from the grassroots, the people on the ground,” says Ron Steiner, a member of Queen of Peace Parish in Salem and a leader of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. He helped organize the successful effort to abolish executions in New Mexico.
Steiner said grassroots organizing in New Mexico led to stunning results, like 12,000 messages to Gov. Bill Richardson in four days.
“We’re trying to find people in the parishes to take this to their community,” Steiner says of the Oregon campaign. “We’d like someone in every parish in the archdiocese.”
In 2000, opponents of the death penalty attempted to qualify an initiative for the Oregon ballot, but fell short of signatures. This time around, they plan to aim for a referendum, a law change sent from lawmakers to the public. Key legislators like House Speaker Dave Hunt are poised to offer support. The next time such a referendum could be on the ballot is fall 2012.
With recent bans in New Jersey and New Mexico and strong campaigns underway in Montana and Nebraska, Oregon’s activists have stepped up activity, though the work has been developing for years.
“It looks like the movement is becoming organized,” says Clarence Pugh of Salem, a longtime member of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “We’re at the point of critical Mass.”
Ann Lackey, a teacher and member of Our Lady of the Lake Parish in Lake Oswego, says that recent Catholic teaching on the death penalty has “changed the whole dynamic.” Linking the opposition to the pro-life movement makes perfect sense to her.
“It’s really starting to build,” she says of the abolition movement.
The campaign has sought allies not only among parishes but in religious orders. Holy Names Sister Janet Ryan attended last week’s workshop on behalf of her fellow women Religious.
Kelly Calderwood, a member of St. Andrew Parish, worked on an abolition attempt nine years ago and was frustrated at the lack of interest among some Catholics. She wants to learn a better approach.
Organizers suggest parish book groups that take up works like Dead Man Walking or Innocent Man. Also helpful, they say, is getting a group of like-minded peers at the parish and offering to do the legwork after getting the pastor’s approval. In many cases, the parish peace and justice committee would be a good place to start. Mentioning the archbishop’s letter and the chancellor’s memo to parishioners would help.
Churches could have potluck dinners at houses to discuss the issue. Items could go out on the church Web site, via e-mail lists, Facebook and Twitter. Speakers could come to the parish or be invited by an entire vicariate.
Some parishes, Craft says, draft resolutions on opposing the death penalty, taking a vote of the congregation or the pastoral council.
The board of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is trying to get faith communities to make such statements public.
“We feel rejuvenated on the cause,” says Bill Long, an attorney with a blog on matters of faith, government and health. “We’re gradually trying to build up the community of those who oppose.”
Thirty-five states have a death penalty. In Oregon, the death sentence is possible in cases of aggravated murder — multiple slayings, torture of the victim, maiming or killing of a child. Murdering a judge, a witness or some other person involved in the criminal justice system could also send a convict to death row.
Oregon is one of only three states where the death penalty is written into the state constitution. That means it can be changed only by initiative or referendum.
The Oregon Supreme Court has overturned half of death sentences handed down since capital punishment was reinstated by voter initiative here in 1984. Since then, 73 death sentences have been pronounced but 36 have been reversed. Thirty-one individuals are currently on death row. Two men have been executed since 1984 because they abandoned their appeals.
Oregonians have come and gone on the death penalty. State lawmakers first approved it in 1864. Since then, voters have repealed it twice but voted it in three times. The Oregon Supreme Court nixed it once and one current justice last year called for a new review.
Death penalty supporters say the policy encourages defendants accused of murder to agree to plea deals, which save taxpayers money because the cases don’t go to trial.
But death penalty cases take a long time and cost a lot because of the high level of scrutiny. Many interviews and assessments take place before the state is willing to condemn someone to die. Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty found that death penalty trials cost at least $250,000 while trials for non-capital murder cost about $24,000 apiece.
In most states, keeping an inmate in prison for 40 years costs about $1.2 million. That compares to a single death penalty case in Maryland that cost $37 million. A Kansas study showed that the death penalty was three times more expensive than murder cases where execution is not sought.
In California, it costs $90,000 more per year to incarcerate a death row inmate than to keep a prisoner for life without parole.
In June, former California Attorney General and Los Angeles District Attorney John Van de Kamp wrote an op-ed calling for an end to the state’s death penalty in light of the economic crisis.
Catholic teaching does not rule out capital punishment as intrinsically evil, but does call for an end to it as unnecessary violence.
Pope John Paul wrote that improvements in prisons make the death penalty unnecessary, because the public is not at risk from escaped convicts.
Fewer than half of Catholics support execution. And the more a Catholic attends Mass, the more he or she tends to oppose it.
“There is no question — the understanding is different in the past decade,” says Sarah Craft, a Seattle-based campaign organizer for Equal Justice USA, a group formed to end the death penalty.
She was in Oregon last week educating parish leaders. She told the group, “Our excitement and our involvement and our own initiative will get things moving.”
The pure moral argument against the death penalty won’t be enough to convince Oregonians to favor repeal, says Jim Moore, professor of political science at Pacific University.
For one thing, Moore says, the state uses the death penalty infrequently enough that the debate will hit people mostly on an intellectual level.
That said, repeal could be fueled by a powerful argument that the lethal injections are somehow cruel and unusual punishment or, more likely, that the death penalty is too expensive.
“I think a good argument can be made for it simply on the basis of cost,” says Moore.
He adds that few politicians can win over a large number of constituents by opposing capital punishment. Though a liberal state, Oregon has repeatedly voted for tougher crime measures, Moore notes.
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