Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Remembering Jesús, Published March 27, 2006
Click to read the article
This article appeared on Online Journal, Antiwar.com and Political Thought Magazine. Also Selves&Others and Countercurrents.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
![[ACLU Execution Watch Counter]](http://www.aclu.org/graphics/dpcounter.gif)
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Citizen Healer, Do No Harm, Published in Ventura County Star, 3/5/06
March 1, International Death Penalty Abolition Day
In 1828 Patrick Fitzpatrick of Detroit was executed for the rape and murder of an innkeeper’s daughter. Seven years later, his roommate confessed to the crime.
As a result of this and other travesties of justice, the first official act of the new state of Michigan’s legislature was to ban the death penalty.
On March 1, 1847, Michigan became the first English-speaking government in the world to outlaw executions. Now we commemorate March 1 as International Death Penalty Abolition Day.
The struggle to abolish the death penalty began around the same time as the movement to abolish slavery. The first independent government in the world to ban the death penalty permanently was the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1786. Today slavery is a crime everywhere on Earth, but the struggle to abolish the death penalty continues.
The US remains one of the few remaining bastions of democratic support for the death penalty. One hundred and twenty nations, from Angola to Nepal to Venezuela have no capital punishment. No European country executes its citizens, nor do our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. The UN has repeatedly endorsed an international moratorium on capital punishment.
Eventually, we as a nation will learn to respect the universal human right to life. We too will reject execution as a form of torture.
There are reasons for national optimism. In 2002 the Supreme Court declared the execution of the mentally disabled unconstitutional; the execution of juveniles was abolished in 2005. Like Michigan, twelve states have no capital punishment statute; Illinois and New Jersey have moratoria in effect, and the death penalty laws of Kansas and New York have been nullified. Many mainstream religious institutions in the US oppose capital punishment as a violation of the right to life. Recent polls suggest that voters prefer life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty, and as we saw last week in California’s Michael Morales case, the medical profession finds it ethically unacceptable for a healthcare provider to participate in executions.
The arguments in favor of capital punishment in the US are weak. It is excruciatingly obvious that executions do not deter capital offenses, are frequently meted out to factually innocent individuals, are racially biased, and function as a macabre lottery stacked against the most destitute defendants.
But the best argument against the death penalty may simply be what Jesus, the archetypal victim of the death penalty, taught: love thy enemy.
When we choose instead to wage “war on crime,” to hate and seek revenge, our empathy atrophies and we neglect to provide the early intervention alternatives to guns, drugs,
unemployment and gangs that are indispensable to sustaining a just and peaceful society.
A society committed to nonviolence and human rights would not be a leading purveyor of capital punishment, rivaled only by the likes of China, Vietnam and Iran. It would not be the world’s leader in per capita incarceration; nor would it have a homicide approximately every 30 minutes, as the US does today.
As we mark Wednesday’s International Death Penalty Abolition Day, let us contemplate what it would be like to wage peace, instead of war, on crime. What if our guiding principles were compassion and rehabilitation instead of vengeance and punishment? What if we all considered ourselves the healthcare providers of future generations, nurturers of the sanctity of human life, citizen healers who refuse to participate in any killing, even when authorized by the state?
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