Death Penalty Revisited     

Our criminal justice system is broken. Too many innocent people have been imprisoned for years, some even executed, due to withholding evidence or inept lawyers. A disproportionate number of people of color are incarcerated, many because of their inability to afford competent lawyers or prejudice on the part of law officials. Just recently a man in Missouri, who claimed his innocence in a murder, was executed by lethal injection. He suffered trauma as a teen when his father was killed in the line of duty as a policeman.

The United States is one of the few developed countries that still retains the death penalty. As of 2013, 33 states still use the death penalty: Of the 33 that still retain it, only 25 have executed anyone in the last 10 years.

The death penalty is inhumane. It is a proven fact that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime. Those who are truly guilty of heinous crimes should be sentenced to life in prison without parole which has proven to be less costly due to the appeals, retrials, paperwork, and lawyer fees for appeals. Too many innocent lives have been ruined because of mistakes made by imperfect humans in charge of the system.

Women religious have been working to raise awareness of this issue. Sister Helen Prejean, whose work was featured in the movie, Dead Man Walking, has long been dedicated to this cause. Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, published in 2004, which examines how flaws in the death penalty system inevitably led to innocent people being executed and make the system unworkable.

A number of religious communities have taken a corporate stance against the death penalty including the Congregation of St. Joseph, the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, and many of the Dominican congregations.

Sister Therese Bangert, a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth, has been lobbying in the Kansas State Capitol to abolish the death penalty for over 25 years and serves on the board of the Kansas Coalition against the Death Penalty. Sister Kathy Cash, whose father was murdered when she was a child, gives talks and social justice education classes urging the end of capital punishment.

Let’s pray to end this inhumane practice of human punishment.

Barbara Mayer, OSB