What's Wrong with Capital Punishment

The state of Georgia executed Troy Davis at 10:53pm on a Wednesday in September, by lethal injection…. Nearly a million people world-wide signed Amnesty International’s petition urging authorities in Georgia to commute Davis’ death sentence. Davis spent 20 years on death row for a crime it’s doubtful he committed, and the penal system ground inexorably forward. No one could stop it. Not Davis’ family. Not lawyers, protestors, or petition signers. Not the 6 prison officials who expressed “overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia.” Not the Georgia governor. Not former President Jimmy Carter, nor William Sessions, director of the FBI under President Reagan. Not even the Pope. No one.

Davis addressed his final words to murder victim Mark MacPhail’s family who sat in the front row at the execution. I know you all are still convinced that I’m the person who killed your father, your son, and your brother – but I am innocent…. I am so sorry for your loss. I really am.  Sincerely.

Troy Davis couldn’t get a stay of execution – despite substantial new evidence supporting his innocence – in part because of the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The Act was pushed to bring a speedy and lethal conclusion to domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.  Under the Act, “federal courts are unable to grant relief despite meritorious substantive claims, including … claims of racial bias in jury selection, ineffective assistance of counsel, and prosecutorial misconduct,” concludes the Constitution Project, which seeks substantial reform to the act. It reduces capital defendants to one, all-or-nothing, federal appeal. If the real killer publicly confessed and there was conclusive DNA evidence, it wouldn’t matter. Once a federal appeal has been denied, the death machinery must grind on. No matter what.

More than two-thirds of the countries of the world have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, according to Amnesty International. About one-third of the states, plus the District of Columbia, have abolished capital punishment. Yet the U.S. ranks 5th in the world for number of executions. If the defendant is African-American, the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times higher than if he or she is white. It’s in this context that Davis’ lawyer declared Davis’ execution a “legalized lynching.” Racial bias in sentencing, determined the Supreme Court, is permitted as long as there is no “clear evidence of conscious discriminatory intent,” summarizes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow. “Racial bias would be tolerated – virtually to any degree,” she writes, “so long as no one admitted it.”

In the moments before Davis’ was killed, he said to the guards, To those who are about to take my life, may God have mercy on all your souls. God bless you all. What will it take for the U.S. to join the family of nations who have once and for all abolished the death penalty? As Christians, we condemn the culture of death. And whether the state uses a cross, a killing chair, or a lethal cocktail, we will choose life.

Reprinted with permission from Sojourners, (800) 714-7474, www.sojo.net