EDITORIAL—Violence has been inherent to man since the dawn of time; since Cain slew his brother, Abel. When Cain murdered Abel out of spite and jealously for his position, God interrogated the admonished older brother and queried, “Where is your brother Abel?” Cain responded to God, “I don’t know.” Cain, almost thinking aloud, pressed to the Lord, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Truly, Cain was asking, ‘am I my brother’s defender and protector?’ In the twenty-first century, as in the beginning of the world, men have continued to exact violence against others. A sad and staunch reality of life on this planet is that violence is among the few things which are likely never to be eradicated.
The cover of the Friday, June 20 edition of the Washington Post detailed the story of a Monticello, Florida country lawyer as he tenaciously defended his client against the ‘grinding machinery of the death penalty.’ To say attorney Baya Harrison, III failed in his mission is a rather reductionist sentiment. Indeed, on Wednesday, June 18 at 7:43pm, Mr. Harrison’s client, John Ruthell Henry, a convicted double murderer, no longer drew breath—his heart no longer pumped blood through his body; he was 63-years-old. Baya Harrison was given the case by the court to represent the indigent Henry—but Harrison would not allow the state to execute a man without exhausting every possible legal avenue. Harrison took an oath to provide the most vigorous legal representation possible to his client. To that end, Baya Harrison didn’t lose; he very much typified the notion that in our system of justice, even the most wretched defendant deserves adequate and assertive representation.
Harrison’s tireless last ditch effort to fight for his client, with just hours before his scheduled execution, speaks to his character. In late-May, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down their decision in Hall v. Florida and determined that an absolute IQ threshold was insufficient to determine the mental competency of the condemned in order to be put to death. Prior to Hall, in Florida, an inmate may be executed if his IQ exceeded 70. Harrison seized on this new opportunity for his client, who’s IQ was 78. Harrison worked through the early waning hours of June 18, writing as fast as he could, an emergency appeal to be submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court. Previously, Harrison’s appeal on the grounds of his client’s IQ was denied by the Florida Supreme Court and in a 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.
Then Baya Harrison called his client, likely the most difficult facet of his entire last ditch effort, and told John Henry he was working on an eleventh hour appeal to the Supreme Court and couldn’t make it to the execution—he noted this may be the last time they spoke. It was. Baya Harrison’s emergency writ of certiorari on John Henry’s behalf was denied by the Circuit Justice for the eleventh, Clarence Thomas, and the execution proceeded as scheduled. Henry’s execution was the third carried out in a 24-hour period across three different states, the first sentences fulfilled following the botched April execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, leading to widespread criticisms as to current death penalty practices throughout the nation.
Interestingly, Baya Harrison is not an idealistic opponent of capital punishment. Quite the contrary, he believes that it serves as a deterrent against future crime. Harrison has represented three condemned murders—Henry, a double murderer who killed his wife and son in 1985; Danny Rolling, a serial killer; and Oba Chandler, who drowned an entire family, while vacationing in Florida. Unequivocally, these were evil men. But this is what makes Harrison a hero; possibly, a reluctant one. In many ways, Harrison is an offshoot of the famous country lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic tome, To Kill a Mockingbird. Albeit, in the novel, Finch represents an almost ‘overly’ honest and innocent man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman in Depression-era Alabama; Harrison is not too far from the likes of Finch. He, like so many other attorneys, implicitly believes that our system of justice is founded upon the notion that all men, regardless of the crimes they’ve been accused of or committed, deserve the best possible representation before institutions of government, prior to being stripped of life, liberty, or property. To think of Harrison and those like him otherwise, would be an affront to our very system of justice.
The larger question, in the post-Clayton Lockett era of capital punishment, is what are we to do with the death penalty in our nation? Take John Henry, who in 1985 was a drug addict that chose to viciously murder his wife and, after feeding his son fried chicken from a restaurant drive thru, slew his own child with the very same kitchen blade that was used to kill his mother. John Henry never expressed remorse for his crimes to his attorney. We can look to Henry and see a man that embodies the very basic idea of senseless evil in our world. To personally opine, as an impartial observer, the mind goes back and forth. I thought of Henry, murdering his wife and son, and I thought of the evil man who died last Wednesday in that Florida death chamber. Ostensibly, one cannot but feel a sense of justice, a sense of relief for ridding the world of a depraved killer. But, on the other hand, in a democratic society, we must come to the realization that each death sentence carried out is done in our name. To employ an analogy, our finger is not on the trigger, but the fatal gunshot is done so on our behalf.
As a Catholic, I oppose the death penalty not in spite of my religion but because of it. Yes, John Henry committed absolutely evil acts. Yet the difficult part of Christianity is realizing that no man is beyond redemption—that each of us is loved wholly and equally by God; even John Henry. In the age of the new and illusive two drug lethal injection cocktail, one cannot but question the morality behind capital punishment.
Rev. Lawrence Hummer frequently ministers to those on death row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio. Among his flock was Dennis McGuire, a man who admitted to Fr. Hummer that he raped and murdered a young woman, Joy Stewart, and her unborn child in 1989—an absolutely evil act. McGuire and his family wanted Fr. Hummer to be present at his execution—it was Fr. Hummer’s first execution. What the Catholic priest noted is that, in the past, when he sat at the bedside of the sick and dying, they’ve all left this world peacefully. McGuire met a terrible, violent, and evil end, in the priest’s estimation. To Fr. Hummer, the 26 minutes it took McGuire to die, as he visibly gasped for air, clenched his fists, and contorted his stomach was an absolutely horrifying and abhorrent way to depart our world. Simply put, McGuire’s death was inhumane.
According to the Guardian, our use of the death penalty in the U.S. juxtaposes us beside nations such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen—all sitting comfortably on the top ten list of nations with the most executions annually. Further, nearly every nation in the entire Global North (i.e., the developed countries), with the exception of the United States, has abolished or functionally eliminated capital punishment within their borders. In the 1987 Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp, the defense team for Warren McCleskey, a convicted murderer from Fulton County, demonstrated the racial bias in death penalty sentencing in Georgia. The study was conducted by University of Iowa law professor, David C. Baldus. The Baldus study contended that defendants were disproportionately more likely to receive the death penalty in Georgia if they murdered white victims. Thus, in Georgia, the Baldus study demonstrated that the sentencing of the defendant was directly related to the race of the victim.
Rightly, McCleskey is often poignantly derided as the ‘Dred Scott decision of our time.’ Writing for the court, Justice Lewis Powell asserted that the petitioner’s conviction could not be overturned based upon on a quantifiable, aggregate study of race and the death penalty. In a few words, unless the petitioner could prove that racial bias was employed during the sentencing phase in his particular case, the compelling evidence that racial bias is employed, generally, in death penalty sentencing is extraneous and erroneous with regards to this particular defendant. Although the Baldus study could not save Warren McCleskey, it is important to understand the underpinning racial bias, particularly in the Deep South, inherent to death penalty sentencing.
What’s more, the death penalty, as a legal, political, and penal process, is more expensive than sentencing a defendant to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the State of Florida could save, on average, $51 million annually by modifying the sentences of all death row inmates to life imprisonment. Similarly, in Texas, each execution costs the Lone Star State three times the amount it would cost to imprison an inmate for forty years in a maximum security penal institution.
If death penalty abolition among all other developed states, racial bias in sentencing, and shear cost isn’t reason enough to severe our nation’s reliance on capital punishment—twentieth century French philosopher Michel Foucault offers a more metaphysical repudiation of the anachronistic practice. In his seminal 1975 masterwork, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault contends that the overarching purpose of punishment no longer seeks to chastise the corporal body (via torture and public execution), but the soul (through penal institutionalization.) To Foucault, human civilization has willfully progressed away from the very public displays of violent executions out of humanitarian concerns. Not solely out of a concern for the condemned, but also because of concerns for the spectators, the executioner, and the possibility—following a very violent demise—for public sympathy to shift on behalf of the condemned individual.
The death penalty in this country is a multi-faceted, moral, religious, political, ethical, and cultural issue. Returning to Cain’s query generally—are we truly our brother’s keeper? Baya Harrison has demonstrated that he is his brother’s keeper. As has Fr. Lawrence Hummer. The former fights in our system of courts and law to ensure that each defendant, regardless of their crime or offense against our society is afforded the best possible representation prior to being deprived of life, liberty, or property. This notion sits at the cornerstone of American jurisprudence; it goes by a rather famous name: due process. The latter, quite frankly, prepares the condemned to die. This author cannot imagine some of the crimes perpetrated by those in Fr. Hummer’s prison congregation; nevertheless, as a fellow Catholic, I implicitly recognize that there is no crime against man or God too reprehensible for those men to be deemed beyond redemption. I believe this is among the most difficult hurdles for death penalty proponents to coalesce behind.
The next question is the most difficult to come to terms with: are John Ruthell Henry, Dennis McGuire, Clayton Lockett, Warren McCleskey, and those like them their brother’s keeper? God answered Cain, tacitly, that, of course, he is his brother’s keeper—but he is now disgraced, a fugitive consigned to wander the earth. These murderers were their brother’s keeper, but failed to protect and uphold the dignity of their fellow man. Nevertheless, because these men spilled blood, does that negate our obligation to them? For are they not still our brothers, and we their keepers? This is the double-edged sword of both moral and Christian obligation to each and every fellow man.
On a small British network television interview (that can be found here), Fr. Hummer was pressed by the program’s host if the death of McGuire would give the family of the woman he murdered a sense of closure. The response by Fr. Hummer noted that, as Christians, closure and understanding can only be found by the grace of God—not through the death of a murderer. To add charity to Fr. Hummer’s statement, those who rejoice in the death, even of a convicted murderer, are grievously contorting the purpose of capital punishment. We shouldn’t rejoice in the death of any man, good or bad, moral or immoral. Remember that the man lying on the gurney in the death chamber is still a human being, with a beating heart, loved ones (likely in the viewing area), and endowed with an undying soul, just like you and I.
Among faith leaders, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, American Baptist Churches USA, the Episcopal Church, the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis have all officially expressed their support for the abolition of the death penalty. Interestingly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints placates on the issue, claiming it to be a matter confined to state and civil law. Further, the National Evangelical Association continues to support a narrow usage of capital punishment, and the religious-political organization, the Southern Baptist Convention has largely been ambivalent, though claiming it to be a Biblically-sanctioned act.
To yield to a more austere authority to summarize the intricacies of capital crime and punishment, one can turn to the Gospel of John (more specifically, see John 8:1-11). In Jerusalem, Jesus ascended the Mount of Olives to reach the temple mount. There he found a woman, accused of adultery, a capital offense at the time of Christ, and set to be stoned by the men of the community. The would-be executioners pressed Jesus and asked what they should do, for it is ordered that, under the Law of Moses, this woman should be stoned to death. Jesus turned to them and instructed, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her”—words to consider, particularly when demonizing, marginalizing, or rejoicing in the death of the condemned are practices all too common in modern society; an age marked by treating those consigned to die as if they are not worthy of our care, of our understanding. Thus, are we, as a people and society, truly our brother’s keeper?
