Capital Punishment: On Killing the Guilty

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 17^th of February, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to remember our place in the family of things,
and to find our way to greater courage
and greater humility
as we face both our awareness,
and the demands such awareness places on us.
Praised are you, Love, our means and our end!
For without you, our worship is self-serving.

(together) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become..

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Fire in the sky, in the stars,
Aldeberan, Mizar, Betelgeuse, Algol,
fire from the embers of the blazing Milky Way
strewn across heaven,
keep us close to our deeper enchantment.
Wrap your wonder arms around us
as we think and feel our way toward
truer truths and demanding demands.

Fire waltzing in the chalice,
dancing in the eyes of heretics and teachers,
questioners and recalcitrants,
help us to remember that the wick
is now twisted in our own eyes.

Fire in the spirit, alive in our un-owned humility,
our growing awareness, our willingness to be vulnerable in a difficult world,
burn away the chaff of our unspent rage and rawness,
that we might glow bright and clear
as we go through our days.
Fire that burns in the silence,
kindle the light of our presence in this place
strong, together, alert, and receptive, attentive
to the word and the world.

silence

Fire of love,
that gives light and warmth
whenever we remember those
who have loved us on our way,
those who have challenged us
and deepened our awareness,
those whom we miss day by day,
year by year,
kindle in us.
Kindle quietly in our hearts as we call to mind
those who make our life possible,
or kindle in our mouths as we illumine this
common place with the brilliant blessings
of their names.

naming

Fire of music, flickering in the keys of the piano,
and in the mouths of singers, burn away all that
consumes us and fills us, and then fill that empty place with enchantment
and courage and strength and beauty enough to live out our week.

First Reading [Next] [back to top]
The First Reading comes from the recent book by the Executive Director of Amnesty International, the Rev. Dr. William Schulz, written in 2001. Bill was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association for eight years, and is a very moving preacher. His book was published by our UUA press, Beacon Press.

If government action, then, provides a model for citizens to follow, what model does the death penalty provide? When the government executes capital offenders, it is sending two contradictory messages to 280 million people. It is sending the message that it presumably wants to send - that is, if you commit a crime of like order, this is what will happen to you - but it is also sending the message that violence is the province of the powerful; that violence signifies victory, success, triumph, retribution, and toughness. An adviser to Governor Jeb Bush of Florida caught this spirit perfectly when he was quoted in state papers as saying, of a speeded-up death penalty process, "Bring in the witnesses, put [the prisoner] on a gurney and let's rock and roll." How could any would-be capital criminals possibly ignore the message that violence may very well be a simple solution to their problems too? Inasmuch as most of those convicted of capital crimes have been subjected personally, usually at a young age, to volumes of physical abuse at the hands of parents and guardians, and are, as a result, already prone to see violence as a customary means of asserting power and authority, the use of the death penalty is a perfect vehicle through which to perpetuate that myth. I submit that one of the reasons criminals continue committing capital crimes even when they know they may face the death penalty is because when it comes to the execution drama, they identify not with the "victim" who receives the jolt of electricity or lethal dose of drugs, but with the powerful figures who administer them.

Criminologist Joan McCord of Temple University cites multiple studies that show that exposure to violence desensitizes those who view it to future violence. Many across the political spectrum certainly believe this is true when it comes to entertainment. Why, then, do we not think the same dynamic is at work when it comes to state-sponsored violence? Or consider that some studies have even shown that the more severe the threat of punishment for any particular behavior, the more attractive the act being punished becomes. If that is true, the death penalty may well invite that which it seeks to discourage. Several studies have indeed shown that homicide rates increase when the death penalty is used. The average annual increase in homicides in California was twice as high during years in which the death penalty was carried out than in years in which no one was executed.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
The Second Reading is a poem from another Beacon Press book, New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver. It's called

Sunrise

You can die for it -
an idea, or the world.

People have done so,
brilliantly,
letting their small bodies be bound
to the stake, creating
an unforgettable
fury of light.

But this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn,
I thought of China, and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes,
and I thought I am so many!

What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want,
it is happiness,
it is another one of the ways
to enter fire.

Sermon: Capital Punishment: On Killing the Guilty [Next][back to top]

I remembered, as I begin to think about this sermon, a man in my former church about whom I cared very much. He was a bright, articulate, thoughtful man, a husband and father of great tenderness and energy. He was also a physicist of no mean inventiveness.

One afternoon as the winter sun was pulling long shadows across the lawn outside my office, this man came into my office to talk. He did not have an appointment, but no matter…I was glad, as always, to see him. He took a seat across from me and began:

"Mark, I am terrible person."

"You think you are a terrible person?" I said.

"You sure had me fooled. I always seem to think of you as one of the most amazing people I know. What's this all about?"

"Well, you know that girl who was kidnapped a few years ago down at that Walgreens in downtown Hayward?"

Did I know about her? Of course I did. Some of you probably do too, even if you can't find Hayward on the map. She was, I believe, the first person ever to be a face on a milk carton. Her name was Michele, I seem to remember. Her mother had just turned away for a moment… a moment mind you, in the doorway of that drugstore. In the twinkling of an eye, Michele was gone. Kidnapped. Eventually, after years of soul- torment I can't even begin to safely imagine, investigators told this poor mother that they had found the remains of her daughter's body.

"Of course I remember," I told him.

He continued: "Well, this week I realized what a terrible person I am because, for some reason, I don't know why, I started thinking about this kidnapping. And then, I imagined me turning one day for just a moment…and what parent doesn't do that?…and then turning back to find Davy gone. And Mark, I couldn't stand it. I felt this terrible rage rise up in me. I knew I would give everything up. My work, my comforts, my lab. I would spend every waking hour tracking down the person who took my son. And then, when I found him, I would kill him with my bare hands. I was so shocked to realize the violence inside me that I decided I am simply a terrible man."

Well, as you may imagine, I was simply blown away by this story on a winter's afternoon. But I told him, "Look, dear man, you're a parent. And I cannot for the life of me imagine a parent who would not feel that way if their child was taken from them. You're supposed to feel that way. Hell, if anyone laid a hand on my godson Ben, I would feel the same thing. The thing is, I know how you process things very well, and I know how I process things very well, and I think that neither you nor I would probably actually get so violent when push came to shove."

"Yeah," he said, "I suppose you're right."

We talked for a while. He said he felt better afterward, less guilty for his violent thoughts.

But I never forgot this conversation.

It is a good preface to this difficult topic. It points out that it's not just a topic of the mind, but of the heart; not just a topic for reason, but for deep and immediate passions.

It's also a topic that travels across all the fields of most human knowledge….sociology, statistics, forensics, judicial theory, theology, psychology, anthropology, language study and history.

History, in particular, could be looked at from one vantage, as the Story of Capital Punishment. Caesar, Henry VIII, Robespierre, Pinochet, Hitler, Pol Pot killed millions, and their names are famous.

Except that I find it so interesting that we revere so many people whom these governments killed. From Sokrates calmly drinking hemlock, to Jesus crying out for water on the cross; from crucified Spartacus, the Freedom Fighter, to Joan of Arc, the Saint in the flames; from the cool-headed Thomas More, Chancellor of England with his head on the block, to the fiery Miguel Servet, our own great ancestor burned at the stake by Calvin. And a thousand, thousand martyrs…Christian and Unitarian and Universalist and Jewish and Sufi and Muslim and Buddhist, and Hindu and Baha'i. And then there are those not so easily classified, like the great visionary who first imagined other inhabited worlds, too, Giordano Bruno, burned alive at the stake. All put to death by the governing body of the time, all guilty according to the laws of the time, albeit twisted a bit. All venerated in one way or another by those who came after.

Mary Oliver imagines some of these deaths: people "letting their small bodies be bound to the stake, creating an unforgettable fury of light." It's a beautiful phrase, but I bet that being burned alive is not beautiful in the least. Still, she's right…people often find a lot of spiritual light emanating from those who have been put to death by the government.

Now you need to know that not everyone at the time of the Reformation was for throwing criminals into the fire. For example, we know of a theologically conservative man named Zurkinden in Berne, Switzerland who had deep reservations about capital punishment …except in only the most terrible of cases. He once "witnessed," he wrote in 1554 to reformer John Calvin," an eighty-year-old woman and her daughter, a mother of six children, being led to death for no other reason than they refused to have their children baptized. It impressed me deeply, and I greatly fear that the authorities will not keep within the bounds you assign them. Another reason why I shrink from such bloodshed lies in the observation that the sword is effective only against individuals, and is powerless against a multitude. I dislike any law of life and death," Zurkenden concluded, "which is sharp against individuals but blunt against the many."

Those are, I think, remarkable lines. Sharp against individuals, but blunt against the many. (Of course, with the invention of sharper swords like nuclear bombs, germ warfare and other weapons of mass destruction, "the many" aren't necessarily all cozy-safe anymore either.)

Our own more theologically liberal ancestors in Poland and Lithuania preached a complete moratorium on the death penalty. Those in high government positions actually stepped down from their administrative posts so as to exempt themselves from the power to order the death penalty for anyone. Some even stripped themselves of ALL their wealth and privilege to disassociate themselves entirely from their former lives, where war and the death penalty were considered ordinary parts of life.

Now some will say to me, "Of course it's stupid to burn heretics. Everyone knows that. But murder and torture are a different matter."

Now, I am not as sure as the people who ask me such a question are, about folks with unpopular ideas being less likely to suffer the death penalty than those who commit terrible crimes, but that's probably a different sermon.

And, of course, when "murder" is brought up, folks like to bring extreme cases right up front. Richard Speck, or cannibalistic Jeffery Dahmer, or the long faced, unapologetic man who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma…these are always the first to be mentioned. "I'm not for the death penalty in general, but there are exceptions," some folks tell me. "These people must be killed to protect the rest of us and to punish them."

Well, I, for one, could be protected if they were isolated from the rest of society with no chance of getting back into society at large to work their violence. After all, it's clear to me that Dahmer and Speck and the Oklahoma Bomber were deeply disturbed individuals, men so removed from their wholeness that it's almost hard to believe they didn't die from their own coldness. I am not one who thinks that we have, within our power right now, the capacity to "rehabilitate" such men. I think that is far beyond our ken right now. But that does not mean we have to let them loose. And I doubt that such isolation from society is any great pleasure for them; if punishment is your need, that ought to be plenty.

And this is also where a person's anthropology and theology make a big difference. If you believe that all human beings are born with rational souls, and choose to commit crimes of unforgivable violence because they have weighed the good and the evil in the scale of their hearts and then simply chosen the evil, then you certainly accept a different anthropology and theology than I do. My anthropology and theology are different. And my anthropology and theology as usual are based not just on study but on plentiful personal experience.

I have known folks who have been sentenced to prison for terrible violence and murder. I have visited them in those prisons, including the awful San Quentin, many times. I have talked with them in hospitals and jails and prisons. They may have been the children of church members, or the friends of friends. But I've known them.

And please do not imagine that these were hulking, twisted-looking Mr. Hydes to my Dr. Jeckle, but people not much different than those around you in appearance. For example, the son of one of my former parishioners murdered some people. His case was so celebrated that someone wanted to write a book comparing him to Jack the Ripper. He was sent to prison for life. But when his mother was dying, he somehow got permission to leave the Atascadero State Institution for the Criminally Insane, where he had been incarcerated for years, to say good-bye to her. He was under guard, to be sure, but was allowed to come into her room when I was there. My moral imagination made me picture him as something utterly alien, with fangs and cruel eyes. Instead, he was the spitting image of Brad Pitt, smiling, blue-eyed, friendly, a totally engaging and charming man. But there was no real question that he was a murderer. He freely admitted what he did.

And the thing is, no one knew then, or knows now, how to yank the pschopathic propensity for violence out of his center. The man was beautiful on the surface, but utterly broken and twisted on the inside. His was a tragic condition, but unfortunately, a human one.

And none of us seem to know what to do with such human beings, except to separate their lives from our own. I have to admit I have no problem with that. I cannot think of anything better at this time. Life without a chance for parole will have to be the rule for some people until we climb slowly out of "the dark ages" of our very thin understanding of the workings of the human brain and psyche. We really know very little about such extreme behavior. Oh, we know about the extra chromosomes in some men. And, as Bill Schulz reminds us, we know the social problems that shaped the vast majority of folks in prison. They had enough abuse during their childhood to curdle even the most resilient soul. But in the end some, if not all, who do murderous violence are, I believe, permanently broken. None of them, however, and this is important, asked to be broken in this way, any more than any of their victims asked to murdered.

Now, as I talk about this, please don't imagine opinions about capital punishment splitting along political or theological lines. Some very conservative Catholics and Mennonites and Amish are as much against the Death Penalty as some very liberal Presbyterians, Jews and Unitarian Universalists. Conversely, not all liberals and free thinkers are against it either. I used to know an articulate Humanist in one of my former churches who was for the death penalty because of his conviction, quite similar to my own, about the tragic brokenness of violent people like Jeffrey Dahmer. For him it was simple. These are sick people. It's more merciful to put them out of their misery, like we would a rabid dog. For him, this was a healthy form of eugenics, of thinning out the gene pool to make the human race better, less prone to violence.

But where would such decisions stop, I wonder? The Nazis are only one example of a group of people in power who thought folks with physical illnesses or deformities ought to be killed for this same reason, too. Furthermore, since two wars that killed millions and millions of people were generated out of Germany in the last century, shall the rest of us, for the exact same reason accepted by my Humanist friend, wipe out the German people as a whole to make a safer earth?

You see where such thinking leads…like the Swiss man in 1554, I distrust any law over life and death which is so sharp against the indi-vidual and blunt against the many. So I have to say my Humanist friend's logic leaves me cold.

I could tell you other things, I suppose, to try and make clear my own feelings about this issue, like how the death penalty practice in our country is often a clearly racist affair. And I could offer you plenty of evidence to support that assertion.

Or, I could tell you that we are the only one of the industrial nations on earth that maintain this practice…there are no executions in Europe for example…but then I could be accused of not using good moral reasoning, but only of trying to "keep up with the Kazhakstans"^[1] in a bizarre competition of civilized behavior.

^[1] The Kazhakstani government is even now working to abolish the death penalty there.

Or I could tell you about studies which show that the homicide rate increases when someone is put to death, as Bill Schulz points out so well.

Or worse, I could tell you that we have killed dozens of people in this nation who have been proven innocent after the fact of their death. Many others have escaped by a hair.

Now the State of Ohio, our state, is about to kill a man, Mr. Byrd, whom many competent critics believe is innocent. The evidence around his accusation is very strange, and certainly raises, to use the legal term I've heard in all the times I've served on a jury, "a reasonable doubt." If the Dispatch and other local papers can be believed, many, many people have those doubts about Mr. Byrd's sentencing. Few are clambering for his death. Thousands have raised a protest. As far as I am concerned, if the State goes ahead on Tuesday morning, the authority of the State and its Governor will seriously undermine itself. For it will have acted irresponsibly. To take the life of a human being where there is such clearly expressed doubt is both cynically amoral and coldly reprehensible.

But that's why, in the end, all of these other reasons for opposing the death penalty pale in comparison to Bill Schulz's argument. It's the most excellent one of all those I could offer you. Clearly, if so many innocent people, both in our own time and in the history of the world (Jesus, Joan) have been put to death, capital punishment is not so much about justice as about the power and strength of the authorities who carry it out to maintain their authority, power and strength. And killers, wouldn't you know it, often identify with such power and strength. For example, convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbot, who, as you may have read, hung himself in his cell this week, said that killing made him "feel stronger." Schulz puts it this way, "I submit that one of the reasons that criminals continue to commit capital crimes even when they know they may face the death penalty is because, when it comes to the execution drama, they identify not with the "victim" who receives the lethal dose of drugs, but with the powerful figures who administer them.

For all these reasons, especially the last one, I personally stand against capital punishment. In every case. No exceptions. I do not think that the fire in our fallible minds is so bright, the flame in our churning hearts is so just, or the blaze of fury in our wrenching guts is so right that we can claim the power to kill someone else legally. For when we do, we send the message (in Schulz's great words), "that violence is the province of the powerful; that violence signifies victory, success, triumph, retribution, and toughness. How could any would-be capital criminals possibly ignore the message that violence may be the simple solution to their problems as well?"

But I say capital punishment is not the solution for our frustrating inability to wipe out poverty and family violence. I say it's not the solution to our continuing unwillingness as a nation to face the specter of racism, drug addiction and social stratification. I say it is not the solution that best expresses our psychological and sociological knowledge and skill. And, it's not the solution that establishes justice on the earth, or creates a culture of "fairness." After all, when the Torah reminded its first hearers "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," the issue of that age addressed by that law was not fairness and justice, but the prevalence of the blood feud and vendetta, which wrecked society all around. The author wanted to limit retaliation to "no MORE than an eye, no MORE than a tooth." The author of that law was trying to rein in endless revenge and retaliation. In our complex day, I say, we have to behave a lot better than they did in ancient deserts.

We will still be enraged, like my beloved office visitor in my former church, when we think of such things as murder and violence against those we love. We will still want to strike back…that's only natural. But my religious work, it seems to me, is to transcend the merely natural, and, in Mary Oliver's words, "to enter the fire," the fire of knowing that we are all in this together, everyone under the sun, bright fire…including the broken, the victims and all those of us who struggle with this difficult issue. And if we accept, in all humility, our lack of any real and final knowledge about so many things, we might begin to allow ourselves to dream of the possibility of real joy, "call it happiness," Mary Oliver says, here on earth.

Fireprayer   [back to top]

Burn, fire of the spirit,
in my mind, that the shadowy corners of
my very real ignorance
might be slowly illumined.
Burn, fire of the spirit,
in my heart, that my own small flames
not grow and rampage across the earth,
but be contained by your own.
Burn, fire of the spirit,
in my soul, not in my hand,
that my mortal search for mortal good
will bring me garlands instead of ashes.
Burn, fire of the spirit, in my voice,
that my singing be one with the light you give.

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