Book Reviews
“Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed.” Francis Bacon (d. 1626)
Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth about Capital Punishment
Robert L. Baldwin
Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2009.
Reviewed by Fisher Humphreys, Birmingham, AL
On a Sunday evening in the early 1950s eight-year-old Robbie Baldwin and his family were walking home from church near Mobile, Alabama, when they saw a cross burning in the front yard of a black family. Robbie asked his mother what it meant, and she said that it was a warning from the Ku Klux Klan that someone in that family had done something inappropriate.
The Old South has changed a lot since then, but Dr. Robert Baldwin, M.D., thinks it still has a long way to go. The criminal justice system is not evenhanded: people who are mentally ill, poor, or black do not fare as well as people who are healthy, wealthy, and white.
Dr. Baldwin is one of the most outspoken opponents of the death penalty in Alabama; recently he publicly challenged the state’s Attorney General, Troy King, to participate in a public discussion or debate with him about the issue. That probably won’t happen, but Dr. Baldwin’s new book on the subject is conveying his interpretation of this issue to political leaders, church leaders, and ordinary citizens throughout Alabama, and beyond.
The narrative thread in this book is Dr. Baldwin’s own story of growing up with racist attitudes and awakening to the fact that he had been mistaken. With great humility he describes his conversion and evolution from racism to being a real follower of Christ. He tells about some of his professional colleagues and personal friends who are made uncomfortable by his vigorous opposition to the death penalty. He writes about prisoners he knows and their experiences of salvation in prison, and, in one case, about the execution of one of them.
Professors will be interested to read in this book about how much Dr. Baldwin was influenced by a professor at Birmingham-Southern College. Medical doctors and others will receive information about the pharmaceutical cocktails used to kill the condemned. Historians will appreciate the accounts of the history of incarceration and of the death penalty in America. Those who appreciate statistics will have massive data about the death penalty at their disposal after reading this book. All readers will benefit from the many stories about criminals, their families, victims, their families, and those who attempt to minister to all of them.
I found Dr. Baldwin’s case for eliminating the death penalty convincing. Although I think that it is morally wrong for anyone to get revenge, I think it is morally right for society through its government to punish criminals, and I think that some criminals do things that are so awful that it would be morally appropriate to execute them. But I want to belong to a society that understands enough about grace to know that it is all right to treat such people better than they deserve by giving them life without parole rather than death. I believe that, when we do this, we will be a better society. I trust Jesus was right when he said, “Blessed are the merciful.”
