The Death Penalty

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The Death Penalty
by Millard Fuller

[Millard Fuller is founder and president of Habitat for Humanity International, Americus, Georgia. After some years as a businessman and as a lawyer, he worked for a few years with Clarence Jordan in developing business options for the Koinonia Christian community near Americus. Since 1977, his work with Habitat for Humanity in providing housing for low income families has resulted in more than 20 honorary doctorates, numerous prestigious awards, and in 1996 the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has written six books and is now working on a seventh to be entitled More Than Houses. A graduate of Auburn University and of the Law School at the University of Alabama, he and his wife, Linda, have four children. This article, written especially for Christian Ethics Today, represents a long-standing conviction he stands for regarding capital punishment.]

The death penalty is back in the news, big time. The case that pushed it forward to the front pages of our newspapers and as the lead story on the evening news was that of Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in Texas in February. This attractive, young, white woman, a confessed pickax killer, professed a Christian conversion experience in prison and, by all accounts, truly was a transformed, born-again Christian.

As her execution date approached, she garnered very vocal support from many people, including such prominent individuals as Pope John Paul II, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, and even televangelist and death penalty supporter, Pat Robertson. In spite of all of this support, she was strapped to a white table in Huntsville, Texas on February 3 and given a lethal injection which ended her life on this earth.

The high profile case of Karla Faye Tucker has caused a lot of people to re-think the whole issue of the death penalty. A front page article in the Houston Chronicle on March 15 reported that a new Scripps-Howard Texas poll found 68 percent of Texans favor capital punishment, down 18 percentage points from a 1994 survey, the last time people in Texas were questioned on the subject. This precipitous drop in support of the death penalty, the article reported, was the lowest approval rating in a decade and, perhaps, the lowest since the 1 960s when executions in Texas were carried out by electrocution.

Other state and national polls have also shown declining support for capital punishment in recent years. Even so, a strong majority of Americans still support the death penalty. And, with more than 3,300 people on death row, there is no shortage of "fodder" for the death machinery in the 38 states that have authorized the ultimate punishment. Furthermore, additional people are being added to death rows faster than earlier residents are being executed.

Texas and Florida are the leading "death states." Texas has already killed three people in 1998. Another 447 inmates in Texas await their turn on the table at some future date. Florida has elected to shoot 2,000 volts of electricity through the bodies of four people within two weeks, starting on March 23, including Judi Buenoano, the first woman put to death in Florida in 150 years. Florida still has 380 men and women on death row.

Larry Spalding, legislative counsel for the Florida American Civil Liberties Union was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article as saying, "Florida`s lawmakers` obsession with the use of `Old Sparky,` as they affectionately term the electric chair, is particularly gruesome. The next thing we`ll see is a constitutional amendment to change our motto from the sunshine state to the Electric Chair State." Florida is one of ten states to use the electric chair. Their last electrocution, before the ones mentioned above, caused great controversy because flames erupted from the headgear of Pedro Medina. The state Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote, subsequently ruled that using the electric chair did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

But, whether death is delivered by electrocution, lethal injection, hanging, firing squad, poison gas, or whatever, the ultimate question is the rightness or wrongness of the death penalty. Specifically, what is right on this issue for a disciple of Jesus Christ? As a Christian, what should my position be on the death penalty? The matter is of great urgency and incredible relevance. "Xlhere do you stand? Can you support your position from God`s word?

I oppose the death penalty. Unalterably. Absolutely. No exceptions. To me, it doesn`t make any difference whether a person is attractive, white, black, female or male, articulate, born-again, belligerent, guilty or innocent. Obviously, even ardent supporters of the death penalty are not in favor of killing innocent people, even though many want to remove a lot of the safeguards to prevent the shedding of innocent blood. But, for me, I stand four-square on the side of opposition to state-sanctioned killing of human beings.

There are many reasons for my position, First, I don`t believe in revenge. "`Vengeance is mine,` saith the Lord. `I will repay.

The Bible, it seems to me, is clear on the subject of revenge. Probably the most powerful voice to speak on this matter is Coretta Scott King, the widow of murdered civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassinations, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the Death Penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by another evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder."

We do have a problem of violence in America. Typically, twenty thousand or so people are murdered every year in the United States. In an attempt to solve this national scandal and disgrace of violence and killing, the federal government and most states have opted for violence to combat violence. We have embraced the Old Testament concept of revenge and retaliation.

Our accepted solution has put us in bed with some unsavory bedfellows, nations like China, Iraq, and Iran. China alone executes 4,000 people a year! Would we aspire, as a nation, to be more like China? Or, Iraq or Iran? We stand alone today among industrial nations in our use of the death penalty.

I oppose the death penalty because it is being employed in a racially discriminatory manner.

A very significant study was done by a University of Iowa professor named David C. Baldus. He analyzed 2,500 murder cases in the state of Georgia between 1973 and 1978. He discovered that if a defendant is black and charged with killing a white, he is 4.3 times as likely to receive the death sentence as a defendant who kills another black. In other words, if you are black and you kill a white, the statistical study shows that you are 4.3 times more likely to get the death penalty than if you kill another black person. That means what? That an African-American life is less than one-fourth as valuable as a white life.

How should a Christian think about such blatant unfairness? Is not all life equal and precious to the Lord? Isn`t that the message of scripture?

The Baldus study was cited extensively in a case called McCleskey vs. Kemp. McClesky was a black man who was convicted of murder in Georgia. His case went up to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Baldus study found that the district attorneys of Georgia (all white males) would demand the death penalty in seventy percent of all cases involving a black defendant and a white victim, but in cases involving a white person who had killed another white person, they would seek the death penalty only thirty-two percent of the time. What do you call that? A double standard. Racism.

Well, in the McCleskey case, his lawyers said that his conviction should be overturned because of this racial discrimination which violated the eighth and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution. Now if you know your Constitution, you know that the eighth amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. And a lot of people in our country say that a death penalty of any kind is cruel and unusual punishment. Human beings ought not deliberately to set out on a plan to kill somebody else in a calculated, premeditated way. But others say, no, if you do it in a certain way, it is not cruel and unusual. The fourteenth amendment says that all of us, black, white, rich and poor, north

and south have a right to equal protection under the law. And this study shows that if you are of a certain race, your protection is different than if you are of another race. They were saying that this is not equal protection under the law. Well, these arguments were rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States in April, 1987. The decision was five to four. Five of them said they reject the study. Four of them said, no, the study is right. But five beats four so this man must die because that study does not apply to his particular case. It does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, it does not violate the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. So, by the Supreme Court approving of the execution of Mr. McClesky, the flood gates were opened to many more executions in Georgia and across the nation.

Disproportionately, minorities continue to be given the death penalty across the nation. And, studies are clear that there is discrimination. What are the reasons for this? First of all there are historical reasons.

Justice Brennen who wrote the major dissent in the McCleskey case pointed out that in Colonial Days a black who killed a white got automatic death. There were no questions asked, a black killed a white, automatic death, usually death by hanging. At the time of the Civil War, there was an automatic death penalty for blacks killing whites but anyone else could get life if the jury recommended it. Or, if the conviction was on circumstantial evidence, there was an automatic death penalty for rape of a white person by a black- automatic. Other rapes by whites got two to twenty years. Rape of a black got a fine and imprisonment at the discretion of the court. Assault by a black person on a white could get death at the direction of the court. The same offense against a black was classified as a minor offense.

So you have a historical situation of a double standard of justice. The discrimination is obvious when you begin to get into this matter and read the cases and understand what is going on. It`s just that the discrimination is more subtle now. It`s a little more sophisticated, but it is still there.

But, there is another reason for this discrimination in these capital cases; and in all the reading I have done on this subject, I have not seen anybody write or talk about this second reason I am going to tell you as to why these death penalty cases are being handed down and why black folks, largely black folks, also poor whites, are just about the only people being executed.

What is this other reason as to why these death penalties are being given out largely to black folks and to poor whites but overwhelmingly to blacks?

I am a lawyer. I am currently inactive because of my all-consuming work with Habitat for Humanity, but in the past I have lot of folks have so much integrity and they have so much love in their heart, they say "No, no matter what, I wouldn`t kill anybody. There is a better way. Two wrongs don`t make a right." And if you can`t shake them and you can`t make them say that under some circumstances they would impose the death penalty, they cannot sit on this jury.

Now, what does that mean? Simply that a big chunk of the folks in the community who are peers, who are the neighbors of the man who is being tried, they are not on the jury! The only people on the jury are all those white folks who believe in the death penalty and a few black folks who you can convince to be for it. That is an evil system that removes from the jury all people who oppose the death penalty.

Studies show that those who support the death penalty are more likely to convict than people who oppose the death penalty. And, after conviction, the trial goes into the second phase. Murder cases, where the death penalty is sought, are bifurcated trials. The second phase of the trial determines whether a person lives or dies.

Even whites who have supported the death penalty, should be repulsed by the injustice of the system I have described above. The unfairness of the whole thing cries out to be remedied.

Here`s what Justice Brennen, who wrote the major dissent in the McCleskey case, had to say about the death penalty, "A mere three generations ago this court sanctioned racial segregation, stating that `if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.`

"….We have sought to free ourselves from the burden of this history. Yet it has been scarcely a generation since this Court`s first decision striking down racial segregation, and barely two decades since the legislative prohibition of racial discrimination in major domains of national life. These have been honorable steps, but we cannot pretend that in three decades we have completely escaped the grip of an historical legacy spanning centuries. Warren McCleskey`s evidence confronts us with the subtle and persistent influence of the past. His message is a disturbing one to a society that has formally repudiated racism, and a frustrating one to a nation accustomed to regarding its destiny as the product of its own will. Nonetheless, we ignore him at our peril, for we remain imprisoned by the past as long as we deny its influence in the present.

"It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined. `The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together,` and the way in which we choose those who will die reveals the depth of moral commitment among the living."

The death penalty is a cancer on our society. It will continue to eat away at our souls until we send it to the junk heap of history.

But how will we do that? How do we send the death penalty to the junk heap of history? First of all, we need to read up on the subject. We need to educate ourselves. We need to understand really what is going on. We need to realize that in the death penalty we are attacking the result and not the cause of the problem. Psychologist Dane Archer believes that human violence is a product of social forces rather than the result of biological drive. And he cites some compelling evidence. For example, he did a study comparing violence rates in this country and other countries and found that in New Zealand, which is an industrialized nation very much like our own, multi-racial although not the same composition that we have, violence and murder are minuscule.

Why is it that our society is so violent and a society like New Zealand so peaceful and people don`t kill each other? He says that it is social forces. Archer is a world authority on homicide and he has earned that distinction by completing, with a colleague, a ten-year international study of criminal violence. The study has established Archer as a premier cross-national psychologist, one whose work is done entirely outside the traditional laboratory of experimental psychology.

Archer`s study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, was published as a book by Yale University Press. The study which has won four major awards in psychology and sociology, explores such illusive or critical social questions as, "Does the death penalty deter potential killers? Does violence increase in a nation that has just concluded a war? Do large cities have higher homicide rates than small cities in the same nation?" Drawing off statistics from 110 nations and 44 of their most cosmopolitan cities, Archer provides the following answers. No, the death penalty does not deter homicidal criminals. Yes, violence does increase in a nation that has just finished a war. And, yes, large cities do have higher homicide rates than small cities in the same nation. To explain most of his seemingly unrelated findings, Archer proposed a single hypothesis. When a nation does violence to human beings by conducting wars or executing criminals, it incites its citizens to more criminal violence than they would otherwise commit. Some people might reason, for example, that if the president was commanding the military to kill enemy soldiers and if judges were ordering prison authorities to execute convicted murderers, why shouldn`t the private citizen follow suit and use deadly force on personal enemies? In other words, in Archer`s hypothesis, the state can make violence the coin of its realm."

For all of the above reasons, I oppose the death penalty. Revenge belongs to God and not to individuals and not to the state. I am not comfortable being in the company of China, Iraq and Iran in the death penalty business. I am revulsed by the racial discrimination in administering the death penalty laws. I am appalled by the unfairness of who gets the death penalty, the poor and minorities, and the arbitrariness in determining who may live and who must die. And, I am convinced that the death penalty is not a deterrent to violence. Indeed, I believe that the death penalty causes more murders.

But, for me as a Christian, the final and most compelling reason to oppose the death penalty is because Jesus was against it. Once a woman was caught in adultery. A crowd was about to carry out the death sentence by stoning her. Jesus appeared. He stooped down and wrote in the sand. He then stood and said that the person without sin could throw the first stone. They all walked away. What about you? Are you without sin? Maybe you haven`t committed adultery. You haven`t killed anybody. But have you never sinned? By what authority are you casting stones to kill all these people on death row?

At the end of Jesus` earthly ministry, he was given a death sentence. The method of state execution in his day was death on a cross. As he hung there, he looked down on his executioners and said, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing."

Do you know what you are doing in supporting the death penalty today? Are you witnessing faithfully for Christ in calling for revenge? Are you witnessing to God`s love in remaining silent while others throw the stones, pull the switches, and stick in the needles to kill those who, in spite of their faults, are still made in the image of God?

I urge you to study prayerfully this explosive and powerfully relevant issue in our country. Ask what Jesus would do. Then, you do likewise.

Updated Friday, December 28, 2001