Capital Punishment

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Capital Punishment

The practice of punishing wrongdoers with death has been a common feature of many cultures throughout human history. Ancient law codes, such as those of Hammurabi and the ones found within the Hebrew scriptures, illustrate this graphically. During the first three centuries of Christianity, it was probably the memory of the execution of Jesus and the early martyrs that led Christians to oppose capital punishment, but after the alliance of the church with the Roman Empire under Constantine I (a.d. 313), churchmen largely set aside objections and accepted use of the death penalty by combining elements of the Christian Old Testament and earlier Roman law.

The execution of Priscillian of Avila in a.d. 385, although protested by prominent Christian leaders, nonetheless set an ominous precedent—Christians killing fellow Christians over doctrinal differences. When a spate of popular heresies arose in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the bishop of Rome enlisted the state as the church's "secular arm" to carry out the execution of condemned heretics. The groups that were the prime candidates for conviction of heresy (e.g., the early Waldenses) were also understandably the ones who openly declared that capital punishment was contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

It was only in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that nonreligious attention was focused on the death penalty and arguments against it were formulated on philosophical grounds. Cesare Beccaria (1764), reinforced by Voltaire (1766), assembled an influential series of criticisms on rational, utilitarian grounds. This brought a reaction from others, such as Immanuel Kant, who formulated retributive counterarguments, insisting that execution was necessary for the balance of justice to be restored (1797).

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, was the first American to call publicly for abolition, combining both religious and secular arguments against what he dubbed "the absurd and un-Christian practice" of capital punishment (1787). It is thus not surprising that controversy and confusion have dogged the issue throughout U.S. history. Strong voices both for and against it have often been heard, with most nineteenth-century Christian clergy supporting it by appeal to the Bible, and most abolitionists opposing it on humanitarian grounds.

The Death Penalty After World War II

Two extraordinary periods full of change, however, have in the past half century affected usage of the death penalty dramatically.

1948–1976: Unexpected Opposition and Decline of Use

The excesses of totalitarian regimes, using state power to kill vast numbers of their own citizens, raised daunting questions about the future of humankind. Part of the postwar response was the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the total abolition of the death penalty in the constitution of the new West German government (Article 102) in 1949. These two signs of hope for a new dawn opened the most intense European debate ever held about the morality of capital punishment. New to the conversation was the frank recognition given to the fact that state power had been horrendously abused. Awareness was high that governments could not function without errors and abuses, and it would therefore be well not to entrust them with the power of putting their citizens to death. The European consensus grew that the death penalty should no longer be a part of ordinary law codes in a modern state. The importance of strong safeguards to foster and protect human life from potential state abuse won new appreciation, with leaders of many Protestant churches joining in.

In the United States it was especially the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York (1953) and of Caryl Chessman in California (1960) that served to generate the first major protests with conspicuous religious involvement. By 1968 the National Council of Churches of Christ actually reached unanimity in endorsing (103 to 0) a statement that provided member churches with ten different reasons why the death penalty no longer deserved church support. First on that list was the Christian belief in "the worth of human life and the dignity of human personality as gifts of God," and last on it was "our Christian commitment to seek the redemption and reconciliation of the wrongdoer." But sandwiched between these two religious arguments were all the usual secular objections, now reinforced from a religious perspective as well.

This development within major U.S. churches coincided with a nationwide decline in, and then an actual moratorium on, executions for ten years (1967–1977). The United States was moving in the same direction as most nations of the Western world. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court, pointing to the "freakish" and "arbitrary" ways in which the death penalty was being carried out, declared that such use was "cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." The pendulum swing toward abolition seemed almost total.

1976–1999: Unexpected Reinstatement, and Opposition

But in 1976, the Court intervened again and brought the abolitionist trend against capital punishment to an abrupt halt when it ruled 7 to 2 in Gregg v. Georgia that "the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution" and went on to indicate how new capital statutes could pass constitutional muster. This reversal rested essentially on the assumption that the admitted flaws in the system could be fixed if the states adopted laws with more "objective standards to guide, regularize, and make rationally reviewable the process for imposing death."

The confident optimism informing this grand act of faith in the system is one major difference that divides proponents and opponents of the death penalty. The former think the past shortcomings either are not relevant or can easily be remedied by revising the statutes, whereas the latter point to the escalating empirical evidence of wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective counsel, death-prone juries, racial bias, and discrimination against the poor and the mentally incompetent as a few of the flaws that make the system inherently unfixable.

Ironically, just as polls showed increasing support for the death penalty and as the execution of Gary Gilmore by Utah (1977) opened the new era with greater public support for the death penalty than ever, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to go along. Their post–Vatican II transformation from being classical proponents to becoming staunch opponents of capital punishment first found full expression in their 1980 statement. Just as in the statements made earlier by many other U.S. religious groups, the bishops were careful to include the many secular reasons for opposing the death penalty, but these were secondary to the newly crystallized religious rationale that they pressed to the fore.

Since the Middle Ages Catholic theologians had defended as God-given the right of the state to execute wrongdoers. After World War II, however, the practical realization gradually imposed itself that this uncritical approval in theory was irrelevant, if not irresponsible, in light of the grim reality of modern killings by the state. Secular arguments might still persuade one to be theoretically either for or against the death penalty, but the new factor in the conversation was the change of priorities, starting with a religious appreciation of the special dignity of human beings as the handiwork of God. This cleared away the theoretical smoke screen. Capital punishment was exposed as a direct and deliberate act of destruction of human life, unnecessary (and therefore unjustified) in a modern society.

Many Catholic laypeople were initially slow to appreciate this historic shift. But as the challenge to embrace consistency in the religious evaluation of life was taken up vigorously by Pope John Paul II in the 1990s, and as its consequences were incorporated into the New Catholic Catechism, it soon became obvious that an important corner had been turned. Support for the death penalty was definitively relegated to the Catholic past. The burden of proof was radically shifted. The presumption was now in favor of the right of the human person to live. The modern state has no right to use the extreme penalty of death when its goals can be just as effectively achieved by remedies short of death.

While this "conversion" of Catholic leadership is clearly the most striking development on the U.S. religious scene regarding capital punishment, what it means for the future is not at all clear. The situation is extremely fluid. As polls confirm, many Americans still find the death penalty acceptable by an appeal to the Bible. Their defense of this position in the past was unshakable even when the system misfired. But how they and others may respond this time is an open question. With well over thirty-five hundred people waiting on death row, and with efforts being made by some politicians to further shorten the time between condemnation and execution, the prospect of the United States engaging in unparalleled destruction of its own citizens in the near future is disturbing to say the least.

One incident in early 1998 suggests that religious support for the death penalty may be softer than many assume. When the state of Texas carried out the execution of a converted murderer, Karla Faye Tucker, the evangelical weekly Christianity Today, after careful review of all the inhumane aspects, including the media circus, withdrew its former support step by step and concluded that "the death penalty has outlived its usefulness."

Conclusion

Capital punishment has undoubtedly occupied a surprisingly privileged pedestal in Christian ethics for most of the past millennium, but as the millennium ends, religious support for it is clearly diminishing. Currently in many U.S. religious circles it is viewed as strikingly parallel with that other "peculiar institution" in U.S. history—human slavery—which in its day was likewise sanctioned with biblical argument by many of its Christian practitioners. Both of these inhumane institutions lose any religious warrant when the biblical evaluation of the human person as made in the image and likeness of God is given greater prominence.

In the 1990s it became standard practice in death-penalty states for religious groups to hold vigils protesting every execution. In 1997 the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) began a national project, "Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty," aimed at raising consciousness and consciences. Sister Helen Prejean's book Dead Man Walking, and the film based on it, were used as tools for helping to introduce groups of church people to the stark reality of the system that is so easily ignored. A broad variety of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and others shared resources, illustrating that the use of the death penalty is basically incompatible with central religious insights and values of the major traditions.

The continued flaws plaguing the post-Gregg system just as they did the pre-Furman system led the American Bar Association in 1997 to call for another national moratorium on executions. Many religious groups have joined in, organizing signature-gathering campaigns to promote a "Moratorium 2000." Such initiatives are among the more visible ways in which many Americans are trying to bring their religious convictions to bear on the issue of the U.S. death penalty as the new millennium approaches.