First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
December 7, 2003

This is not the subject I was planning to talk about this morning; in fact it is one I would rather not have to talk about at all. Even thinking about it tends to make me feel frantic and slightly sick, and from this I know that my reaction to the topic is visceral, not intellectual. I will make the intellectual arguments in a moment, for although they are probably familiar to most of us, it appears that we shall have need to be reminded of them before we are done this time around. But I suspect that rational discussion is in some sense beside the point. In the end, the appeal of the death penalty is fundamentally an emotional response, and it is at the level of feeling, not thought, that people make their decision about this fraught question. Indeed, I shall argue, it is and has long been a very specifically religious issue; the impulse to execute has its origin in a failure of moral and ritual imagination in society, and those who would wish to banish this ancient terror from modern civilization would do well to understand the dynamic of its enduring appeal to the baser instincts of popular sentiment.

From this point of view, perhaps it ought not to be surprising that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has recently announced that he will urge our legislature to reinstate judicial execution, a practice he has long favored. Telling reporters that he has had it with hearing about violent sexual offenses, and that the kidnapping of Dru Sjodin was the "tipping point" in his decision, Governor Pawlenty is quoted as saying, "I think I speak for most Minnesotans - as a Minnesotan, as governor, as dad of two young daughters; I'm fed up," at a news conference last Tuesday. Now, I confess that it is unclear to me what the two things have to do with each other, since the accused abductor, Alfonso Rodriguez, was not previously convicted of murder, is not presently accused of murder, and could not be sentenced under legislation yet to be enacted, even if Pawlenty's proposal were to be approved. What is apparent is the way in which the governor's initiative both draws upon and feeds the widespread outrage over Dru Sjodin's disappearance; to advocate for the death penalty just now may be legally irrelevant to the facts of this particular case, but it is astute timing politically. Part of what makes a public official effective is the ability to mirror and give expression to the feelings of those he or she serves, and in that capacity, the governor has obviously hit a collective nerve.

Let us review a bit of historical context. Minnesota has some reason to be embarrassed by its record with regard to state executions, even though it was one of the early states to eliminate the death penalty, in 1911. That decision was the legislative response to the last execution, carried out at the Ramsey County jail in 1906, during which an incompetent executioner mismeasured the length of rope required to hang 28 year old steamfitter William Williams, convicted of killing a friend. Williams' feet accidentally struck the floor when the execution was attempted, and deputy sheriffs had to grab the rope and lift him, holding him in the air for 14 minutes until he was strangled. Minnesota also holds the dubious honor of having conducted the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, on December 26, 1862, when 38 Sioux warriors, arbitrarily chosen from 307 sentenced to death for their participation in a protest earlier that year, were hanged in Mankato, surrounded by cheering crowds of white settlers. Two points are worth noting about this shameful event. First, the uprising was a response to being cheated of their promised annuities and denied access to their intended food rations by federal agents, and immediately after the executions, all members of indigenous tribes were officially expelled from Minnesota. Second, then President Lincoln, when appealed to for clemency in the matter, felt that although the execution of all 307 would risk offending foreign governments, who might then come to the aid of the Confederacy, he also could not afford the loss of support in a key Northern state that would result from exonerating all those condemned in the highly illegal summary trials conducted by General John Pope. Hence his relatively arbitrary selection of a percentage of the number to be killed. The truth is that political considerations are never absent from the application of the death penalty, either then or now.

In this respect, the history of the country as a whole is no different. Americans have always had an uneasy view of state-sponsored killing, and there were initiatives to eliminate it even in the early days of the new republic. A rising concern for public decency in the Victorian age brought about an end to hangings as a public spectacle, moving them inside prisons and decreeing obscure hours, such as midnight or dawn, for their occurrence, in order to discourage crowds. Some historians have speculated that had it not been for the brutalizing effect of the Civil War, the death penalty might actually have been done away with in the United States by the end of the 19^th century. What did happen at that time was the transfer of authority over capital cases from individual city and county jurisdictions to the state level, in an attempt to make the process orderly and uniform, avoiding the capricious exercise of local prejudice or high feeling. Traditionally, the willingness to countenance executions increases during and following a war - this, too, is a factor we should perhaps be taking into account at present. That pattern ran true after the First World War as well, when the number of states permitting death sentences increased. However, revulsion at the revelations of state-sponsored killing in the German death camps seems to have muted this usual reaction in the aftermath of World War Two, and that popular sentiment began to carry over to the memory of racially-inspired lynchings as the civil rights movement gained prominence. From 1967 to 1972 there were no executions anywhere in the United States, and in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty, as it was then practiced, unconstitutional.

Most of us probably remember that the court's opinion described the application of judicial execution as unfairly administered, and left open the possibility that states could draft death penalty legislation that would satisfy the criteria of impartiality. In the more conservative mood that followed the end of the Vietnam war, a number of state legislatures were eager to do this, and in 1979 the state of Florida executed John Spenkelink, ending a twelve year moratorium on state sponsored killing. Since then there have been 681 executions in the United States, which stands almost alone among representative governments in its use of the death penalty. Since the death penalty has been abolished in all European and South American countries, we now share this practice only with such nations as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, the Sudan, China, and some republics of the former Soviet Union. Other democracies, as well as international human rights groups like Amnesty International, are constantly exerting pressure on the U.S. to abandon this anachronism.

The practical arguments are no doubt familiar to all of us; our clergy statement rehearsed them briefly. Statistics demonstrate repeatedly that states and nations which do not exercise judicial execution have no higher rates of murder or of crime in general than states and nations that do kill people; indeed the former usually have demonstrably lower rates of violence, general crime, and murder. The death penalty does not offer an effective deterrent, and does not make citizens who endorse it any safer. Since 1973, more than 110 convicted death row inmates have been proven innocent of the crimes for which they were scheduled to be executed. The process of criminal prosecution is by no means perfect or certain, and never will be; it is tragic enough when someone who is not guilty spends years in prison before being exonerated, but it is irremediable injustice when an innocent person is killed by what is supposed to be a system of justice. Nor does execution, if it is to be handled with any attempt at basic, thorough fairness, save the state money in the final analysis. And yet it seems to me that these are not really the arguments that we need to be making. Political writer and editor Michael Manville puts it this way:

Here's what I think: the death penalty arises out of feelings, not out of logic. It is a reaction of revulsion; certainly feelings of revulsion are what is fueling our governor's current wish to bring judicial killing back into our state - he has said so himself. I want to suggest that we examine those feelings, and I want to suggest that a useful place to begin is with a little-known injunction in the Bible. Check out Leviticus, Chapter 20, verses 15 and 16: "If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he must be put to death, and you must kill the animal. If a woman approaches an animal to have sexual relations with it, kill both the woman and the animal. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." Now I find these instructions rather puzzling; granted, bestiality is a fairly unattractive manifestation of human sexual impulse, but even if you wanted to scare people into staying away from the practice by making it a capital offense, why kill the animal, too? Presumably the poor creature is not held accountable to human moral standards, and it had nothing to say about the matter anyway. Why should it have to die?

The key to the answer, I suspect, lies in the title of often given to these kinds of verses; they are called 'holiness codes.' Their purpose was to define for the community of ancient Israel how to maintain a condition of ritual purity, and how to deal with various different forms of defilement that might occur within the group and prove destructive to its cohesiveness. Some offenses against this demand for holiness, or purity, were to be resolved with rituals of sacrifice and prayer, and sometimes by the passage of time; for others, there was no ritual remedy, and the only solution was for the community to get rid of the person who had committed the offense, which was accomplished by killing that person. But think about it; even today it would be difficult, I suppose. What can you do with such an animal, especially if the whole neighborhood knows what happened? What will they be saying, or snickering, each time you take the dog for a walk? Could you wear a sweater, or serve a stew made from that sheep with a straight face? The animal has to be killed because the community could not imagine any way to ritually purify it, to redeem it from the icky, uncomfortable memory that would always be attached to it.

I am inclined to think that it is this almost instinctive urge to rid ourselves of that which we know not how to redeem that is the emotional foundation of the human attraction toward the death penalty. That is why I say it represents a failure of moral and ritual imagination, and that is why, as a humanist and especially as one who claims the Universalist heritage, I can never accept it as a legitimate form of justice on my own behalf. It is true that there are any number of wrongs in our society that we have not yet discovered how to resolve; today especially where sexual predators are concerned, we have not found the key of understanding, whether it be biochemical, psychological, motivational, environmental, or something else as yet unknown. What we do know is how often and often in the sad history of our species, and indeed of our own nation, we have used execution to rid ourselves of people whose supposed crimes were functions of the most basic inequities and destructiveness of the social situations in which they lived, and the anxiety of others. The sentence of death has never been applied wisely, reflectively, in tragic reluctance; rather, in every age, including ours, it has always been an expression of collective outrage, disgust, vengeful power, and fear.

The rule of law has two functions in a civilized society. One is to protect members of the community from the dishonest or violent actions of those who are not restrained by their own consciences; the other is to protect people who are vulnerable from the oppression and worst impulses of the majority. The state which executes its citizens has abandoned that second responsibility in the alleged service of the first. Later in the same essay that I cited earlier, Michael Manville continues:

Centuries ago, our Universalist ancestors insisted that God's love was powerful enough to reconcile every single human soul to holy justice and goodness eventually. Their confidence did not sit well with their more orthodox neighbors, who desired to be assured that certain despised individuals or groups would be excluded from the divine presence, and suffer forever. There is something petty and mean about that wish, something that diminishes the humanity of those who carry it in their hearts, just as there is something larger and more noble about the Universalist vision of God - something that expands and nurtures the humanity of those who embrace it. In the same way, I believe that something within us dies when we become, through our government, agents of death; when we succumb to our revulsion and try to assert the purity of our community by eliminating the people who represent irredeemable evil, we only bring evil into ourselves and lend it our own strength.

And friends, we are not alone in the struggle with this ancient impulse. Christian, Jewish, Catholic, people of faith all over this city are hearing a similar message from their spiritual leaders. My colleagues and I do not want to live in a state that puts people to death; it was shame to us in the days when we did it, here in Minnesota, and it will be the more shame to us after all these years if we ever do it again. The demagogues are at it once more, though, manipulating our fears, making political hay, asking us to let our state kill in the name of innocence and purity. The facts all suggest that justice cannot be served this way, but facts are not the issue. What is really at stake is which of humanity's two oldest and deepest imperatives will guide us - fear, or love? It is easy, instinctive, to live out of our unreflective fears, especially when they are fanned by the excitement of public anger and the lust for retribution - and for votes. It is an attainment of the heart and mind and spirit to live instead from a perspective of love, to leave open the possibility of redemption even when we are not able to imagine how it might be attained, and to withhold our assent from the urges of the mob. Yet if there are enough of us who believe, enough of us who choose the higher ideals of humanity, enough of us who stand firm in the conviction that love truly does cast out fear, then we need not be plunged back into the horrors of days that should be gone forever. Execution by the state is a barbaric relic of humanity's past; it has no place in a civilized modern society, and certainly no place in Minnesota. I am proud to be part of a larger faith community that chooses life over death, and love over fear, and bears witness to that choice in the halls of power, and against the self-serving pronouncements of political opportunism. I fully expect that one day this recognition will prevail throughout the earth, and humanity will leave one more ancient scourge in the dust of ages gone. I devoutly wish that you, and I, and my colleagues, might all live to see that day.

JOINT STATEMENT BY DOWNTOWN MINNEAPOLIS CLERGY ON THE GOVERNOR'S PROPOSAL TO REINSTATE THE DEATH PENALTY

Governor Tim Pawlenty's call for the reinstatement of the death penalty in Minnesota is a profoundly troubling development which voters and legislators should reject. Not only is state-sanctioned killing impractical, costly, and ineffective as a deterrent to crime, but - more important - it would make all Minnesotans complicit in the very cycles of violence which everyone abhors and which are tearing at the fabric of our society. As spiritual leaders of many of Minneapolis' downtown houses of worship, we stand with those who will resist this backward and frightening step. While we do not speak for members of our congregations, our firm opposition to the death penalty rises from what we understand to be the deepest values of our various faiths.

No credible evidence has ever been offered to support the idea that imposition of the death penalty lowers the rate of violent crime. A 2002 report from the FBI confirms that in the South, where 86% of executions take place, murder rates have increased in recent years while those rates have decreased in the Northeast, where only 1% of executions have occurred. It should also not be lost on Minnesotans that while all of the Western democracies - with the sole exception of the United States - have abolished the death penalty, their rates of violent crime remain significantly below those of our own country. If deterrence cannot be proved, then the only remaining motivations for capital punishment are retribution and vengeance. These are among the baser instincts to which men and women fall prey and which, according to our religious traditions, mar our humanity and distort our relationship to God.

How is it that at a time when voters and government leaders in many states are moving toward a moratorium on executions, Minnesota's chief executive wants to lead us in the opposite direction? In places like Illinois and North Carolina, to name but two, there is a growing awareness that systems of capital punishment are skewed by inherent racism and invariably flawed, allowing the execution of innocent people by irreversible mistake. The repeated experience of post-conviction exonerations alone should be enough to stop us from proceeding down this dangerous path.

As pastors, we are filled with deep compassion for victims of violent crime and their families. Each one of us, in our work, has had to stand with such families in their loss, their grief, their desire for justice, and their efforts to put their lives back together. We support vigorous prosecution of those who perpetrate violent crimes and we believe that strong and consistently imposed prison sentences can adequately protect the public from those who may become repeat offenders.

At the heart of our opposition to the death penalty is our firm belief that God is grieved, and the highest ideals of humanity are betrayed, by the taking of any life. Further, it is our conviction that state-sanctioned killing draws the entire citizenry into dehumanizing acts of violence. The men, women, and children of Minnesota should not be made into executioners by state fiat. If that role is forced on them by an intemperate legislature, the original wound inflicted by violent crime will be inflamed rather than healed, and all of us will have become participants in the very evil that we are called - by all that is holy - to resist.

The Rev. John Forliti

St. Olaf Roman Catholic Church

The Rev. James Gertmenian

Plymouth Congregational Church

The Rev. Kendyl Gibbons

First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rabbi Sim Glaser

Temple Israel

The Rev. Timothy Hart-Andersen

Westminster Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Mark McWhorter

First Christian Church

The Rev. Michael O'Connell

Basilica of Saint Mary

The Rev. Spenser Simrill

The Cathedral Church of St. Mark, Episcopal

The Rev. Rodney Wilmoth

Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church

The Rev. Sandye Wilson

Gethsemane Episcopal Church

The Rev. Suzanne Mades

Wesley United Methodist Church