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Thinning the ranks in a town called Death Row
Death penalty a sign of nation's divided heart about sanctity of human life
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Across the country, 38 states including our own have the death penalty. That works out to
about 3,400 men and women awaiting execution — enough to populate a Colorado town the size of
Yuma. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court closed off the appeals of more than 100 of those
condemned persons.
Back in 2002, the Supreme Court overturned the laws of various states in which a jury
or judge had determined an accused person's guilt, but then judges alone had decided whether
special circumstances — such as multiple victims or extreme brutality — made a convicted murderer
eligible for the death penalty.
At the time, the court said that a person's constitutional right to a jury trial precluded
death sentences imposed only by judges. But last week, the court said its 2002 ruling does not require
a wholesale review of convictions that already have run their appeals course.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Antonin Scalia acknowledged that, "The right to
jury trial is fundamental to our system of criminal procedure, and states are bound to enforce the
Sixth Amendment's guarantees as we interpret them."
But he added that when a defendant has had a full trial and has lost on appeal, "he
(should not be able to) continue to litigate his claims indefinitely on hopes that we will one day have
a change of heart."
In other words, the constitutional issues resolved by the court in 2002 are not retroactive.
A "fundamental right" to jury involvement in any final decision about capital punishment was
important enough to clarify in 2002 — but not so important that it should interfere with more than
100 pending executions. Thus, it's easy to read the court's opinion as the product of impatience
rather than good legal or moral sense.
America's ongoing addiction to the death penalty is one of the great signs of our
nation's divided heart about the sanctity of the human person. For the past half-century, the Church
has repeatedly encouraged nations to turn away from capital punishment as a response to crime.
The death penalty does not deter violence. It does not bring back the victims. It is not necessary to
secure punishment for the criminal. Worse, innocent people have almost certainly been convicted by
an inadequate justice system and been executed for crimes they did not commit.
Americans are a free people with public institutions founded in human dignity. We don't
need to kill people to vindicate our laws and punish crime. All we accomplish with the death penalty
is adding to a culture of violence, modeling revenge to our children and demeaning our own humanity.
God made us better than this. While Scripture and Catholic tradition both support the
legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances, Pope John Paul II has stressed again
and again that those circumstances almost never exist in today's developed countries. We're called
to serve justice through a higher moral road of mercy and restraint.
The irony in this election year is that both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush support the death
penalty. So do most Americans. So do most American Catholics in both political parties. Thus, even in
a remarkably bitter election cycle, most Americans do agree on something.
It's too bad the issue is so terribly wrong.
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