I join other people of faith in mourning the death of Troy Davis, who was killed by lethal injection in Jackson, Georgia tonight. Davis had been convicted of the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail. One of the reasons this story has received a lot of media attention is that many believe Troy Davis did not kill Mark MacPhail. Ed Pilkington of The Guardian explained that there are reasons to doubt Davis’s guilt: witnesses have recanted and said they had been pressured by police to give false testimony during the original investigation, no DNA evidence links Davis to the killing, no gun was ever found, and nine people have come forward with testimony implicating another man in the murder of MacPhail. But even if Troy Davis killed Mark MacPhail, he should not have been put to death by the State of Georgia. This is not justice.
In their 2005 document, A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops call for an end to the use of the death penalty because:
The sanction of death, when it is not necessary to protect society, violates respect for human life and dignity.
State-sanctioned killing in our names diminishes all of us.
Its application is deeply flawed and can be irreversibly wrong, is prone to errors, and is biased by factors such as race, the quality of legal representation, and where the crime was committed.
We have other ways to punish criminals and protect society (3).
In his 1999 homily at the Papal Mass in St. Louis, Blessed John Paul II pleaded with U.S. Catholics:
The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate, and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil… I renew the appeal I made for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary (CLPD, 14).
The criminal justice system in the U.S. is broken. If you’ve ever had the privilege of hearing Sister Helen Prejean speak at your campus, you know that Catholics have been tireless advocates against the death penalty in the U.S. We still have a lot of work to do.
Too often are actions of the State touted as actions done on behalf of the people, and too often are “the people” and “the State” conflated, in far more issues than just this particularly grave one. I hope eventually the implications of grave incidents such as this one become clear to the masses: the “State” is not the people and it does not speak for the people.
Emily – thanks for this. I wanted to relay this link (http://davidrhenson.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/the-state-killed-a-man-last-night/) about Lawrence Brewer, another person killed by the state last night. But as Henson writes, many might see this death as justified because Brewer was a white supremacist who acted on his racist views.
I think the Church’s view of this death is similar to what you mention above, at least in relation to pro-life concerns and the fact that we in the US do exist in a society where people can be incarcerated for life. And I just want to highlight a quote that stood out for me in this post:
“[T]he true prophetic voice on Wednesday came not from Georgia, but from Texas where aging African American Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory fasted for half a day to protest the killing of an avowed white supremacist who murdered a black man solely because he was black.
‘When do the State qualify to kill somebody and the government qualify to kill somebody and it’s all right”? said Gregrory. ‘It’s never all right to kill somebody intentionally. There are people who kill people. They are not the State. They are not the government. I don’t pay taxes to them.’
The vigils outside the prison in Jackson, Ga., are good news in this world. But it should be known, lest we pat ourselves on the back for our altruism, that until those same protests are seen outside a prison when the state is preparing to kill a white supremacist, abolishing the death penalty is a long, long way away.”
Thanks for your comments, Helen and Jana.
Helen, I think I understand the distinction you are making, but it is a complicated issue, right? The State is made up of the people. It is not just an institution or non-personal social contract. And yet people who are part of the same “State” can disagree and work to transform the public policy of the State (regarding war, taxation, prison reform, etc)… how would you help me to better express this tension?
Jana, Thanks for your comment too. Here’s a link to the list of names of all of the death row inmates who have been executed in 2011:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/execution-list-2011
There have been 1270 executions in the U.S. since 1976.
I would concur with David Henson’s analysis: everyone, even the most hardened white supremacist criminal, is a child of God who has inherent human dignity. Catholic pro-life teaching is “cradle to the grave,” as a friend wrote on Facebook. As Henson writes, we have a long, long way to go.
I still think that attention to Troy Davis’s case will be especially fruitful for advocates against the death penalty because it exposes the flagrant racial injustices in criminal investigation and prosecution. But that does not mean that his is more tragic than other executions.
Yes, ideally and in theory the State is made up of the people. But is it in practice? Do we feel that in America today, the State comprises us or people like us? The State has become so centralized and therefore far removed from us that there’s no way it can truly represent us.
My local community/government/what-have-you is made up of my neighbors and myself, and represents me, but is my federal government? Or even my state/commonwealth government? The larger and more centralized it becomes, the more unsustainable it is, and the more elusive it is to the people.
Most relevant to this issue: as the State becomes larger and more elusive and more “other”, it begins to need to forgo morally informed behavior in favor of sustaining the unsustainable. My neighbors and myself, as members of a local community, or more likely to be able to develop sustainable, morally informed policy that most accurately represents us. When we are forced to be accountable for members of our own community, we have to reconcile the love we have for them and the duty we have to forward justice. Because they belong to us, our treatment of them is more likely to be both just and merciful. Because the fate of Troy Davis was not in the hands of any community he belonged to (he certainly didn’t belong to any ‘community’ of America or ‘community’ of Georgia), he ceased to be a person and became a problem in stead. His fate was unjust and unmerciful.
Small is beautiful–dignity is local.