I want to talk to you about the death penalty and some of my feelings about it.

When Elizabeth Fry, an English Quaker who lived in the 1700s, spoke against capital punishment, she was dismissed as a hopeless idealist. When the Unitarians and Universalists merged their denominations in 1961, a call for abolishing capital punishment was one of the very first decisions made by the new denomination. By that time many nations had already abolished the death penalty, and it seemed that we were on our way.

The first time I thought much about the death penalty was in 1973. I was in a high school rhetoric class learning the art of debate. We were assigned pro or con positions on a given topic. It wasn’t supposed to matter how we actually felt about the issue, because we were supposed to be learning how to construct an argument, and we were told that we ought to be able to argue respectably for either side. I was assigned to argue for the death penalty—which I tried to do, although in the process I
quickly came to understand that most of the arguments for it were false.

I argued that it acted as a deterrent, even though all research indicates that most murders are crimes of passion committed when people are under great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol—times when they are not thinking clearly. All in the Family was then a new television show, and Archie Bunker was declaring that “the death penalty is a known detergent against crime.” But the research simply does not support this. The best I could feebly say in my high
school debate is that we know that someone who has been executed will never again kill anyone.

I conceded to my opposition that as things stood, the death penalty had been unfairly applied—with black men being put to death way out of proportion with the rest of the population. Later, the United States Supreme Court case, McClesky v. Kemp, established that in the state of Georgia someone who kills a white person is four times more likely to be sentenced to death than someone who kills a black person. I conceded that in the United States in this century, some 23 people have been put to death only to have their innocence effectively proven after the fact. Further, I conceded that the death penalty was not cost effective—that it costs the government two to three times as much to put a person to death as it does to keep a person in jail for life. These things, I argued, were a matter of fine-tuning. The system had a few bugs in it, but that did not mean that those bugs could not be corrected.

One argument that I did not put forth was that the relatives of the victims might gain emotional satisfaction from having the convicted killer of their loved ones put to death. It seemed completely barbaric and counter to everything we had ever been taught in school, church or home. One of the first rules of the playground is that just because someone hits you does not mean that you get to hit them back.

This all took place in Massachusetts in 1973. The last execution in that state occurred in 1947—ancient history for a high school student born in 1955. The last execution in the United States had been in 1966. The death penalty, we all knew, was going the way of debtor’s prisons and public floggings.

Then, three years later the Supreme Court made a number of decisions that enabled states to reinstitute the death penalty. In Utah in 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad after protests, vigils, marches and profuse public soul-searching. I remember much was made of the fact that Gilmore wanted to be executed, although very few proponents of the death penalty are strong advocates for criminals having that much say about the sentences given to them. With the execution of Gary Gilmore, the reintroduction of the death penalty inthis country was under way.

Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, and I moved to Canada. The last execution in Canada took place in 1962. After that there was a five-year moratorium imposed on executions under the liberal government of Lester Pearson. Then it was abolished under the liberal government of Pierre Trudeau.

While I was living in Canada there was a move to reintroduce the death penalty there. This was in 1987 during the conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulrony. It was led by politicians who also thought it would be good to abolish government-supported medical insurance. The United States model was touted in both the areas as being highly successful. Mulrony was personally opposed to re-introducing the death penalty and, to the frustration of some backbenchers in his party, the movement never went anywhere. Canada remains a country without the death penalty and seems to be getting along just fine without it.

In 1994, changes for the better seemed to be happening in the United States. This was when Clinton and Gore were elected for the first time. Clinton has always been publicly in favor of the death penalty, but people were talking about Clinton’s America as a place where there would be government-sponsored medical insurance, full equality for gays and lesbians, and a large quantity of new resources put into education and the general public good. In such a climate as this, could the death
penalty last long? As this vision faded like a morning dew, I consoled myself that I and my family, now living in the United States, were at least living in one of the few liberal bastions on the continent—the San Francisco Bay Area.

Then, in May, 1996, I was invited to attend a vigil at San Quentin to protest the execution of William Bonin. I thought I was committing myself to a three hour car ride somewhere into the desert. My first shock that night was finding out how near San Quentin is to San Francisco. It took no less time to drive from the Golden Gate Bridge to the site of the execution than it did from the bridge to my home in Bernal Heights.

I saw many UUs there that night, some from our church and some from others around the district. Among them was Bob Bacon, a member of our church who works with prisoners on death row. I thought about how strange it must be to spend your life working at a profession which you would like to see abolished. It was good to see familiar faces there,
but most of the evening I spent in meditative silence.

At some level, my thinking about the death penalty was still at the level of a debate in high school rhetoric class. The death penalty was something people talked about. The idea that a man was actually being put to death in the name of the people of California, only a few miles from my home, seemed incomprehensible. Yet, there were these guards and this fence and the knowledge that on the other side that is exactly what was happening.

My body felt nauseous and completely exhausted. Driving home that night I did something I almost never do. I pulled over to the side of the road to nap for 20 minutes before I felt safe to continue driving. The next morning I was still trying to make sense of what had happened, and it occurred to me that the real force behind the death penalty is the one issue I did not pursue in my high school debate—the desire for vengeance.

The desire for vengeance is really what the death penalty is all about, and the more honest proponents of the penalty are willing to say that. They use the term retributive justice—the idea that justice is not done if appropriate retribution for a wrong is not given. But it is really vengeance they are talking about, and I believe that we liberals are, in many ways, ill prepared to answer them on these grounds.

I remember the presidential debate between Michael Dukakis and George Bush, when candidate Dukakis was asked how he would feel if his wife Kitty was sexually abused and murdered. Might he then be in favor of the death penalty? He answered coldly that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent, but that was not the question he was asked. The television audience was left wondering if Kitty might not have been better off going home with George that evening. John Turner, a prime minister of Canada, was once asked the same question and he refused to answer it because it was an insulting question. However, I know myself well enough to know that if a member of my family was tortured and murdered, there is a big part of me that would want to see the criminal killed. To simply say that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent can be a form of cruelty to the people whose lives have been devastated by the murder of a loved one.

There is a couple in Texas who sued the court for the right to witness the execution of the murderer of their two children. I don’t agree with state executions, nor do I believe that witnessing them should be among the rights of the bereaved, but on a psychological level, I can understand and empathize with these parents. If such a thing were to happen to me, I’m not sure my response would be any nobler than theirs.

The only problem is that another part of me knows that this is not the right answer. Whatever satisfaction there might be would be temporary. Family members of murder victims have been interviewed months after an execution and have said that the execution wasn’t enough. They find themselves wishing that the criminal could be brought back to life and executed again. They know that in reality the wish makes no sense, but it is there in their minds. The problem is that on a psychological level
the wish does make sense—and we liberals need to find a way to deal with it.

We do not talk about the land of death. We acknowledge it as a mystery. One of the memorial service benedictions I sometimes use is: “Farewell traveler, we do not know your destination, but we bid you go in peace and in the love we bear for you.” But what do we say to one whose life has been devastated by the murder of a loved one? What we can do is admit that we share in the shock, the outrage, the horror. We can never be shocked, outraged or horrified enough when something like this happens. We can admit that it does not make any sense to us, and perhaps it never will. Perhaps there are some things
that happen that never will have a sensible explanation—but I believe we can know that perpetuating the cycle of violence is not the answer. We can say that capital punishment raises the level of acceptable violence in our society.

Capital punishment teaches our children that it’s okay to kill people if they do something wrong. I believe they deserve better than that. We deserve better than that. We can say that as awful as it may seem at times, the road to enlightenment and peace for every individual is inextricably bound to the road to enlightenment and peace for all others.

We can evoke the story of Cain and Abel. We can remind people that Cain’s punishment was that he should be reviled, not that he should be put to death. The Mark of Cain was put on his forehead as a sign of God’s protection for him, so that others would not try to kill him. Like many of the issues surrounding the death penalty, the story of Cain and Abel is a study in questions that have no answers. Why is it that some are born to a life where nurture and material goods are provided
for them, and others are born to misery and abuse? Why is it that some who are born to misery are able to find a teacher, or a pastor or some other role model who is able to help them find a different way, but others grow up to become perpetuators of cruelty and viciousness?

But if Adam and Eve are God’s first human children, then Cain and Abel are both God’s first human grandchildren, so to speak. Their story is our common heritage. One of the discomforting truths about the death penalty is that on some levels our lives are not so very different than the lives of people on death row. The problems that land people on death row usually start with problems like alcohol and other substance abuse issues, violence within the family, or mismanagement of finances. Many
of us have experienced these problems somewhere within our extended family. But we have a layer, sometimes it may seem a very thin layer, a veneer of wealth, a social privilege, that protects us from the worst manifestations of these problems, protects us from ending up in prison on death row. It allows us to pretend that the problems facing these people are not really our problems.

The story of Cain and Abel says that those problems are our problems. The story says that we are each other’s keepers. It says that human life is precious, and however God felt about those two brothers, God did not want to see more human blood shed, and moved to protect Cain. We are all one human family. We are all going to die someday. And the fact that we are all going to die means that we need to have some solidarity against the death that awaits us all. I have a request—that you keep your hearts open to all living human beings, to let no one be alien to your compassion. If we lived only as individuals, or if we
believed that those outside our known community were not fully human, there would be no problem with the death penalty. It is time for us to know that we live not just as individuals, but also as a community. It is time for us to know that our community extends to include all people alive on this earth.

In the sacred books of the Hebrew people there is the story of Moses, near the end of his days, going before the people and saying: I have set out two paths before you, one is the path of death, the other the path of life; therefore choose life that you and your children may live. The choice between a life sentence and the death penalty was not one that Moses ever imagined. I use his words in a new context, but with some of the same spirit and urgency, when I say to you now: therefore, let us choose life, that we and our children may live.