c. 1997 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Late last month, as the date neared for the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Joseph O’Dell, death penalty foes worldwide, including Pope John Paul II, voiced their opposition.
But after O’Dell’s life was ended by the commonwealth of Virginia, the prominent and the powerful, their voices unheeded, turned to other issues, leaving the day-to-day struggle against capital punishment in the hands of unheralded and beleaguered foot soldiers such as Marshall Dayan.
Before 1980, the 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Georgia in Athens never thought much about the death penalty.
But four years after the 1976 Supreme Court ruling upholding states’ rights to use capital punishment, Georgia was poised to execute its first prisoner in 20 years. Dayan attended an anti-death penalty vigil in Atlanta out of curiosity.”The idea that someone was going to execute someone in my name _ I didn’t really like that,”Dayan said.”I’m a pretty observant Jew, and I tend to believe that instead of completing the creation of the universe, God did what he could in six days. Our responsibility as creatures of God is to work with God in creation of the universe. How can we do that if we’re wasting human resources this way? The more I thought about it the more I got sick to my stomach about it.” Dayan went on to law school, specializing in representing death row inmates. Since graduating from Washington, D.C.’s Antioch Law School in 1986, defending capital offenders has been his passion.
Augmenting his legal work, Dayan is a leader in the still-minority anti-death penalty movement as board chairman of the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Despite opposition by many religious groups, popular support for the death penalty runs high: A 1996 Gallup Poll shows 79 percent of Americans support it for those convicted of murder.
It’s from the religious community that many of these in-the-trenches death penalty activists come.”There’s just no basis in the Christian ethic for killing anyone,”said Sallyann McCarthy of the Sisters of Saint Francis in Clinton, Iowa.”There are other ways to punish those who do wrong,”she added.”Many sisters are committed to prison reform, to finding other ways of changing human behavior and punishing others who deserve to be punished.” Her group is part of the Sisters of the Upper Mississippi Valley, who have expressed their opposition to the death penalty by giving at least 30 Iowa public libraries the film”Dead Man Walking,”based on Sister Helen Prejean’s ministry to inmates on death row in Louisiana. The nuns have targeted Iowa because the state legislature there is debating a reinstatement of the death penalty.
Opponents like Dayan and the Iowa nuns believe there are soft spots in public support for capital punishment. Ultimately, they say, the tide of public opinion will be turned in their direction.
They argue that the racism involved in meting out death sentences and the possibility of executing the innocent weaken support for capital punishment. And a 1993 Greenberg/Lake-Tarrance Group poll found support for the death penalty drops dramatically _ to just 41 percent _ when life without parole and restitution to the victims is an option.”People are willing to consider other sentencing options, but they don’t know what they are and what they mean,”said Lisa Bartle of the Death Penalty Information Center.”Many times the death penalty is favored because people are at a loss of what to do with recidivist criminals. If the person isn’t on death row, people assume that person will be back on the street.””The alternative (to the death penalty) isn’t that they throw you a ticker-tape parade,”said Dayan.”But that you’re living in an incredibly restrained situation. Life in prison is an extraordinarily serious punishment.” Diann Rust-Tierney, director of the Death Penalty Project for the American Civil Liberties Union, said despite the string of executions in Texas earlier this year she is still optimistic.”We’ve got to keep working to make sure that (capital punishment) is not a part of our society,”she said.”Public support for this is premised on the notice that it’s fair. If the public knew how unfair this thing was, they wouldn’t accept it.”It’s a moral imperative,”she continued.”We’re in this for the long haul. Just as was true in the civil rights movement, you can appeal to fundamental goodness in the public.” Although death penalty foes take heart from the anti-death penalty views voiced by some religious groups, they also criticize the religious community for not doing enough to mobilize congregants on the issue.
A number of religious communities _ including the Roman Catholic Church, the main branches of Judaism and most mainline Protestant denominations _ have written statements opposing the death penalty. But Dayan said some of the statements are more than 30 years old and it’s time for the religious community to translate its words into action.”In 1995, this country executed more than 50 people, the largest number of executions since the ’50s,”Dayan said.”This is something that is going to confront us as citizens and religious people. It would be wrong to have these executions take place without our debating the issues.” Rust-Tierney agrees.”It is incumbent on religious communities to raise the moral high ground of the concept of mercy,”she said.”That’s a moral argument the religious communities can make better than anybody.”It’s a human rights issue, and we have people in this country who pride themselves on their religious heritage. There’s the need to temper justice with mercy. We desperately need the religious community to lift this issue up.” MJP END CAMPBELL
