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March-April, 2017
THE CATHOLIC WORKER
Page Five
Capital Punishment Must End
By SCOTT LANGLEY
“We're making American great again!”
barked the US Marshals on an early January
morning as they welcomed a shackled line
of mostly black men into the jail cells of a
courthouse in Washington, DC. 1 was bound
in that line, as a prisoner with the other men.
The day before, on January 17th, [had been
arrested on the steps of the US Supreme Court
in Washington, DC for unfurling a thirty foot
long banner that read “Stop Executions!” with
members of the Abolitionist Action Commit-
tee, a nonviolent direct action group working
to end the death penalty. In all, eighteen of
us were arrested and held overnight in jail.
That next morning in the courthouse,
seeing the imagery of black men chained
together while white people of power sum-
moned the catch phrase of an overtly racist
president was the stark reality of not just the
new Jim Crow of our criminal justice system,
but the sobering reality of the racist culture
that I was there to resist.
Being in jail is to be in the belly of the
beast, the reality of racism is right there in
plain sight. Throughout our thirty-plus hours
of incarceration, I observed that of the other
sixty or so male prisoners, there was only
one other white person who was not a part
of the protest action. The rest were all people
of color. It is no secret that for decades, this
country has been bent on making the US “great
again” by warehousing people of color at a
rate vastly disproportionate to our country’s
racial make-up and actual criminal behavior.
And within the specific context of the death
penalty, that reality is glaringly true.
Forty years earlier, at the same hour of
our banner unfurling at the Court, Gary
Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah
as revenge for his murders of Ben Bushnell
and Max Jenson. It was the first modern era
execution after the Supreme Court had voted
to allow executions to resume.
Despite a growing trend away from the
death penalty, the US continues to take
human beings from death row cells and
execute them by various methods—includ-
ing electrocution, firing squad and untested
inations of lethal drug injecti Since
nearly 3,000 more on death row today, await-
in the
first half of 2017 there are already execution
dates set for two or three prisoners a month.
The system continues to churn, targeting
people by both race and by class.
Despite these gut wrenching statistics,
we actually have come a long way over the
years. In 2016 we saw the lowest number of
executions in a quarter of a century (down
from a peak of ninety-eight to twenty). US
juries imposed the fewest death sentences
in the modern era of US capital punishment.
ion the way out. Which is exactly why we
acted at the Supreme Court—because the time
is long overdue for the Supreme Justices to
declare capital punishment a violation of the
Eighth Amendment—because an execution,
in whatever form it is carried out, is a cruel
and unusual punishment.
Less than a week before our action,
Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the
2015 murders of nine Black people at the
Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina. He was the first person ordered to
be executed for a federal hate crime. What
really makes this case extraordinary is that
despite such a horrific tragedy, several of
the church congregants and families of the
victims chose to forgive Roof, a professed
white supremacist.
At one of Roof’s hearings, Nadine Collier,
the daughter of seventy-year-old victim Ethel
Lance said to Roof, “I forgive you. You took
something very precious from me. I will never
talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her
again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on
your soul.” Another one of the murder victim
family members even offered to visit Roofin
prison. What an amazing commitment to the
scripture in Matthew 25:36 that recalls, “I
was in prison, and you visited me.”
Inall of the political speak around the death
penalty, at the heart of our beliefs, we know
that the death penalty must end because we
Gilmore’s execution in January of 1977, the
US has exterminated 1,443 prisoners, with
illed to love one another and to forgive.
Those church members showed us just what
Jesus taught us—which is to love our enemies.
Atour Court protest, two days after Martin
Luther King, Jr’s birthday, supporters on the
sidewalk held a banner with a King quote that
read, “Capital punishment is society’s final
assertion that it will not forgive.”
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Suffering Jesus Lavrans Nielson
‘This message of forgiveness was embodied
by several of those arrested. Participating in
our'action were other murder victim family
members who have been on a long journey
toward a place of ion and i .
leaders and clergy who were arrested, includ-
ing Fr. John Dear and two Sojourners staff.
Also arrested at the Court was Shane Clai-
borne, from the Simple Way community in
Philadelphia, and author of a new book, titled
Executing Grace. After the action, Claiborne
wrote, “What we did at the Supreme Court
was about the death penalty, but it was also
about something bigger than the death
penalty. It is about what it means to follow
Jesus in a world that is plagued by violence
and death.... We did not just protest—we
protestified. We proclaimed the Gospel. We
performed liturgy in the streets. We declared
that mercy triumphs over judgment, that God
blesses the merciful, that Jesus came not for
the righteous but for the sinners. We spoke
truth—that no one is beyond redemption, and
that everyone is better than the worst thing
they’ve done. That’s what we went to jail for.”
At the very same time that we were all
released from jail on January 8, the US
Supreme Court denied a black Virginia death
row prisoner’s request for a stay of execu-
tion. Within hours, Ricky Gray was dead on
aprison gurney in retaliation for his murders
of the Harvey family, including two children,
ages four and nine.
Our work does not stop with one simple act
of resistance. It is a sustained movement. In
our society, we face countless problems and /
epidemics. The treatment of people based
onthe color of their skin is one of them. The
inability to forgive and love our enemies is,
another. And a third is the plague of violence in
this country. The death penalty encompasses
all that, and more.
The fact that Dylann Roof, a white person,
Brave souls who have lost so dearly, like Art
Laffin, of DC’s Dorothy Day Catholic Worker,
Sam Reese Sheppard and Suzann Bosler.
Bosler, who was stabbed along with her
father in their Brethren church parsonage,
survived, but her dad, Rev. Billy Bosler, did
not. Bosler ended up forgiving the attacker—
not because it was easy, but because her
father preached forgiveness and she knew
that is what he would have wanted. She took
a tragedy and turned it into a mission—co-
founding Journey of Hope... From Violence
to Healing, an organization of murder victim
families who preach love and compassion for
all of humanity.
That message of forgiveness was also.
amplified in our action by a number of faith
was icted of killing black people, is a
disturbingly rare thing in our criminal justice
system. The vast majority of death sentences
are given to people of color who kill white
people—like the Ricky Gray case in Virginia.
Our culture values white life more than
any other. It is the sad truth that we all need
to acknowledge and confront on a daily basis.
Sometimes that truth is there in our face, like
when those marshals declared that Black
prisoners in chains was somehow making
this country a better place. All you have to
do is look around a jail cell at the criminal
justice system to know that we are far from
being great. We have along way to go as we
grapple with issues around race and forgive-
ness. And ending the death penalty is one
important place to start. :
