What’s a corporate lawyer who supported the death penalty doing writing a book that
challenges those who think Scripture supports capital punishment?
Dale S. Recinella admits his only experience with the criminal justice system was a
strange jail encounter while working as a clerk for a firm that handled public defender
work. In The Biblical Truth About America’s Death Penalty, he says: “In twenty years,
| had never been in a court in the role of litigation counsel. My arenas were the
conference rooms, the capital markets, and the closing tables.”
But a decade ago, when a lawyer friend asked him to help with a murder case, he
realized he “had no idea what was actually going on in my country, or even in my
own state (Florida), with respect to the death penalty.
“| was astounded to discover that we are in the grips of a tremendous conflict
between the death penalty system we believe we should have and the system that
actually exists.”
His search eventually led him not only to minister to inmates, including Death Row, in
Jacksonville, but to evaluate Scripture-quoting advocates of this punishment. “.... 1
continued hearing hundreds, maybe thousands, of Christian brothers and sisters
quoting verses from Torah/Pentateuch, the biblical death penalty, as God’s mandate
for the American system of capital punishment. In fact, | have found almost no
Americans who support the American death penalty without referring to those
Hebrew scriptures.”
Recinella’s analysis revealed other truths about America’s court systems.
“It is not unusual for prosecutors to quote the Hebrew scriptures to juries in their
arguments for death sentences in capital cases. In the last fifteen years, almost one
hundred reported appeals of courts decisions in death penalty cases have involved
legal challenges by the defendant based on the grounds that the prosecutor used
religious remarks to support leveling a death sentence.”
It seems to be especially popular in the Bible Belt. The most quoted, of course, is the
“eye for an eye; tooth for tooth; life for life” reference.
In his well-researched exploration of Hebrew and Christian verse, he notes that the
biblical death penalty however, was not a simple, speedy form of retaliation but a
multi-faceted collection of laws used by courts.
Through his research and beliefs, he makes the case for a faith-based moratorium—
and eventual abolition—of executions for our modern-day death penalty.
“Based upon our American jurisprudence to date, our society has evolved to the point
where cutting a person’s tonque out, stoning, burning people alive, beating the evil
out of children, public executions and exile in the form of expatriation, all
punishments prescribed in the scriptures, no longer meet the evolving standard of
decency marked by the progress of our maturing society. As we assess modern
America in light of the effort to support capital punishment based on the Mosaic law,
clearly there are some serious inconsistencies in our appraisal of punishments.”
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0