[Dialogue] 9/29/11, Spong: Troy Davis and the Debate over Capital Punishment

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Troy Davis and the Debate over Capital Punishment
Wednesday, September 21, was a consciousness-raising day in the United States.  It is always a conscious-raising occasion when a high profile public execution is about to take place.  The people of this country favor the death penalty for murder, the polls tell us, by about a 64 per cent majority, but there is a deep ambivalence even among those who say they approve.  The support for the death penalty was 80 per cent as recently as 1994.  It has declined because of publicity in cases where DNA evidence established innocence for some who were condemned and waiting on death row.  The idea of executing an innocent person is deeply troubling.  Death is so final.  Mistakes cannot be rectified or restitution accomplished.
On that particular September Wednesday two people were executed in the United States.  Only one of them, however, received national attention.  His name was Troy Davis, an African American man living in Georgia.  The other was a white man named Lawrence Brewer, who was convicted along with two other men  of tying a black man named James Byrd by his legs to their pick-up truck and dragging him along an unpaved gravel road in Jasper, Texas, until he was not only dead, but dismembered.  The crime for which Troy Davis was put to death took place in 1989.  According to the testimony at the trial the details were these:
Police officer Mark MacPhail was off duty, but working a second job as a security guard.  A homeless man called for help when he was being assaulted by a group of people including Troy Davis.  Officer MacPhail came to his aid and was shot in the face and heart, presumably by Mr. Davis, who was at that time 20 years old.  Officer MacPhail died immediately, leaving a widow and two small children to struggle through life without a husband or father.  Mr. Davis was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to die.  He has been on death row for 22 years, spending that time exhausting the appeals process.  His execution date had been set four times.    On three previous occasions during 2007 and in 2008 Mr. Davis came near the moment of his execution, but received a stay, first from the State of Georgia Clemency Board and later from the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court, having granted the stay, however, voted not to hear the case.  The fourth date set for his lethal injection was the final one.
It was after the appeals process had exhausted the possibilities for clemency that the case catapulted into national prominence as a number of anti-death penalty groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, Amnesty International and the NAACP took up the cause.  A majority of the witnesses who had testified against Mr. Davis at the trial publicly wavered and sought to withdraw their testimony, which they now said was coerced.  Of course this case had racial overtones.  Given Georgia’s racial history that is probably inevitable.  When the final appeal to the Georgia State Clemency Board was turned down just before the execution, rumor had it that the vote of this five person board was three to two in favor of denying clemency and proceeding with the execution.  That vote has not been confirmed, but it was noted that this board was made up of three white Americans and two black Americans, so the rumor, coupled with unverified assumptions, fueled the charges that racism was operative.
Mr. Davis was said to have declined a final meal and to have been in “good spirits.”  He was aware of the world-wide publicity that his case had attracted.  Among those who appealed for clemency on his behalf were former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict XVI, fifty-one members of congress, people from the world of entertainment and even William S. Sessions, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation head and a strong supporter of capital punishment.
There is a kind of fascination present in the American public that accompanies the process of execution.  People want to know the details, to hear of the last words, to be informed of the behavior of the condemned person.  For those who witness an execution there is always an audience to address.  A public execution is an emotional experience for many, though after the deed is done people quickly forget all but the most notorious of the victims.  Attending this execution were Officer MacPhail’s widow and her two now-grown children.  This execution for them seemed finally to have closed a door on their pain and grief, allowing them to move on.  The murder had obviously left deep scars on each of them and all three had clearly undergone real suffering.  Mrs. MacPhail characterized her family, quite appropriately it seems, as “victims.”
Also in attendance at this execution were members of Troy Davis’ family.  This experience had also defined their lives as they watched one they loved spend 22 of his 42 years of life incarcerated.  They made no comments, leaving us to wonder at their grief and the specter of the broken dreams and lost hopes that parents always seem to have for their children.  There is a deep heaviness that accompanies a wasted life.  The two families were kept apart.  They made no attempt to see each other.  No one needed that additional emotional load.
When Troy Davis was pronounced dead at 11.08 p.m. that Wednesday night, those outside the Jackson, Georgia, jail demonstrating in support of Mr. Davis dispersed.  Some were weeping, others were angry, all felt defeated.  There were undoubtedly others across this land who rejoiced, who claimed that justice had been done, the laws upheld and proper punishment administered.  There is always that division in the American body politic.
The debate on the death penalty in America is an ongoing one.  The Supreme Court temporarily suspended it in 1972 as “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore for a time unconstitutional.  They then reinstated it in 1976.  Since that time 1269 people have been put to death.  A particularly horrendous public crime always brings loud calls for capital punishment.   Some of the people who support the death penalty surely want revenge.  That is as basic and as ancient in human nature as “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  Vengeful, hard justice seems to satisfy this emotion in some people.  Others who support the death penalty believe that this punishment is a deterrent to further crime.  Deterrence is also the major argument used by politicians who favor it, but all of the studies I have read fail to demonstrate that deterrence works.  Nations that have the death penalty have no less murder and in most cases actually have a higher murder rate than those who do not.  Psychologically the death penalty has always seemed strange to me.  The argument that “because killing is so terrible a thing to do, we will punish those who kill by killing them,” does not make logical sense to me.
I do understand the need for finality, for closing the door on a devastating episode that has been like a draining sore.  I do understand the need for a government to protect its citizens from those who have demonstrated that they are not capable of living in society without doing violence to another.  Both of these needs, however, I believe can be met with sentences of life imprisonment without parole.  People argue the economics of this, suggesting that life time care for convicted murderers is an expense taxpayers ought not to be asked to bear.  The facts, however, do not bear even this out.  The endless appeals process in capital cases is far more expensive to the taxpayer than life-time incarceration for the convicted one.  Others argue that our parole system ultimately sets free those with life time sentences.  That does happen in some cases, but that can be fixed by a legislative body passing a law to make parole in these cases impossible.  This argument is thus an excuse, not a reason.
Deep down I know that I do not favor capital punishment under any circumstances.  My reasons are convincing, at least to me.  First, the wrong person can be and has been executed on more than one occasion.  Second, there does appear to be economic and racial disparity in those who are sentenced to die.  Very few wealthy people, who can afford top criminal lawyers, need fear this outcome.  Poor people with court-appointed attorneys do.  Far more blacks than whites face the threat of execution.  That gives me pause since racism runs so deep in this nation that it inevitably distorts objectivity.  Third, both the fields of sociology and psychology have taught us that life is not only deeply connected, but radically interdependent.  None of us is an island complete in himself or herself.  All of us have been shaped and formed by our human experiences.  Is stealing wrong?  Yes, of course, stealing is wrong, but so is an economic system that grinds some people so deeply into poverty that they steal in order to survive or to provide bread so that their children do not starve, as was the case with Victor Hugo’s character Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.  Is murder wrong?  Of course murder is wrong, but who created the murderer?  No one is self-made.  Abused children do become abusive adults.  I do not intend to say that the individual can be relieved of any ultimate responsibility for his or her behavior, but I do want to say that individualism is not as individualistic as once we imagined.  We are a deeply interrelated species and any of us can be warped, twisted and even destroyed by another.  Given these facts I do not believe that the judgment of society can ever fall with appropriateness solely on the shoulders of the one who commits the crime or pulls the trigger.
Finally, I am not able to square capital punishment with my faith as a Christian.  I do not believe that capital punishment is or can ultimately ever be a moral option, nor do I think war today is or can ever be a moral option.   I am also prepared to argue that if we had a vigorous and competent system of sex education in our public schools and if we made birth control universally available, I would regard abortion, save in the rarest of circumstances in which the mother’s life or health was at risk, as no longer a moral option.
We live, however, in a compromised society.  Executions strike me as the result of failed domestic policy.  Wars strike me as the result of failed foreign policy.  Most abortions strike me as the dreadful result of a compromise between rampant sexual ignorance and the inappropriate repression that rises from contrived and unhealthy sexual fears.  I, furthermore, do not think that revenge and violence are the qualities of a civilized people.  I do not think that state killing demonstrates an advanced civilization.  I still hear the words of Jesus commanding us to love our enemies.
Troy Davis, may you rest in peace.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Janet from North Tonawanda, NY, writes:
Question:
I read the account of Joseph in one of your recent columns.  I have also read previous opinions of yours in regard to the biblical character of St. Joseph and it seems you think he did not exist.  If so, who was Jesus’ father, assuming you also do not accept the myth of the virgin birth?  You also point out that Jesus has several siblings.  They must have had a father.  What is your opinion?
Answer:
Dear Janet, 

Yes, there must have been a father.  Mark’s gospel records Jesus as having four brothers, James, Judas, Simon and Joses and at least two sisters (see Mark 6).  James, the brother of Jesus, is also referred to by name in both the epistle to the Galatians and the book of Acts.  There was indeed a father, but who the father was is quite problematic. 

John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, calls Jesus the son of Joseph on two occasions (chapters 1 and 6).  A Roman soldier was said to be Jesus’ father in early church history by some critics of the Jesus movement.  We do not have much better knowledge of the mother of Jesus either despite the strong “Mary” tradition in Christian history.  The fact is that before the birth tradition was introduced by Matthew in the 9th decade, we only had one reference to the name Mary being the name of Jesus’ mother and that was in Mark (chapter 6) and it was on the lips of a hostile critic from the crowd saying of Jesus, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” 

The parents Mary and Joseph loom big in the tradition, but neither of them is big in scripture.  Take the birth stories of Matthew and Luke out and Joseph all but disappears and Mary is left in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) as a figure who was quite skeptical of Jesus and thought he was “beside himself” and tried to remove him from public life.  She is never portrayed as present at the cross in Mark, Matthew or Luke. That tradition comes into the tradition only in the Fourth Gospel, which is dated near the end of the first century.  That fact destroys the credibility of Mel Gibson’s motion picture “The Passion of the Christ.” 

In the Fourth Gospel, where there is no birth narrative, Mary appears as one trying force Jesus’ hand at the wedding in Cana of Galilee  and finally appears at the cross not to cradle the dying Jesus as Catholic piety implies but to be commended to the care of the beloved disciple.  Rudolf Bultmann sees in this episode nothing but symbols.  Mary is the symbol of Judaism.  The beloved disciple is a symbol of the Christian Church that has transcended its Jewish origins.  The Church is to care for and to honor the womb that bore it is Bultmann’s read on that Johannine narrative. 

I think it matters little who Jesus’ parents were.  It matters greatly who Jesus is. 

~John Shelby Spong





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