JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on Wednesday September 24, 1997, I watched as the state of Missouri put Samuel McDonald to death by lethal injection. I had never wanted to witness an execution, and I was devastated by what I saw. How did I come to be at the Potosi Correctional Institute on that night? It had to do with friendship, and with the unforeseen and frightening implications of taking even the smallest step forward in faith.
Since my late teens I have opposed the death penalty. I have had many reasons: Poor and minority defendants are executed in grossly disproportionate numbers. Innocent people are sometimes sentenced to death. There is no evidence that the death penalty reduces the rate of violent crime. The rest of the Western world has managed to function without executing criminals.
But the heart of my opposition grew out of my religious commitments. As a Christian, it seems to me that the death penalty violates the essence of Christ's teachings to choose mercy over revenge, to love our enemies and to forswear all violence.
For all of this, my opposition to capital punishment remained abstract. This was because, in the late 1960s, capital punishment almost disappeared from the American landscape. It seemed gone for good in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court (Furman v. Georgia) held that the death penalty is "arbitrary" and "capricious." But just four years later, the court (Gregg v. Georgia) ruled that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution as long as there are adequate due-process procedures. This ruling opened the door for states to resume their use of the death penalty. In the two decades since Gregg v. Georgia, 40 states have instituted it for certain types of murder.
One of the states most eager to resume executions was Missouri. By the time I moved there in 1984, dozens of individuals had been sentenced to die. I was appalled. I wish I could say that I reacted by throwing myself (at least in some metaphorical sense) into the gears of Missouri's "killing machine." But the truth is that I acted on my moral outrage in a decidedly modest fashion. Following up on a notice in The Other Side, I contacted the Death Row Support Project for the name of a condemned prisoner with whom I could correspond. This is how I became acquainted with Samuel McDonald, or #CP-17, as he's known in the Missouri correctional system.
Read more>>> Source: Christian Century, Nov 11, 1998 by William Vance Jr. Trollinger
