Stephen Dear, executive director of the Carrboro-based People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, is keeping a close eye on Raleigh.
Last year, the North Carolina House of Representatives passed the Racial Justice Act, which, if approved by the Senate, will allow a person accused of a capital crime to request a court review of whether race played a role in the prosecutor’s decision to request the death penalty or in a defendant subsequently being sentenced to death.
Dear and other proponents of the bill argue there’s substantial reason for concern that race is a contributing factor in who gets sentenced to death in this country.
A study of the death penalty in North Carolina conducted at UNC in 2001 found that defendants who killed a white person were three and a half times more likely to receive the death penalty than those who killed a person of color.
The Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center reports that since the death penalty was resumed in the U.S. in 1977 after a 10-year moratorium, 238 people have been executed for committing an interracial murder. Of those cases, 223 involved a black defendant and a while victim; only 15 involved a white defendant and a black victim.
Should the Senate pass the Racial Justice Act (it’s uncertain whether they’ll get to it in the current session), Dear will welcome it as an important step in what he believes to be an incremental “eroding away†of the death penalty in America.
Executions have currently been suspended in North Carolina (the state is one of 36 that still have the death penalty). Last year, in response to a challenge to the state’s use of lethal injections, the N.C. Council of State approved changes to execution protocol that included a statement assuring that a doctor would be present at executions to monitor the condemned inmate’s essential body functions. But less than a year prior, the N.C. Medical Board issued a policy statement affirming that “physician participation in capital punishment is a departure from the ethics of the medical profession,†and that while doctors could be present at executions, they could not participate in any manner. The medical board is now appealing a ruling against its position.
Meanwhile, five death-row inmates have filed suit on the grounds that their attorneys weren’t allowed to present evidence to the council when it was considering the new protocol.
Dear isn’t confident either of those cases will be won. Should they be lost, he says, “We could have an unprecedented number of executions in 2009.â€
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP) was formed in 1994 by a group of five clergy and lay people (Chapel Hill resident Tye Hunter, executive director of Indigent Defense Services, was among them. Bob Seymour, for whom Orange County’s Robert and Pearl Seymour Center is named, was very early involved.) Dear came onboard in 1997.
“Our mission,†says Dear, “is to educate and mobilize faith communities to act to abolish the death penalty in the United States.â€
He and Amanda Lattanzio, a Jesuit volunteer serving as a community organizer, comprise the PFADP staff. About 60 percent of funding comes from foundations, 40 percent from individuals.
“We shouldn’t exist,†says Dear, “People of Faith Against the Death Penalty should not have to exist at all. It’s a tragedy that we exist and that our mission is to educate and mobilize faith communities to do what they’re formed to do.
“The mainline Christian churches have been opposed to the death penalty since the 1950s and they don’t even know that – their own local pastors don’t know that and certainly the people in the pews don’t know that.â€
Reminding them is Dear’s task.
“I’m talking about the mainline churches,†Dear says. He doesn’t spend much time with fundamentalist churches.
Dear’s theory, he says, “is that if we could just get the people who agree with us mobilized, we’ll win. We’ll end the death penalty. But they’re not mobilized because they don’t even know that they have all these resources.
“When we started, I think we were seen – and to some people still are seen – as the people who protest on the nights of executions.â€
That’s not what Dear is asking people to do though: “In fact, I don’t want people to come to vigils if they haven’t done other things. Don’t come protest when somebody is being executed. Call your senator; I’d rather you do that.â€
Relatively speaking, the anti-death penalty movement in North Carolina is pretty strong. Dear calls organizational efforts here relative to South Carolina, for example, “polar opposites … they’re where North Carolina was in the early sixties.â€
That’s thanks to people like the late Rev. W.W. Finlator of Raleigh, a longtime member of PFADP’s board of advisors and a founder, in 1965, of North Carolinians Against the Death Penalty, which in 2003 changed its name to the North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium.
Faith based
So what role does the word “faith†play in PFADP’s work?
“The way one of our local organizers put it,†Dear says, “is if you’re comfortable with us, we’re comfortable with you – whatever the word [faith] means to you.â€
Dear grew up attending Catholic school and going to mass on Sunday at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church in Potomac, Maryland, where, he says, he would look up at an “enormous crucifix of this sickly thin Jesus,†contemplating the man’s fate.
“I’ve never understood how Christians could support the death penalty when our savior was born homeless and killed as a death row prisoner. I just don’t understand that. I’m still scratching my head after 11 years with People of Faith.â€
Genesis 9:6 reads: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.â€
“If you ask me,†says Dear, “that’s a warning: If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. It’s not saying it is proper for government to kill on God’s behalf. But people seem to want to believe that. And they ignore the numerous examples of where the Old Testament calls for the death penalty for all sorts of sins.†Adultery, for example; gluttony. The stoning of children for bad behavior.
“This work can change your view of what churches are all about,†Dear says, “and it makes me think that there are many … places that Martin Luther King rightly called ‘irrelevant social clubs.’â€
Dear and Lattanzio tell of having recently experienced a very trying day – and then Rick Edens, co-pastor of the United Church of Chapel Hill walked in.
“He was all excited,†Dear says. “He has this great idea; and he’s just engaged.†Ten bad experiences are then wiped away, Dear says, and faith is reconfirmed.
Lattanzio says she was concerned coming in that this work might render her irreversibly cynical: “It’s something Steve and I talk about quite a bit when we have hard days. But it hasn’t…. I feel I’ve learned so much this year about the world around me.â€
Dear talks of just having had lunch with the head of North Carolina Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.
“I’ve met so many incredibly wonderful people who have been through unimaginable horror,†he says, “and who are healing themselves and their communities by their work against the death penalty.â€
Step by step
Progress, says Dear, has come in increments:
“Eleven years ago, when I started here, I never really thought we’d be in the great position of having abolished the death penalty for people with mental retardation and then had five or six enormously important reforms that have really changed the death penalty.â€
As examples, he cites district attorneys being given the discretion of whether or not to pursue the death penalty in first-degree murder cases and the founding of the Office of Indigent Defense Services.
Another important development was the creation of the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission, which provides a forum for prosecutors, DAs, judges, law-enforcement agents and victims’ advocates to discuss how to decrease the possibility of wrongful convictions. The commission is viewed as a model for other states.
November could be a very critical month in the history of the death penalty in North Carolina. We’ll have a new governor then. And, should the effective moratorium be lifted, we may soon have a backlog of executions.
How will the new governor respond?
If it’s Pat McCrory, the Republican candidate, Dear says, “He’ll have his pens ready to sign [the orders of execution] as fast as he can.â€
Dear says that in 2000, as mayor of Charlotte, McCrory was the only elected official in North Carolina who actively organized against a PFADP-sponsored moratorium on the death penalty.
“He was very passionately pro-death penalty,†Dear recalls.
As for Beverly Perdue, the Democratic candidate, Dear says that on April 30, 2003, the day the North Carolina Senate passed the moratorium bill, she, as lieutenant governor, gave a speech in favor of the bill, which passed.
“She has repeatedly since said she supports a moratorium…. So we’re very hopeful that Governor Perdue certainly will be a breath of fresh air as compared with Governor Easley.â€
Dear says he believes support for the death penalty in this country “is eroding away.â€
A 2006 Gallup Poll found that support for the death penalty had declined from 80 percent in 1994 to 65 percent. When respondents were asked to consider life without parole as an alternative, 48 chose that option; 47 percent
chose execution.
This decline in support is probably due in some large measure to deteriorating public confidence in its effectiveness.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that only one percent of police chiefs polled believe that expanding the death penalty would be an effective detterent to crime, while 31 percent said reducing drug abuse would help and 17 percent listed more jobs and a better economy.
But this decline of confidence in the death penalty might well be primarily attributable to the growing number of exonerations. Since 1973, 129 death row inmates have been exonerated. Eight of those were in North Carolina, three in the past six months.
“It’s going to wither away,†Dear says. “I’m not sure if the death penalty will completely be abolished in America. Because I think for terrorism and some massive crimes it might still be on the books.
“But in terms of street crime, it will be largely taken off the books.â€
Over time, Dear believes, we’ll see fewer and fewer executions, “and people will be making the argument, ‘Why do we have this? We don’t use it. It’s really expensive; these trials are incredibly expensive.’ And more politicians will then feel comfortable raising those questions.â€
Politicians from rural communities – those in particular are the voices Dear would like to hear raised in opposition. He and Lattanzio travel the state – to Louisburg, Shallotte and Cullowhee – addressing gatherings large and mostly small, generally at churches with a sympathetic pastor.
“I’m happy with whoever shows up, Dear says. When only five people turned out in Louisburg, “I said, ‘We made a few good friends tonight.’ And that’s great. We’ll follow up and work with those people.â€
So when then will the death penalty be essentially no more? Dear is uncertain.
“I came here thinking I was going to be hitting my head against the wall for a few years in a sort of prophetic call to abolish the death penalty: ‘My brothers and sisters in North Carolina, this is completely against what we are about and what we as people of faith should be about.’ And I thought that would be the message I would be working on for however long I was here. I didn’t think things would really change. But things have changed; unbelievably.
“So, things could continue to change. They will continue to change. It’s just a matter of how long [it will take].
“I guess I tend to think 10 to 20 years. But I don’t really know. So much can change in that time.â€
The leadership councils of some Christian denominations in the U.S. have released statements in opposition to the death penalty.
These statements reflect social positions that have questionable biblical foundation and, often, they reflect positions which selectively only discuss the mercy of God and improperly avoid the justice of God.
For example, some believe that it would be hypocritical for Christians to support capital punishment, because that would suggest that some peoples sins are not forgivable. They argue that capital punishment conflicts with Jesus’ teachings – that, if we are not willing to forgive, then we place ourselves outside of God’s forgiveness.
Such pronouncements are hardly convincing and are biblically inaccurate.
All death row inmates, no matter how vile and numerous their misdeeds, are subject to the forgiveness of men and of God and, more importantly, they are subject to redemption and eternal salvation.
Indeed, God compels us, individually, to forgive those who have harmed us. This, in no way, conflicts with the biblical mandate that the government authority impose the death penalty in deserving cases.
Social positions cannot and do not replace biblical instruction. Furthermore, the murder victim is hardly capable of forgiving the murderer. The biblical requirement to forgive those who injure us is an individual requirement. Therefore, no one, other than God, has the moral authority to forgive the crime of murder.Â
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I have a friend on nc deathrow and he need help- he tells me he is innocent and i believe him. he says he has proof that he is innocent-he needs someone to help him fight for his life-i’m trying to help him but i don’t know what to do to help him–PLEASE Help US!!