Once Again, A Minority View

January 18, 1995

On Monday, January 17, in Union, South Carolina, Susan Smith’s prosecutor said in the courtroom that he had to seek the death penalty for her. Susan Smith confessed to the murder of her two young sons after initially alleging that a carjacker kidnapped the little boys. Added to the notoriety was her false statement that the kidnapper was a Black man.

The prosecuting attorney, Tommy Pope, was also quoted that he sought her death by electrocution to “assure that people remembered the two young sons she drowned were the victims and not her.”

For more than 67 years I have been opposed to capital punishment, no matter how vicious the crime. That makes me a member of another minority because there is no doubt that a vast majority of the people of this country support the death penalty. Why do I maintain this stance when I am so outnumbered?

Late on an August evening in 1927, a teen-age boy sat in the kitchen corner while a tinny, primitive radio reported a story that went around the world. Five miles away in an old, dismal, rat-infested prison, located near a clattering, ugly bridge spanning a large railroad switching yard, the electric lights dimmed and brightened several times. After a short period of time, the dimming and brightening re-occurred. The pattern of dimming signified the instants when thousands of volts of electricity were jolted into the bodies of two men, Sacco and Vanzetti. Sixty-seven years ago, I was that teen-ager who listened with awed and fearful fascination.

It was a night to remember. The radio reporter described the thousands of people congregated in the streets near Charlestown State Prison, muttering and surging as the two immigrants, one a shoe-worker, one a fish pedlar, were killed by decree of the State of Massachusetts. In the years that followed, I read everything I could find about the case, and came to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent of the crime for which they were executed. Because they were political anarchists and economic radicals they were the victims of an unjust verdict and a prejudiced judge.

The youthful experience of living near enough to the death house at Charlestown State Prison, so that, a few years later, almost daily I would drive by that institution of hopelessness, undoubtedly played a role in bringing me to a conviction that capital punishment is morally wrong, socially ineffective and personally harmful.

That experience branded me as far as capital punishment is concerned. I could muster the arguments against the death penalty, but I surmise that most of you are familiar with the details: that the death penalty does does not deter capital crimes or reform people; that feelings of revenge play a large part; that innocent persons have been executed; and that the law is not equally applied. (When is the last time you knew of a rich person being executed? In the present notorious O.J. case, the prosecutors announced before the trial begins that they will not seek the death penalty.)

I will concede as Charles Beals once pointed out that if a murderer is executed, that particular he/she will never kill another person. But, to me, that point is transcended by the persuasive case against the death penalty.

Furthermore, history teaches me that executions once thought legal and just, we would look on as both horrible and perversions of freedom, justice, and mercy. For example, Leonard Levy points out in his scholarly and illuminating study, BLASPHEMY:

In 13th century England, a deacon converted to Judaism when he fell in love with a Jewish woman. Found guilty of apostasy in an ecclesiastical court, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the deacon was executed by being burned at the stake.

Adam Duff, in the 14th century, was burned alive in Dublin because he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. That hits me where I live because I share Adam Duff’s anti-Trinitarianism.

Levy quotes a Catholic source who pointed out that in the last four years of (“Bloody”) Mary’s reign, something like 273 of her subjects were executed by burning because they obstinately adhered to beliefs that contradicted the teachings of the Roman Catholic church.

Protestants need not feel smug or self-righteous, because they were equally cruel. The Puritans in the the Massachusetts Bay Colony had 13 crimes subject to the death penalty by hanging: witchcraft, idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, rape, adultery, bestiality, sodomy, false witness with intent to kill, and a child 16 years or older who was “stubborn” or “rebellious”. All these laws, except rape, were taken from the first five books of the Old Testament. (If you are a believer in the complete inerrancy of the Bible, let me know so I can warn people). Source: ALBION’S SEED, David Hackett Fisher.

Thus, I still don’t hold with the death penalty. Shakespeare has Prospero say about those who tried to kill him and his child, and who are now in his power:

“Yet with my nobler reason gainst fury
Do I take my part:
The rarer action is in virtue
than in vengeance.” (THE TEMPEST, Act V, Sc. 1)

While I don’t particularly feel virtuous, like Prospero, I believe that any justification for the death penalty is far outweighed by its failure to solve social problems, except sating the itch for vengeance.

Thus, I hope that the jury and/or judge do not pronounce execution for Susan Smith even though dreadful was her crime.