wfn.org | Capital Punishment Discussion

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"UNITED METHODIST DAILY NEWS" by SUSAN PEEK on Aug. 11, 1991 at 13:58 Eastern,
about FULL TEXT RELEASES FROM UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE (3482 notes).

Note 3479 by UMNS on March 11, 1997 at 16:15 Eastern (4164 characters).

Produced by United Methodist News Service, official news agency of
the United Methodist Church, with offices in Nashville, Tenn., New
York, and Washington.

Contact:  Joretta Purdue                      125(10-31-71B){3479}
          Washington, D.C.  (202) 546-8722          March 11, 1997

EDITORS NOTE: This story may accompany UMNS # 123 {3477}.

Prison minister says society
is failing its young people

     WASHINGTON (UMNS) -- Young people have been failed by the
government, the church and their families, a United Methodist
clergyman engaged in prison ministries told members of the
denomination's Board of Church and Society here Feb. 8.
     The Rev. Robert Lee Abrams, minister of Riley Chapel and
Mount Pleasant United Methodist Churches, Gulfport, Miss., was
part of a panel on capital punishment that followed the showing of
"Dead Man Walking," a film based on a nun's death row ministry, at
the spring board meeting.
     Abrams has first-hand experience with being failed by society
and its institutions. As a civil rights protestor in the 1960's he
was beaten and jailed for his efforts, he said. He recalled that
he was a very angry man -- angry at the church as well for its
support first of slavery and then of the status quo.
     Earlier as a black child in black schools in Mississippi, he
had been told by a teacher not to enroll in the college
preparatory classes because he could not do the work and "would
never amount to anything." He went on to overcome dyslexia, a
learning disability, and graduated from Tougaloo College and
Candler School of Theology.
     Now, chairman of the subcommittee for prison ministry of the
Mississippi Conference Committee on Church and Society, Abrams has
taken up the cause of Azi Kambule, an indigent South African teen-
ager who is facing the death penalty in Mississippi.
     "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Abrams.
     Kambule, who was born and raised in the black township of
Soweto, outside Johannesburg, S.A., came to the United States in
1994, when his mother received a college scholarship. Azi fell in
with an older crowd and now is charged as an accomplice in a
carjacking murder. The trial originally scheduled for March 3 has
been postponed until May 5.
     Abrams is the financial administrator and a fund raiser for
the Azi Kambule Defense Fund. He is also a member of Coast Prison
Ministries, Inc. and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty.
     "In the church we have made a lot of wrong decisions, but we
cannot allow our young people to be put to death because we made
mistakes," Abrams declared.
     The church, he asserted, too often makes decisions on a
financial basis rather than on moral grounds.
     A 16-year-old can not go to a theater and see "Dead Man
Walking," but he or she can live it and be executed, commented
Steven Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty.
     Hawkins also said that in the United States, the death
penalty has taken the place of lynching. Poverty and race are two
factors disproportionately represented among those sentenced to
death, he stated. Two-thirds of the people on death row in
Pennsylvania are African Americans, he added. 
     Tonya McClary, a public defender in Baltimore, agreed, noting
that last year an international committee of jurists, found that
most of the people sentenced to death are people of color and poor
people.
     "We're killing people who are mentally ill," she lamented.
Sometimes they do not even understand what is happening to them,
she said, recounting the story of one young man who saved the
dessert from his last meal, thinking he could eat it later.
     Pat Clark of the criminal justice program of the National
American Friends Service Committee, warned that if a society
believes it can take the life of its prisoners, then it probably
believes it can do anything to its citizens.
     Clark is a board member of Murder Victims Families for
Reconciliation, and as a child experienced within six months the
murders of two family members.
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