wfn.org | Capital punishment for those with no capital, Lowery says

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

June 6, 2001   News media contact: Joretta Purdue ·(202) 546-8722·Washington
10-31-71B {259}

WASHINGTON (UMNS) - Civil rights activist and United Methodist clergyman,
the Rev. Joseph Lowery,  took an unequivocal stand against capital
punishment in a panel discussion in Washington June 5.

"We cannot defend life by destroying life," he said at a discussion of
Religious Reflections on the Death Penalty," sponsored by the Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life. "We need a time out on this atrocious barbarism,"
he declared.

The co-founder and president emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and chairman of the Black Leadership Forum remarked that place,
race, inequity and iniquity are too often determinants in who is sentenced
to the death penalty. He said that eight out of every 10 people executed in
the South are minorities. In Georgia, where Lowery lives, African-Americans
are 15 percent of the population and 50 percent of the people on the state's
death row.

The poor are "vigorously prosecuted and poorly defended," Lowery said. 

"Capital punishment is for people who have no capital," he emphasized.

"It is ironic that the Bible Belt means the Killing Belt," he said. "We've
lost reverence for life."  The challenge to the religious community is to
restore the reverence of life, he urged. "You don't protect society by
making all of us killers," which is what happens in executions, he observed.
"Society has already crumbled," Lowery said, when children kill other
students and teachers with automatic weapons.

In his introduction moderator E.J. Dionne Jr., co-chair of the Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life, remarked that there is no religious consensus on
capital punishment and that there are people within each religious body that
disagree on that organization's position.

Officials in the Catholic Church have called for a moratorium on capital
punishment, reported John L. Carr, director of the Department of Social
Development and World Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. The
bishops oppose the death penalty because of "what it does to the rest of us"
by perpetuating the cycle of violence, he said.

The pope, Carr noted, has called for an unconditional pro-life stance
including abolishing capital punishment and abortion. The bishops have
called for an end to the death penalty, he added.

Orthodox Judaism favors a moratorium but not the abolition of capital
punishment, according to Nathan J. Diament, director of public policy for
the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. 

"Baptists traditionally supported capital punishment," and last year the
Southern Baptist Convention went on record with this position, said Barrett
I. Duke Jr., vice president for research and director of the Research
Institute of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist
Convention's agency for social and moral concerns.

Duke said that Baptists believe capital punishment is "a biblical solution"
for murder. He also said that this punishment should be applied with justice
and that every effort should be made to remove racial and economic
inequities. He further explained that Southern Baptists believe all people
are conceived with the right to life "but some forfeit that right." That
church has not taken a position on a moratorium.

"The death penalty seeks vengeance," asserted Lowery. In imposing it, the
state sets a poor example, he said. He cited a study by Columbia University
that concluded two out of three capital cases are seriously flawed. 

States that have the death penalty often have higher rates of homicide,
Lowery argued. He said the United States is filling up jails and privatizing
prisons to the point where the industry seeks a high occupancy rate to make
a profit.

Carr said that the Catholic Church's catechism has been changed to say that
the state has developed other ways of protecting society, so that it no
longer needs capital punishment. An example of an alternative is
incarceration. He advocated a "moral revolution."  

He observed that the only people who are more in favor of capital punishment
than the American public are the American politicians.

Lowery agreed about politicians who are very pro-death penalty to win
elections, and he urged the churches "to take them on."

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org