13.

Thirteen Ways to Live without the Death Penalty

We can look at the death penalty every which way, but it is always a travesty, even when it is not being used for reasons that are obviously unjust—to eliminate enemies, rivals, or unpopular beliefs; to maintain a leader’s hold on power; to dehumanize a group of people. Even when the death penalty is used for the supposedly civilized reasons of public safety and deterrence, or when its goal is simple retribution, even when its aims are modest, capital punishment fails to achieve them.

We cannot create new life by imposing death. Justice that kills is never justice. Justice implies at its roots the responsibility to save life, every life. When this principle is lost, justice enters into conflict with itself. Every execution adds death to death and creates unrecoverable loss, compounding victimhood with victimhood. It ratifies the worst that has already happened by multiplying its destructive effect, prolonging it in time and involving others. It is a defeat for life, a victory for death.

So what should we do instead? We should work for the victory of life over death.

Specifically, we should work to abolish the death penalty. But how? Here are thirteen ways of joining life row.

1.

Work to ensure that your government has a constitution that prohibits the death penalty altogether.

Ninety-seven countries have abolished the death penalty. Short of full abolition, dozens of countries whose populaces are still divided over capital punishment have at least abolished it for lesser crimes like theft, and another eight countries have abolished it for “ordinary crimes” while keeping it available under military law.

2.

Work to bring about a moratorium on executions, whether by law or in practice.

A moratorium is a written commitment on the part of a government to forgo the practice of capital punishment, leaving aside broader questions of whether the death penalty can ever be useful or effective. As it falls short of a constitutional ban, a moratorium is something of a partial measure. Still, the patchwork of nations that have enacted moratoria on executions or more partial bans on the death penalty totals nearly 150—about three-quarters of the world where capital punishment is not practiced.

3.

Create support for the human rights protocol now gaining momentum worldwide.

As of late 2014, eighty-one countries had signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Once ratified by a nation’s parliament, this protocol binds that nation not to allow anyone under its jurisdiction to be executed.

150 countries have to ratify the Protocol before it can take effect. With only eighty-one signatories so far, we have a long way to go. This is another way to work for the abolition of the death penalty: by applying pressure on individual governments to ratify the Protocol. An international association of MPs opposed to the death penalty associated with Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA) is taking shape, and this body could be an effective tool, because parliamentarians can influence their peers in government, so that those who are already working to promote the Protocol in retentionist countries do not feel as isolated.

4.

Show how the death penalty actually works—and doesn’t work.

This one is easy—because there is a huge mass of evidence demonstrating that the death penalty doesn’t work. The thing to do is to put all that information to good use. Develop studies on the ground. Show how prevalent the death penalty is in certain places. Illustrate how ineffectual it is in reducing prison costs and deterring further crimes. Demonstrate how disproportionately it affects poor people, people of color, immigrants, undocumented citizens, and people with intellectual disabilities. Point out how few capital cases actually result in executions, noting the cost of capital prisoners’ prolonged incarceration and appeals process. Emphasize how many death sentences are based on corrupt or insufficient evidence, murky or contradictory eyewitness testimony, or jailhouse plea bargains.

5.

Talk to your friends, your parents, your children.

Much of the information that I present in this short book has not been widely available before. Talk to people. Share. You’ll be amazed at how receptive most people are to opening up this dark corner of our world and letting light and air in. Talk to lawyers, bar associations, teachers, journalists, and opinion makers.

6.

Work to advance the understanding that freedom from death is a basic and universal human right.

The concept of a “universal human right” may sound abstract, but this is an approach that is much more useful and practical than it sounds—in Africa, especially. And even in the US it is a useful formulation, one that people can benefit from hearing more often than they do now.

The Organization of American States requires that all member states implement the American Convention on Human Rights, which explicitly forbids the reinstatement of the death penalty by any member country and has a specific protocol calling for its abolition. Now the African Union is working toward something similar: a resolution modeled on the UN General Assembly Resolution that calls for a “moratorium on the use of the death penalty.”

This can be an effective pursuit for international and local activists alike. In the European Union, the process already has a natural ally in the Council of Europe. The European Convention on Human Rights forbids the death penalty in all circumstances. Any state that wishes to be a party to this convention must implement Protocols 6 and 13, which uncompromisingly demand abolition. And in this way, through the language of international amity and cooperation, the nations of the world create and bind themselves to a culture of life row.

7.

Work to abolish the death penalty within yourself.

We can help abolish the death penalty by starting with ourselves—by working to reduce our level of anger, our habits of retaliation, and our fear that we will not be taken seriously if we don’t marshal all the resources of will and control available to us.

Retaliation is a shortcut that political leaders often take—and one that the citizens of the world will one day refuse. We can all play a role in bringing this about by refusing to take retaliatory postures in our own lives, even when we are wronged, and thus overcoming habits of revenge.

8.

Accept that there is nothing wrong with allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.

Just as we are taught to hold back from sharing the pain of others, so too we are taught to believe that if we have too many deep feelings of our own we’ll wind up feeling too much pain. The fear of being hurt in our relationships often wins out over the chance to live through our relationships.

We all strive for simplicity. But oversimplification is not the solution.

Create a life row where a death row was.

9.

Work to create a society that is not
enslaved to revenge and fear.

In the West, recent decades especially have been marked by a culture of fear. Fear of terrorist attacks, of street crime, of the unexpected ups and downs of the economy, and fear of not knowing who we are. In a global and interconnected world, many live in a state of true disorientation: no homeland, no knowledge of one’s roots, no control over one’s political environment.

To live with the death penalty is to live under the illusion that if we as a society find an enemy and dispel it, fear will disappear from our lives and we will feel at home in the world. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case: we look for enemies because we do not know, too often, who we are, how we want to live, and where we want to go. In times of uncertainty everyone can become an enemy. Those on death row give expression to our barely suppressed wish to do away with them all.

The alternative is to live without fear—even without fear of senseless death.

Revenge is always distance. But we know that love can never be death, it can only mean life.

Anyone can defeat that special kind of disease that aims to create a society of dumb people, people who cannot be touched by anything, who are not ready to fight for the people they love when the time comes.

If there is a creed that unites many of us in the world today, it is individualism. But the deeper truth is that no man or woman is an island.

10.

Recognize that the death penalty has not made us any safer and that no one executed by the state can be said to have “gotten what they deserved.”

To envision a world without the death penalty is to work for a safer world. It starts, simply enough, with the recognition that things are never black and white, that no party to any dispute has a monopoly on good or evil. Whatever may have happened, whatever crimes may have been committed, there is humanity on death row—decent people who know human weakness, who feel compassion for their victims and sorrow for what they or others did. There are even, perhaps, saints, who after a long pilgrimage towards awareness and purification have come to know the hell their acts have created for other people.

11.

Try to identify with the victims of the death penalty as an act of compassion.

People in prison live lives that are extraordinary in their lacks and absences: no natural light, no liberty, no human companionship, no difference between one day and the next, no right to live free from fear and violence. Many succumb to the trials of prison life. Many others become better people than they were before. Death row is a place where one is inevitably and profoundly changed: either dehumanized or enriched and refined in humanity.

We can learn that the right way to demonstrate our grief for a murdered loved one is not anger and hatred. That is a trap. Many people fear that if they do not hate the person who murdered their spouse, brother, sister, or friend, they haven’t shown love for their beloved. That is never true.

Compassion is never a lack of strength. Instead, it is strength expressed at its highest, least primitive level.

12.

Start corresponding with a person on death row, their relatives, and relatives of their victims.

Individual people can do it; school and church groups can do it; neighborhoods and towns can do it. You can be pen pals with a death row prisoner, with a death row prisoner’s relatives, or with the relatives of victims. However it comes about, such correspondence builds a bridge between two worlds that generally do not communicate. For a person on death row, friendship with a free person is a window to the world outside. Often the correspondent becomes like a brother or sister, the family the prisoner never had.

Once the letters are going back and forth, consider it an opportunity to set aside or overcome all the differences in power and freedom between the two of you. The person on death row will remember every word, every crumb of human candor, while our own lives are so full that we hardly pay attention to the details of them. In this way both partners can grow.

We can also befriend and empathize with the families of both death row prisoners and their victims. This is perhaps the darkest and most neglected side of the death penalty.

The quality of prison life is a test of civilization for a whole society. A society that does not hide its sick, its old, and even its guilty is a society that is less afraid of sickness, old age, and criminality; lives in extremis become reminders of how various life is.

13.

Join together with others; ask one another, what can be done that hasn’t already been done?

There are nearly as many ways of resisting the death penalty and its culture of revenge as there are people. In contemplating forms of resistance, you may find a way that nobody else has tried before.

Many NGOs are internationally active in trying to envision ways of resisting the death penalty: Amnesty International, Death Penalty Focus, Hands Off Cain, the Community of Sant’Egidio, Together Against the Death Penalty, Texas Coalition, Great Caribbean for Life, Murders’ Victims Families for Human Rights, and Journey of Hope, to name a few.

In a campaign like the one against capital punishment, it’s always better to create a network of activists with whom we can share hopes, labor, and commitment—whether two or three friends, a group of local people, or an international movement. That’s the reason to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty on October 10, and on November 30 to support the Cities for Life, Cities Against the Death Penalty movement.

You can help build a consensus behind the UN resolution against the death penalty; you can put pressure on your government to implement it, using the recommendations contained in the Secretary General’s biennial Report as a tool. You can urge your elected leaders to promote the ratification of binding treaties such as the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights. And while you do, remember: nothing is impossible.

Give this book as a gift to someone you care about. Contact the publisher to inquire about discounts on bulk purchases. If you or someone you love is a prisoner, write to the publisher for a free copy.

A world without the death penalty: it is possible. And we can see it. It is happening already.