We are not good enough to kill those who kill. We are too good to kill those who kill.
On November 22, 2006, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that it is not cruel and unusual punishment to execute murderers by lethal injection. “Conflicting medical testimony prevents us from stating categorically that a prisoner feels no pain,” the court declared. “But the prohibition is against cruel punishment and does not require a complete absence of pain.” On December 15, 2006, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida suspended the death penalty because of the troubled and lengthy execution of Angel Nieves Diaz. Bush appointed a committee to study lethal injections and their constitutionality and inhumanity. Shortly after Bush’s decision, a federal judge in California ruled against the lethal injection system as a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. On September 28, 2007, in response to the United States Supreme Court’s halting of an execution in Texas, officials in that state declared their intentions to proceed with impending executions. At that time, 25 Texas inmates had been executed in Huntsville in 2007 by lethal injection.
These intense and conflicting judgments point to our considerable and ongoing disagreements regarding our just responses to those who have taken the lives of others. We continue to wrestle with the death penalty, as we have for decades. Good people remain at odds concerning what we should do for our common good in the face of people who kill.
I have wrestled with these matters since childhood. When I was a boy, my family lived next door to a church in Huntington, W. Va. There was a ping-pong table in the church basement. My best friend and I loved to go down there and play ping-pong. He was a member of that church, and periodically I attended youth fellowship with him so they’d let us play ping-pong during the long summer days.
One day, construction workers started digging up the ground in back of the church. They even tore down the magnificent walnut tree. I had spent hours under that tree. With two bricks, I had removed the green hulls that covered the walnut shells, and I had put the walnuts in fruit sacks so they could dry. I wore a pair of old heavy work gloves to keep the walnut stains off my hands.
Soon I met an important-looking man in that torn-up churchyard. He carried a pencil, a clipboard, and a measuring tape. Miller was his name — Mr. Miller. He seemed rather old at the time, but he probably wasn’t. Mr. Miller often stopped and talked with me, and it didn’t take me long to find out that his construction company was building a new education wing on the church where I played ping-pong.
Sometimes, in the evening, after the workers had gone home, Mr. Miller would bring Mrs. Miller out to the construction site to review the progress of the job. All I can remember about Mrs. Miller is that she was a kindly woman. I recall that she and her husband really seemed to belong together. They were nice people.
Then, one day, Mrs. Miller was murdered. I saw her picture on the front page of our morning newspaper, The Herald Advertiser. Not long afterward, I saw a picture of her killer. He was a man who had done odd jobs for the Millers at their home. His name was Elmer David Brunner.
As a schoolboy, I followed the Brunner trial with much interest. Indeed, I read every word The Herald Advertiser printed when he was electrocuted at the state penitentiary at Moundsville, W. Va. I also remember asking lots of questions about the murder. My schoolteacher and members of my family and community told me the following things. People who kill must be electrocuted. They must be executed for the sake of retribution, that is, to pay a price. They must be executed in order to protect society.
A few years later, I was with several young people and adults who were touring the Moundsville prison. There, unforgettably, an official showed us the chair where Elmer David Brunner had been killed for killing Mrs. Miller. There I was told again about our great need to protect society.
Of course, you and I know, deep in our hearts, that our society does need to be protected from all the people who take the lives of others. We’re not naïve bleeding hearts; we must be protected. To be sure, our society deserves to be protected. People who kill should be punished very seriously.
Yet, here is a potentially painful rub. Even as a boy, I never believed that we should kill the killers. Why? Well, I couldn’t tell you then. I couldn’t put it into words. Then, my instincts were ahead of my words, ahead of my thought processes. But now, I can tell you why.
Today two biblical/theological teachings shape my thinking on the matter. First, we’re not good enough to execute people. And second, we’re potentially too good to execute people. That is to say, in light of the resumption of capital punishment throughout our country, Christians must seek to inspire others to take human sin seriously and to take human dignity seriously. Human sin: we’re not good enough to take life. Human dignity: we’re too good to take life.
As individuals and as groups, we’re not good enough to take a human life deliberately, rationally, and intentionally. As theologian John H. Leith explains: “The coolly calculated, rational, clinical taking of life in capital punishment is an offense against the Christian understanding of human existence and incongruent with our human status as creatures who are not only limited by time and space, but also by our own sinfulness.”
In John’s gospel (8:1-11), Jesus our teacher is very helpful. There is a woman — an adulteress. The law is quite clear. The law says she should be killed. The law of Moses says she should be stoned to death. Moreover, she is the only one brought before the religious authorities. A double standard, grossly unjust and suffused with discrimination, appears to be at work. Where is the man with whom she has committed adultery? Why is he not being held accountable to the same law? As Cornelius Plantinga has observed, either they are applying “a double standard or else … the woman had managed to commit adultery alone.” What to do? The religious authorities ask Jesus his opinion. If he says do not stone her, he is a rebel — a rebel against the law of Moses, a law that prescribes the death penalty, not only for killers and adulterers, but also for striking a parent, for witchcraft, for breaking the Sabbath, for sacrificing to a strange god, and for many other interesting deeds.
However, there isn’t anybody who is good enough to stone the woman. That’s the problem. There isn’t anybody good enough to take another life rationally, clinically, and systematically. There isn’t anybody good enough to kill another person. Go ahead and do it. As Jesus cautions, let the person who is without sin, and let the person who has never had lust and adultery in his/her own heart go ahead and put the woman to death.
According to The Letter to the Hebrews (4:15), Jesus is tempted in every way that we are tempted, yet Jesus is the only one in the world who is without sin. If that confession is true, then Jesus is the only one in the world who is good enough to kill the woman caught in adultery. And instead of wanting to kill her for breaking Moses’ law, Jesus goes to the cross of capital punishment and is killed in her place! As Karl Barth explains, the judge is judged in her (our) place. The one who should be the accuser becomes the accused.
No, there isn’t anybody good enough, finally and totally, to keep the law of Moses — not even Moses, who broke his own law. I find it fascinating that two of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament were Moses and David: Moses, who killed an Egyptian with his own hands, then ran away to hide in a far country; David, who murdered Uriah the Hittite in order to have Uriah’s beautiful wife, Bathsheba.
My second biblical/theological understanding about this critical issue is that you and I are too good to take life. We are potentially too good to take a human life rationally, deliberately, clinically, and intentionally.
Frankly, I don’t want to set that kind of example before the children of our society. Pardon the immodesty, but I think I’m a little bit better than that. I simply refuse to say to our children, “Kids, this is the best we can do. We’ve got to kill those who kill. Yes, we can discover new planets; we can communicate with people on the other side of the world; and we can find cures for deadly diseases, but the only way we can protect ourselves from violent human beings is to kill them.”
I refuse to believe that. I believe we’re better, smarter, more sensitive, and more creative than that. Why, we have the image of God in us; and because God’s image is in us, we are inspired to have value and respect for all human life — regardless! Again, as John Leith challenges us, our society must “be able to find better ways of protecting its members from violent human beings without in that process denying the dignity and mystery that belong to every human soul” regardless!
Moreover, the death penalty does not deter. It is discriminatory. It is arbitrary. Sometimes it is erroneously applied. In light of our biblical theology, Christians must continue to urge society to find a better way, for the central thrust of Christian Scripture reveals God’s remarkable love of all human beings through Jesus Christ — regardless!
In 1982, the search for a better way to deal with those who kill was powerfully illustrated to me by a southern prophet named Will Campbell. As we enjoyed a meal together in Austin, Texas, Campbell talked compellingly about our potential destructiveness and our potential creativity. He was in town lobbying against the death penalty, more specifically, against the forthcoming execution by injection of young Charlie Brooks at Huntsville Prison.
“I once thought this was over,” I said to Campbell. “I thought the death penalty was behind us.” Indeed, in 1969, Life magazine had issued a triumphant editorial titled “An end to capital punishment.”
“Why is it coming back?” I asked.
“Well,” Campbell said, “as far as I can figure, it started coming back when we got out of Vietnam.”
“Do you mean to tell me that our blood lust is so insatiable that we had to bring back the death penalty once the Vietnam War was over?”
“That’s what I mean to tell you,” he said.
I grimaced because, deep down, I didn’t want to believe his analysis. Then, graciously and abruptly, Campbell shifted the conversation toward a more positive direction.
“What you folks need to try to do,” he said, “is to inspire your governor to take a higher road. Urge your governor to help us study and find more creative and humane ways to protect society from violent people. Surely your politicians don’t want to be remembered as those who settled for death penalty solutions. You’re better than that. Ask your governor to appoint a blue ribbon commission. Ask your governor to gather a broadly representative group of creative, pragmatic, and compassionate citizens. Ask him to challenge that commission to study the issue of protecting us from violent persons and to come up with sound alternatives to the death penalty.”
We followed Campbell’s advice, issuing that precise plea to Governor Mark White, but to no avail. Thoughtful anti-death penalty arguments and a sermon urging broad-based moral discourse were offered to government officials. We also held a moving prayer vigil and public demonstration on the capital grounds, calling for a stay of execution, for our common good, in order to study irenic alternatives throughout the region. Not unlike many political leaders, our governor was not moved; and death penalty solutions by lethal injections became a standard procedure in the Lone Star State. The tone was set for the future: a legacy of arbitrary and brutalizing vengefulness.
Those events felt like a critical hinge of history, for since those times the death penalty has been reinstated or reactivated by many governors and legislatures throughout the United States. Nevertheless, I agree with former New York governor Mario Cuomo that the practice of capital punishment “demeans and debases us.” It also “tells our children that it is O.K. to meet violence with violence.” Although designed to restrain brutality, the death penalty may in fact brutalize our society. In John Leith’s words, “If we continue to answer hate with hate, violence with violence, vengefulness with vengefulness, how will hate, violence, and vengefulness ever end?”
Of course, our society and we need and deserve to be protected from people who murder and commit violent crimes; but let us also open ourselves to Will Campbell’s prophetic and pastoral plea to search for more creative and humane alternatives to death penalty solutions. For many of us, the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker in Huntsville, Texas, once again brought this concern to the forefront in an extraordinarily dramatic way. It appeared to many that Tucker, a murderer, had remarkably experienced a rehabilitation, if not transformation, while in prison. As the journalist Ellen Goodman observed, “For at least one moment, in one case, some religious conservatives and some civil libertarians ended up on the same
side. … “ Karla Faye’s execution, Goodman recalled, “made allies of Pat Robertson and Bianca Jagger, of Pope John Paul and the ACLU.” Yes, there could have and should have been another approach to punishing Karla Faye Tucker. Yes, we could have and should have found a better way. Yet she was executed during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas and, apparently, that trend will continue for the foreseeable future.
Sometimes, I find myself giving in to my cynical side and believing that too many political leaders fear that to engage in moral discourse that seeks creative alternatives to the death penalty is to engage in political suicide. However, I will do well to remember that theologian George Stroup spoke the truth when he reminded an ecumenical gathering in Austin 25 years ago that there are plenty of good people on both sides of this issue.
Of course, those who kill and commit violent crimes must be punished. Indeed, many should never be set free. They should be incarcerated with meaningful and productive work to do and with modest recreation, but they should not be set free.
Of course, those who murder must be met with punishment and, we hope, rehabilitation. We must be protected and defended from those who kill. Order and dignity must be preserved. And with God’s help we will find more creative and humane ways of doing so.
For we are not good enough to kill those who kill. And we are also too good to kill those who kill. If we believe this construct about our nature as human beings, we should share it humbly with others. Even if we cannot accept this construct, we should wrestle with it prayerfully. And may God bless, save, keep, and protect us, one and all.
Dean K. Thompson is president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
