Capital Punishment and Jesus

One of the great questions that so many Christian supporters of the death penalty avoid is what Jesus, who was a victim of state-sponsored execution, would think about capital punishment? After all, he knows first hand how easy the state can become corrupt when dealing with life and death--and push for executions for public approval or political points. But he also seemeed to subvert other so-called capital crimes.

The writer below articulates this very well in a 1998 article on the subject. I urge you to read it in its entirety, as I have cut and edited to make it a bit more readable in this blog. He restates what we already know--that the death penalty is racist, classist and bloodthirsty. But he also points to something that a colleague mentioned to me. He is a conservative who actually supports the death penalty in some cases, but believes that we should ban the death penalty because of the "brutality effect." This holds that the death penalty actually encourages more brutality than it stops. More brutal crimes occur in states that execute and around execution dates, etc. More! Not less. Anyway, read this.

Thanks to Salaam for this article by a christian lawyer who founded Habitat for Humanity:

There are many reasons for my position, First, I don’t believe in revenge. “‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord. ‘I will repay.

The Bible, it seems to me, is clear on the subject of revenge. Probably the most powerful voice to speak on this matter is Coretta Scott King, the widow of murdered civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassinations, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the Death Penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by another evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.”

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Our accepted solution has put us in bed with some unsavory bedfellows, nations like China, Iraq, and Iran. China alone executes 4,000 people a year! Would we aspire, as a nation, to be more like China? Or, Iraq or Iran? We stand alone today among industrial nations in our use of the death penalty.

I oppose the death penalty because it is being employed in a racially discriminatory manner.

A very significant study was done by a University of Iowa professor named David C. Baldus. He analyzed 2,500 murder cases in the state of Georgia between 1973 and 1978. He discovered that if a defendant is black and charged with killing a white, he is 4.3 times as likely to receive the death sentence as a defendant who kills another black. In other words, if you are black and you kill a white, the statistical study shows that you are 4.3 times more likely to get the death penalty than if you kill another black person. That means what? That an African-American life is less than one-fourth as valuable as a white life.

How should a Christian think about such blatant unfairness? Is not all life equal and precious to the Lord? Isn’t that the message of scripture?

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“It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined. ‘The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together,’ and the way in which we choose those who will die reveals the depth of moral commitment among the living.”

The death penalty is a cancer on our society. It will continue to eat away at our souls until we send it to the junk heap of history.

But how will we do that? How do we send the death penalty to the junk heap of history? First of all, we need to read up on the subject. We need to educate ourselves. We need to understand really what is going on. We need to realize that in the death penalty we are attacking the result and not the cause of the problem. Psychologist Dane Archer believes that human violence is a product of social forces rather than the result of biological drive. And he cites some compelling evidence. For example, he did a study comparing violence rates in this country and other countries and found that in New Zealand, which is an industrialized nation very much like our own, multi-racial although not the same composition that we have, violence and murder are minuscule.
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Archer’s study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, was published as a book by Yale University Press. The study which has won four major awards in psychology and sociology, explores such illusive or critical social questions as, “Does the death penalty deter potential killers? Does violence increase in a nation that has just concluded a war? Do large cities have higher homicide rates than small cities in the same nation?” Drawing off statistics from 110 nations and 44 of their most cosmopolitan cities, Archer provides the following answers. No, the death penalty does not deter homicidal criminals. Yes, violence does increase in a nation that has just finished a war. And, yes, large cities do have higher homicide rates than small cities in the same nation. To explain most of his seemingly unrelated findings, Archer proposed a single hypothesis. When a nation does violence to human beings by conducting wars or executing criminals, it incites its citizens to more criminal violence than they would otherwise commit. Some people might reason, for example, that if the president was commanding the military to kill enemy soldiers and if judges were ordering prison authorities to execute convicted murderers, why shouldn’t the private citizen follow suit and use deadly force on personal enemies? In other words, in Archer’s hypothesis, the state can make violence the coin of its realm.”

For all of the above reasons, I oppose the death penalty. Revenge belongs to God and not to individuals and not to the state. I am not comfortable being in the company of China, Iraq and Iran in the death penalty business. I am revulsed by the racial discrimination in administering the death penalty laws. I am appalled by the unfairness of who gets the death penalty, the poor and minorities, and the arbitrariness in determining who may live and who must die. And, I am convinced that the death penalty is not a deterrent to violence. Indeed, I believe that the death penalty causes more murders.

But, for me as a Christian, the final and most compelling reason to oppose the death penalty is because Jesus was against it. Once a woman was caught in adultery. A crowd was about to carry out the death sentence by stoning her. Jesus appeared. He stooped down and wrote in the sand. He then stood and said that the person without sin could throw the first stone. They all walked away. What about you? Are you without sin? Maybe you haven’t committed adultery. You haven’t killed anybody. But have you never sinned? By what authority are you casting stones to kill all these people on death row?

At the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he was given a death sentence. The method of state execution in his day was death on a cross. As he hung there, he looked down on his executioners and said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”[Emphasis mine]

How then do we continue to perpetuate this indignity? Isn't the church simply exising a particularly wrathful god from the OT to justify this?