02/06/01

Why we oppose the death penalty

 By Cheryl A. Jacques and Harold S. KushnerAs

As A RABBI and as a legislator, we are often expected to take a stand on controversial issues. Congregants and constituents alike look to us for guidance, and for solutions and answers to the complicated problems our society faces.

Many issues appear at first to be cut and dried. On further reflection the distinctions between the sides of an issue can start to blur - what once seemed to be the obvious answer is no longer as apparent. Attitudes evolve over time, with education and discussion playing a central role in the refinement of one's views. For the two of us, a common subject of reflection and dialogue has been capital punishment.

We both approached capital punishment from the perspective of the survivors, seeking justice for terrible crimes committed against their loved ones. During the course of our work, we had emotional interactions with survivors who wanted to see criminals pay for their actions with their lives.

Over time, however, facts about the effectiveness of capital punishment versus the alternative, life in prison without parole, have caused us to reconsider.

Senator Cheryl Jacques:

As a former criminal prosecutor and a victims' rights advocate, I was always humbled by the desire of survivors to have a death penalty. The emotional appeals of survivors are hard to resist. After all, who am I to stand in their way? If one of my friends or family members were killed, wouldn't I want to see the killer punished to the full extent of the law and forced to give up his or her life in return for the life that was taken?

So while I never considered the death penalty to be a deterrent, or even a meaningful crime-fighting measure, I supported it in deference to those whose lives have been shattered by homicide.

However, as a legislator, my views on this issue have shifted. More than 3,300 people are on death row in the United States. Since 1976, 710 have been put to death. Yet there is little evidence that the threat of capital punishment has caused a decrease in violent crime.

Far more important for me has been the expanded use of DNA technology and the many stories of people who have been convicted of first-degree murder only to be exonerated after many years of sitting on death row. It is this - the risk of our executing an innocent person - that has most affected my thoughts on the subject of capital punishment. As an advocate of victims' rights, I don't know what I would say to the survivors of a homicide committed by the state after a false conviction.

During my time in the Senate, I have focused my efforts on creating and supporting meaningful legislation to prevent crime. I spearheaded passage of the Gun Control Act of 1998 in an effort to reduce the unacceptable levels of gun violence in our society and the impact of gun violence on children.

Last year I passed the Wanted Fugitive Apprehension Act, legislation designed to crack down on a backlog of more than 300,000 outstanding arrest warrants in our state. This sort of legislation will do a lot more to combat crime than any capital punishment bill ever could.

So after many years of supporting capital punishment, I have had a change of heart and of mind. This year, should capital punishment come up for a vote in the Senate, I'll be voting no.*Rabbi Harold Kushner:

I began as a (somewhat uncomfortable) supporter of the death penalty. After all, the Bible endorses it, and my emotional response to reading of a particularly vicious crime was that person doesn't deserve to live. But I now find myself a principled opponent of it.

To me, the question is no longer what the criminal deserves. Timothy McVeigh deserves to die. More than that, lethal injection is too good for him. He deserves to be lowered slowly into a vat of acid while watching video clips of firemen bringing children's bodies out of the Murrah Building, and if it were possible to do it to him 168 times, he would deserve that.

But for me, the question is not what McVeigh deserves but what we as a community deserve. And we deserve better than to be the instruments of his death. We deserve better than to lower ourselves, not to his level but in the direction of his level, by deliberately taking a human life.

Capital punishment is not about deterrence. That is a fig leaf we attach to our desire to punish. Capital punishment, like all acts of revenge, is about control, about the need to reclaim control from someone who has taken it from us. It is the communal equivalent of the parent who hits his child because the child has defied him and he has no other way of reclaiming authority.

Look at what happens when a mass murderer saves his last bullet for himself and takes his own life as the police close in. How do we feel? Admit it; we feel cheated that he punished himself before we could punish him. He kept control. And should he only wound himself, we will spend tens of thousands of dollars in public funds to keep him alive so that a prosecutor can call for the death penalty.

If we could understand that a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole would represent sufficient control over the criminal (and the chances of his escaping or killing someone in prison are less than the chance that we will execute an innocent man), we would not have to compromise our own souls by deliberately taking a life. We express our respect for life by imposing the maximum sentence on a murderer. We don't express it by killing him.

Democratic Senator Cheryl A. Jacques of Needham, a former criminal prosecutor, is a candidate for lieutenant governor. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner is the author of ''When Bad Things Happen to Good People.''