OPINION

Delaware, it's time to abolish the death penalty

Delaware Voice Susan Loney

Delaware’s death penalty has attracted attention again.

On Jan. 28, for the third time in three years, a bill to repeal the death penalty was defeated in the State House. Four days later, President Judge Jan Jurden issued a temporary stay on all capital trials and executions in Delaware, pending a constitutional review of the state’s death penalty law. Jurden’s stay followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Florida’s death penalty, finding that it placed too much authority in the hands of judges.

Delaware’s law may have similar problems.

This is not the first time we have been here. Three other times since 1972, U.S. Supreme Court rulings have rendered Delaware’s capital punishment procedures unconstitutional, forcing the state legislature back to the drawing board to reformulate death penalty statutes. Now that we await the state Supreme Court’s latest constitutional review, the question arises.

Why wonder about a law which is ineffective and immoral?

Rather than looking for a constitutional loophole, Delaware should once and for all abolish the death penalty.

Capital punishment serves no positive social purpose. It is not a deterrent to others who might commit egregious acts of violence. Since 1992, Delaware has executed 16 people, but as epidemic gun violence in Wilmington suggests, we cannot claim that we are now safer. We are simply more habituated to killing. Academic research further debunks the myth that capital punishment deters would be murderers.

Furthermore, the death penalty is not uniformly applied. In the words of Rep. Sean Lynn, sponsor of the defeated House bill, “Decades of evidence show that, here in Delaware, capital punishment depends more on the color of someone’s skin than the crime he committed.” This is a civil rights issue. The judicial process is flawed, in Delaware and across the nation, in ways that reflect bias against people of color. Despite the hard work and best intentions of many, we have not conquered institutional racism. Until we do, we cannot pretend that our judicial processes always serve the cause of justice.

Of course, when the process ends in execution, we can’t reverse a wrong decision. In 2015 alone, the convictions of 6 U.S. death row inmates were thrown out. Since 1973, nationwide, 156 wrongly convicted people have been released from death row. We should wonder how many executions, in Delaware and elsewhere, happened under questionable circumstances.

In its 2015 year-end report, the Death Penalty Information Center shows that the number of executions, newly imposed death sentences, and public support for the death penalty are all at historic lows. A majority of states either have abolished the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in over a decade. It’s time for Delaware to join this list, by abolishing capital punishment.

Some will say that the punishment must fit the crime, and that death penalty opponents care more about the criminal than about the victim’s family. But, tit-for-tat, eye for an eye killing of those who kill is not an act compassion for the victim’s family. It’s an act of vengeance. The Bible’s test of “an eye for an eye” is not an invitation to retaliation. It’s a maximum limit on retribution, no more than an eye for an eye. Justice sometimes demands far less. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

We are a nation founded on the idea that we are entitled to our creator endowed right to life. For people of faith, our central, shared beliefs respect the dignity and sacredness of all human life. It is not the state’s prerogative to decide who lives and who dies. More than a civil rights issue, capital punishment is a human rights issue. State sanctioned killing is not the mark of a just or moral people. It betrays our deepest values and it aligns us with nations whose practices we deplore. We know this. It’s why we no longer allow public executions. Capital punishment is carried out behind closed doors, in the middle of the night, so that we can avert our eyes from barbaric acts carried out in our name in the misguided pursuit of justice.

This diminishes us. We are better than that. Delaware, it’s time.

Susan Loney is a seminarian at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

Susan Loney, a seminarian at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, lives in North Wilmington