by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Busboys & Poets Against the Death Penalty

     Washington, D.C., is not a City for Life – not yet.   Neither is Takoma Park, Maryland – not yet.   But on Monday night the Busboys & Poets on the D.C. - Maryland border was a café-bookshop-event-space for life, and against the death penalty, as three activists against the death penalty spoke about their efforts, joining with activists in 2,000 cities, from Berlin to Venice, Florida.

Cities for Life/Cities Against the Death Penalty is an initiative organized by the Community of Sant'Egidio and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.   On November 30, 1786, Tuscany became the first modern state to abolish the death penalty; and with that in mind, the last day in November is marked in cities which, by one or another form of decree, have become Cities for Life / Cities Against the Death Penalty.

I was invited to moderate the event because I wrote the afterword to 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty, by Mario Marazziti, who has a central role in both Sant'Egidio and the World Coalition.   Truly, it was humbling to be in the company of the people there.    

Brian Stolarz, a lawyer based in Alexandria, worked for eight years to exonerate Dewayne Brown, a man in Texas falsely accused and wrongly convicted in the murder of a police officer.  On stage at Busboys & Poets, he showed us the decisive piece of evidence – a phone record, substantiating Brown’s alibi, that the detective investigating the case had obtained from the phone company and hidden in his garage.  

Dani Clark, who works with the World Bank in Washington, corresponds with Ivan Cantu, a man on death row in Texas who she (and many others) is convinced is innocent.   She brought some of their letters with her – “about half,” she said – and there were enough to fill a large Rubbermaid storage container.  

Art Laffin, a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community on Rock Creek Church Road, was always against the death penalty – but was moved to deepen his commitment after his younger brother was murdered by a mentally ill patron of the soup kitchen in Connecticut where he was volunteering.  

Art pointed the event outward in two directions, in my hearing at least. His presence put in mind the efforts of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker’s foundress,who died November 29, 1980 – thirty-five years ago last Sunday.  And his insights about “restorative justice” connected opposition to the death penalty with the Year of Mercy declared by Pope Francis, which begins formally on December 8.  By maintaining a “death row,” where prisoners’ time with other prisoners and with visitors is strictly limited, the state seeks to place them beyond mercy – beyond the encounters with other people that can be restorative for all concerned.    But it doesn’t work, and the activists at Busboys and Poets make that clear through their very personal encounters with people submitted to this frankly barbaric practice.

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 63: Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”

Allen Toussaint was to play the Hamilton in Washington on November 30, and a plan was fallling into place for a group of us to go hear him after an event about the death penalty that day – which is the World Day Against the Death Penalty.  But Toussaint died earlier today, age 77, struck by a heart attack after a concert in Madrid; and with him two traditions – the tradition of pre-rock-and-roll New Orleans music, and the pre-rock-and-roll tradition (still going on in Nashville) whereby songwriters subsisted through royalties for versions of their songs done by other artists – go a little deeper into the grave.

It’s an apt coincidence – if not a happy one – that this post follows immediately on one about Elvis Costello, who collaborated with Toussaint in all sorts of ways in recent years – and who has done as much as anyone to carry forward Toussaint-style songwriting, at once direct, complex, and tender.

If you’ve never heard Toussaint singing his own song “Southern Nights,” do yourself a favor and click on this video.   It’s from Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York, where Toussaint graced the city with several dozen Southern nights of solo performances after he was displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.   On this video, Toussaint tells the stories of some of those southern nights, adding sound effects on the piano – with such easy elegance that you come away thinking we’ve lost not just one of our great songwriters, but one of our great storytellers, too.