by Paul Eliefrom 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.
Tsarnaev Sentence: A Last Spasm for the Death Penalty in America
“The last time a convicted criminal was executed in Massachusetts — 1947 … the high wall in left field at Fenway Park had just been painted green.” But now they want to undo the gains of two-thirds of a century in Massachusetts by putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.
The death sentence for him is a giant step backwards for us, because the strong evidence is that in the United States the death penalty will soon be a thing of the past.
Mario Marazziti is sure of it. Long the “portavoce” of the Community of Sant'Egidio in Rome, lately a member of the lower house of Italy’s parliament and chair of its human rights committee, Mario – friend to many of us – was a founder of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty late in the last century. Since then much has changed in the United States, as he spells out in a powerful opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times:
The number of executions and new death sentences is at a 20-year low, and just a few states are responsible for the vast majority of executions … A bill to reintroduce the death penalty in Massachusetts was defeated. Bills to outlaw the death penalty are in process in Delaware, Kansas and Colorado. Even in Nebraska, a conservative state, a bill to abolish the death penalty has such strong support that legislators could override an expected veto by the governor.
Much has changed – and much is changing. In the weeks since the publication of Mario’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty (I wrote the afterword), the Supreme Court has heard arguments against lethal injection in Oklahoma and two death-row prisoners have been exonerated.
In the hours since he wrapped up the LA Times opinion piece, the Atlantic dropped a new issue with a cover story on lethal injection and Nebraska legislators did indeed vote to abolish the death penalty (and they do have the numbers to overide a veto from the governor).
It
seems possible and even likely that Tsarnaev will still be alive when
the death penalty is declared dead in this country.
Mario Marazziti: From Texas to ISIS
Mario Marazziti was a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show on Friday, speaking about 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty. Lopate introduced several points that were news to me – showing that the death penalty is constantly in the news just now. He pointed out that a man was executed in Texas earlier this week with a new form of lethal injection. He mentioned the state of Oklahoma just re-approved the use of firing squads in executions. He remarked on the sentencing of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber – for whom the state is expected to seek the death penalty. And he asked about ISIS, which led to this exchange:
“How does ISIS fit in?”
“ISIS is the culture of death. They use the death penalty as a show, to scare people. They use it to get Muslim people to join, saying, if you do not do what they tell them to do, they will be killed. At the same time, they exhibit death to create automatic reactions in the West. They would like retaliation, because retaliation would allow many other Muslim groups to feel that they are under attack. So ISIS is the culture of death used as a political tool.”
“We’re horrified by the beheadings, but we also execute people.”
“I don’t think there is so much different between a beheading and the gas chamber.”
My afterword to 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty is up on Commonweal’s website. It’s essentially a portrait of Mario and his gifts of friendship:
If Trastevere embodies the paradox of Europe—emphatically old but with pockets of exceptional vitality—Mario Marazziti embodies the paradox of Sant’Egidio. He is no stranger to high society: through an old friend at the prominent wine journal Gambero Rosso, he and his friends put together Vino per Vita, an initiative where Italian wineries run by Mario’s contacts give the proceeds from certain bottlings to Sant’Egidio’s campaign for AIDS relief in Africa. He can be irreverent, relishing the story of a cleric friend whose poor Italian led him to open the church’s millennial ceremonies in 1999 with a crude profanity. Yet he is selfless and tireless on behalf of Sant’Egidio—on behalf, he says, of “the Gospel and friendship.” I had learned of him through a Sant’Egidio group at St. Malachy’s Church near Times Square led by the author Thomas Cahill. The group was small, but Mario sustained us with calls and e-mails. I later asked him how he kept up contact with his countless friends worldwide. “Friendship is not proportionate,” he said matter-of-factly.
Mario Marazziti: The Death Penalty, Seen in the Rearview Mirror
Two points especially stood out in Mario Marazziti’s presentation of 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penaltyat Greenlight Bookstore the other night – two points that arereally two more ways of looking at the death penalty.
The book is frankly what the Wallace Stevens-echoing title promises: the death penalty seen thirteen different ways – the way of history, the way of religion, the way of the families of murder victims, of exonerated death-row prisoners, and the way of men who, condemned to death, went all the way to death, killed for the sake of retributive justice by the state.
And it’s the death penalty seen from Mario Marazziti’s strong point of view. Mario is a force of nature: human rights activist, Italian parliamentarian, longtime spokesman for the Community of Sant'Egidio, lover of life, and friend to countless people around the world. A few years back he took a key role in founding the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which has helped establish moratoria against the death penalty worldwide. He has written a regular column for Corriere della Sera. And now he is the author of this book, his first in English, just out from Seven Stories Press. (I contributed an afterword, excerpted in Commonweal.)
On Wednesday he and I will be in conversation in Riggs Library at Georgetown, through the university’s Faith & Culture conversation series.
At the bookstore event Mario told how, country by country, Europe turned against the death penalty. In the first half of the twentieth century Europe saw tens of millions of dead people: two world wars, six million Jewish people killed in the Shoah, five hundred thousand gypsies, gay people … Europe, as Mario told it, was “disgusted with death and so chose life” – chose life by abolishing the death penalty or suspending its use through moratoria.
That’s the first striking point: a profound social change that took place over a few decades. The second point is like it. Today the change that took place in Europe is taking place all over the world. In 1975 25 countries had renounced the death penalty. Today 150 countries do. The U.S. and its counterparts in capital punishment – China, Saudi Arabia, Iran – are distinctly in the minority.
When it comes to state execution, at least, the world, disgusted by death, is choosing life.