Exile and Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourse on the Death Penalty

1 | Introduction

) 1) Introduction In 1972, when Marie Deans was thirty-two and pregnant with her second child, her mother-in-law, Penny, was murdered. Penny’s husband, Jabo, had died a year before, and when Marie became pregnant, “it was like a new life . . . for all of us.” Penny drove from her home in Charleston, South Carolina , to visit Jabo’s family in North Carolina and tell them about the baby. Sometime during her return drive a man began following her. When she arrived home, he entered the house behind her, fatally shooting her twice. Marie We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others. ( albert camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt To speak of a disaster as “tragic,” then, may seem to be a scoundrel’s recourse, at least if it is supposed somehow to justify an unwillingness to address suffering. It is far more in accord with our democratic sensibility to accept the responsibility for doing something to remedy the situation. ( kevin crotty, “Democracy, Tragedy, and Responsibility” 2 ) exile & embrace ) and her husband were prevented from entering the home when they arrived at the scene; they found out that Penny had been killed by asking police at the scene about an ambulance they had passed en route, an ambulance with no lights on. That ambulance, they were told, was bringing Penny to the hospital for an autopsy.1 Deans had had an inclination toward abolitionism before Penny’s death, but said that it was fairer to say that she was not for the death penalty than that she was in favor of abolishing it. The way her mother-in-law’s murder was handled, however, changed that. When Deans and her husband decided that they did not want the death penalty sought, police and prosecutors marginalized and disregarded them. They later learned that Penny’s killer had escaped from a Maine prison. During the escape he had killed another woman and stolen her car. After the man’s sister turned him in, Deans and her husband told prosecutors that they would do everything in their power to fight extradition to South Carolina. In the end, Penny’s killer received a life sentence in Maine, and Deans had embarked on a lifelong career of abolitionism. Deans eventually moved from South Carolina to Richmond, Virginia, where she founded the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons. Affiliated with the SouthernCoalitiononJailsandPrisons,theVirginiaCoalitionwasdedicatedto stopping the expanding prison-industrial complex, seeking new approaches to criminal justice, and opposing the death penalty, which she described as “something that is destroying the soul of our people.” Deans corralled lawyers for indigent defendants and visited some of the men on death row, where she shared a last meal with Richard Whitley, who was executed on July 6, 1987. Whitley “wanted ice tea and he wanted tea for everybody, so they brought a jug of ice tea. I am sitting near the bars close to Richard and they put the jug down and it says on the side, ‘Cider Vinegar’ and without thinking I said, ‘Oh my God. And our Lord thirsted and they gave him vinegar.’”2 Patricia Streeter’s daughter, Sarah, was raped and murdered twelve days before her eighteenth birthday. When Streeter first saw the man who killed her daughter, she was surprised. She “thought he would look like a monster, but he didn’t.” For two years, since the police had arrived at her home at 6:45 a.m. to confirm that Sarah was her daughter, Streeter had survived, hounded by the media, waiting for the trial to begin. There she sat in the same room with her daughter’s killer, hearing the details of the crime repeatedly over the course of the proceedings. Streeter was satisfied when the man was sentenced to death; anything less, she said, would have “carried the message that [her] daughter’s life was of little value.” She acknowledges the arguments against taking life in retribution for crimes, but she sees the problem from the other side. What about self-defense, she wonders? What about war? If taking life is acceptable in those situations, then perhaps capital punishment is also justi- ( Introduction ( 3 fied. After all, the murderer made a choice to kill, and we are left to deal...