Article - "Stop the Death Penalty"

From Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online. It seems to me that if you are a conservative, small/less government person, you certainly should oppose the death penalty. State-sanctioned killing This is a good article taking that position in the conservative National Review. His crimes were appalling but ...

... no one was asking for the man to be released. Instead, people, including prison staff and the sister of the inmate he killed, were advocating for his life. In the 34 years since he had been on death row, he had done what you would hope would happen in prison. He changed. He started caring about others. To judge from his last words, he became a man of faith. He even saved the lives of prison staff when inmates got violent. One former corrections officer whose life Sutton saved said in the plea to the governor that if Sutton were released from prison tomorrow (which was never under consideration, he was just making a point), he would welcome Sutton in his home and as a neighbor.

His crimes were evil. They were also committed by a teenager whose mother abandoned him and whose father abused him and went on to commit suicide. Reports indicated that his father introduced his son, as a child, to drugs, leading to Sutton’s drug addiction. One recent headline in the news cited the abused boys we send to death row. It’s usually not a happy upbringing that leads a man to such a place.

It’s all so miserable. And even more so, of course, for the families of those he killed all those years ago. On social media, I saw a lot of burn-in-hell, this-should-have-happened-years-ago kind of comments. I couldn’t help but think about mercy. Justice is crucial. But so is mercy. ...

Nick Sutton’s execution happened in Tennessee, around the fifth anniversary of those mostly Coptic Christian Egyptian men who were beheaded on the shores of Libya by ISIS militants. The witness of their families to forgiveness is remarkable. Of course, they have the consolation of knowing what noble deaths their loved ones died — such courage and conviction! These death-row situations are more like senseless violence. But there is a shared brutality (and the video of the Coptic martyrs’ deaths are on the Internet). And yet these families — they are praying for the conversion of the terrorists. They are praying for their peace. We do see this closer to home, too — we saw such remarkable forgiveness after the Charleston church shooting in 2015, for instance. But in America, when it comes to the death penalty, we have anger and argument. But there’s something about this spirit of mercy that we could afford to latch onto.

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Sutton was the 1,156th person executed in the United States since 1976. You hear protests about racial disparities and other injustices. But what about the very concept of the state executing people in these times? It was probably good that Nick Sutton was a converted, peaceful element in prison. Needless to say, not everyone is. He wasn’t always. But these state executions are a poison among poisons in our law and culture. They insist that more violence and death are a good. We pretend that this punishment will be a civilizing influence. But it’s probably not on the next Nick Sutton born of similar circumstances.