Lance Lindsey

As you're aware, Death Penalty Focus has had the extraordinary good fortune to have an Executive Director, Lance Lindsey, who has advanced the cause of abolition in myriad ways over the past fifteen years.  His devotion to the issue, coupled with his enormous intelligence, integrity and strength, has been central to our great progress during his tenure.  We are everlastingly grateful for the huge contributions that he has made, both to DPF and to the abolition movement at large.

That being so, it is with decidedly mixed feelings that I write to say that Lance Lindsey has decided to embark on the next stage of his life and has thus announced his very well-deserved retirement as of April 2011.  All of us who have had the privilege of working closely with Lance lament the idea of his departure, but at the same time we celebrate our great fortune in having had such an outstanding leader for these powerfully productive years.  We know that his devotion to the cause and his support of DPF will remain strong.

Due in large part to Lance's leadership, DPF stands at the strongest point in its history.  Our circle of members and supporters has grown steadily, our programs are active and effective, our extraordinary staff continues its exemplary work, and our financial position, thanks to all of you who provide such generous support, is stable.  The abolition movement, always facing daunting odds, has made tremendous progress in public education and advocacy with DPF in the forefront.   

We are also fortunate at DPF to have an active and supportive board of directors who will soon undertake a national search for a new Executive Director.  Having once found Lance Lindsey, we are confident that we will again find the right candidate to lead DPF  toward what is now clearly inevitable: the abolition of state killing.  In that pursuit, we will continue this vital work without interruption. 

Please watch our website for the job posting and additional information.  As the organization transitions to new staff leadership, please keep us--and our goal--in your thoughts.  We will keep you advised of progress. 

Oh behalf of Lance and the Board of Directors of DPF, thank you for your ongoing commitment. 

Peace!

Mike Farrell
President, Death Penalty Focus

Kevin Keith

A possibly innocent man will die unless Ohio Governor Ted Strickland heeds the concerns of numerous law enforcement officials and tens of thousands of concerned citizens. Kevin Keith is scheduled for execution September 15th for a crime he likely didn't commit.  

Mr. Keith's conviction centered on flawed eyewitness identification. The key witness against Mr. Keith first told four people he could not identify the shooter because the shooter was wearing a mask. It wasn't until the police showed this witness a highly suggestive photo lineup, with Mr. Keith's face made larger than the others, that the witness picked out Mr. Keith.

This blog is continued on CARE2...

Well it is hard to believe but Governor Schwarzenegger has announced that he plans to “borrow” $64 million from the general fund to begin construction of the new death row housing facility. California has no budget, the Governor wants to furlough State workers, and the state is running a massive deficit, but apparently the Governor has decided the death penalty in more important. Go figure.

This is what Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblyman Jared Huffman had to say. 

Statement from Senator Mark Leno:

”While California is in the midst of a dire financial crisis, the Schwarzenegger Administration is pushing forward with the expansion of San Quentin’s death row, without first exploring any alternatives. I continue to oppose this deeply flawed project. The proposed construction and operating costs will exceed $1.6 billion over the next 11 years, and despite the cost and increased capacity, the new inmate complex would run out of space by 2014. The governor’s proposal to use General Fund dollars for this ill-conceived project at a time when he is decimating support for our children’s education and the sustenance of services for seniors and children makes no sense at all. The Schwarzenegger Administration should take the necessary steps to explore alternatives to the expansion of San Quentin before acting recklessly with taxpayer dollars and one of the California coast’s most beautiful and precious stretches of land.”

Statement from Assemblymember Jared Huffman:

“At a time when the state may be two weeks away from sending IOU’s and when the Governor is attempting to furlough 156,000 state workers citing our impending cash crisis, it is stunningly hypocritical that he is surreptitiously – and quite possibly illegally – borrowing $64 million from the state’s deteriorating General Fund in order to advance his favorite pet prison project: the $400 million “Cadillac Death Row” at San Quentin. It’s a project that has been stalled by the budget crisis, by the courts, and by the inability to sell bonds due to pending litigation and the uncertain legality of proceeding with construction. It’s also a project that the Legislative Analyst found to be so wildly expensive that they recommended scrapping it, and the State Auditor concluded that it would likely provide a very short-term solution for housing condemned inmates since the condemned inmate population would exceed its undersized capacity within three years of completion. If built, this would be the most expensive inmate housing ever built, at a cost of more than $500,000 per cell.

Read the full statements.

Now is the time to remind the Governor that California could save $1 billion in five years by replacing the death penalty with life without parole.  Watch this video and then tell the Governor to "Cut This!"

Last week, you may have read that 70% of Californians support the death penalty according to a new Field Poll.  Several newspaper headlines cited that figure.  Upon further reading, however, we learn that 42 percent of voters prefer life in prison without parole and 41 percent prefer death when given a choice between the two sentences.

The last time the Field Poll asked that question, in 2000, it found that 44 percent chose the death penalty and 37 percent favored life without parole.

These statistics reflect a marked shift in public opinion.  People are realizing that life without parole is swift, severe, and cost-effective.

While the 70 percent figure represents abstract support for the death penalty, the majority of Californians realize that the death penalty is bad public policy and prefer life without parole.

"The majority of Californians now favor permanent imprisonment over the death penalty. That includes murder victims' family members like me," said Judy Kerr in a letter to the Sacramento Bee editor.

"Victims' families know that the death penalty does not bring back a loved one, that the death penalty wastes millions each year and that the death penalty does nothing but prolong grief and healing through endless appeals. Public opinion is shifting, and this is why."

In a recent article, reporter Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle asks whether candidates running for statewide office, such as our former and perhaps next Governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown, Jr., and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is running for Attorney General, may lose votes because of their opposition to the death penalty.

In fact, while California voters "support" the death penalty in the abstract, further questioning reveals that they actually prefer the alternative of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LWOP), also known as permanent imprisonment, or better yet LWOP plus a provision for restitution by the prisoner to the victims' compensation fund (LWOP+R).

When offered a choice between death and LWOP, 55% of Californians polled in 2009 by the Survey Research Center at the University of Virginia preferred LWOP, and only 37% the death penalty, with 8% unsure. When LWOP+R was offered, only 26% still preferred the death penalty, while more than 66% preferred LWOP+R.

In California, LWOP, or permanent imprisonment, has actually been in place since 1977 for all persons convicted of capital crimes who are not sentenced to death. The categories of murder with "special circumstances" automatically subject to permanent
imprisonment were greatly expanded in 1978 by the Murder Penalty Initiative (Proposition 7).

Since 1977, over 3700 prisoners in Callfornia have been sentenced to LWOP, and only a handful have been released, those later found to be actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted.  One hundred and thirty eight death row prisoners have been released due to wrongful conviction nationwide since 1972. Apart from these cases of exoneration, permanent imprisonment in our state means exactly what it says.  A small number of prisoners who committed their crimes before the 1977 and 1978 LWOP statutes were enacted, such as Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson, get periodic parole hearings under an earlier law. 

Further, restitution, the "R" part of LWOP+R, is already in good part the law in California. Ironically, however, opportunities to perform various forms of work and service whose proceeds can be devoted to crime victims and their families are now often sought by individuals serving LWOP sentences but denied to them due to our overcrowded facilities. Adequate program funding could make LWOP+R not only the ideal but the consistent reality in our state, a goal worthy of action through either the Legislature or a voter initiative.

As the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice (CCFAJ) showed in its report of 2008, replacing the death penalty with permanent imprisonment would save over $125 million a year. This money could be used both to strengthen prisoner
restitution programs, and to assist law enforcement at a time when in many of our counties only about 50% of murderers are caught, convicted, and imprisoned. Victim advocates stress the importance of reopening "cold cases" and getting killers off our
streets, thus promoting the public safety and doing some justice for forgotten murder victims and their families.

In short, conscientious and farsighted candidates for statewide office can and should exercise responsive and responsible leadership by fully considering the alternatives to the death penalty.

Damien Echols

Check out my blog post about Damien Echols on Care2 today.  Please add a comment and vote in the poll. We are trying to generate as many letters as we can to Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe before Damien's September 30th hearing.  Take Action here.

What would prompt someone to spend a beautiful summer day in July diving into and swimming the chilly, choppy, dangerous waters between "The Rock" - the former maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island - and the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge?

For Lynn Greer, 41, it's the prospect of generating money for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP), a statewide citizens' organization dedicated to ending capital punishment in that state. Greer, a member of VADP's Board of Directors, plans to fundraise, and focus public attention on the issue of innocent people being wrongfully convicted and executed, by participating in the July 18, 2010 Alcatraz Challenge Aquathlon & Alcatraz Challenge Swim.

The annual Alcatraz Challenge Aquathlon & Alcatraz Challenge Swim, sponsored by Tri-California Events, Inc., is a USA Triathlon-sanctioned swimming and running competition. Greer chose the event as the vehicle for her fundraising and public education effort.

Greer's goal is to raise contributions in recognition of each of the 138 prisoners exonerated from death row since 1973 due to their innocence. Beginning at 8 a.m. Pacific Time on July 18, Greer will navigate the extremely strong ocean current around Alcatraz and swim 1.5 miles to the East Beach of Crissy Field in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area's Presidio Park.

Undaunted by the rough, freezing waters, Greer looks forward to the challenge. "The last time I participated in this event 10 years ago, I completed the entire triathlon in less than four hours," she says. "It is not for novices. This time, I am just focusing on the swim." She trains by swimming five to seven miles a week in the Washington, D.C. area.

Greer may be swimming against physical tides, but the "tide" of public and criminal justice opinion is gradually turning against capital punishment, especially with respect to wrongful convictions and executions. In a recent Rasmussen Reports opinion poll, 73 percent said they are concerned about innocent people executed by mistake, with 40 percent saying they are "very concerned."

Moreover, in 2009, the American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent scholarly institute providing support for legal theories that undergird state criminal justice systems, removed the death penalty from its Model Penal Code. Among other things, the ALI cited the minimal safeguards against mistaken convictions and executions.

Greer notes that of the 35 states that still have the death penalty on their books, Virginia is second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out between 1976 and 2009 (Texas 460; Virginia 107). Moreover, she says, California, site of the athletic challenge, has a death row population of 690, but executions in the state are currently on hold due to legal challenges regarding its three-drug lethal injection execution protocol.

"Virginia and the other states implementing the death penalty should end it," asserts Greer. "It is a fatally flawed public policy which puts innocent people at risk for wrongful conviction and execution. By swimming in the Alcatraz Challenge, I expect to increase public awareness regarding the innocence issue."

# # #

For more information about Lynn Greer's swim against the death penalty, visit her web page at http://www.firstgiving.com/lynn_greer.

Check out this amazing video!

We know that advocates and community members from across the state are fighting to ensure that the vital social services that make up the safety net for California's most vulnerable populations aren't slashed. We're here with a small piece of the solution. Need to cut something? Cut this: the death penalty.

Share this video on Facebook and Twitter!

Check out this great piece by Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation director Beth Wood, "Death Penalty Only Hurts Victims' Families" posted on AOL News. The piece makes special mention of CCV and our work in California.

Also, make sure to check out CCV's latest newsletter to read about our meeting with Governor Schwarzenegger's staff and other California officials, see pictures from recent events, and find information on county coalitions throughout California! CCV Summer News 2010.

What's inside:

• News from Around the World
• A report on the International Conference held in San Francisco this month.
• Unsolved Homicides: A Public Safety Crisis by Aqeela Sherrills
• Photos from the Annual Awards Dinner
• New Books
• The Inland Valley Chapter of DPF presents the 2010 Student Essay Contest Winners! 
• Photo Gallery

The Sentry is produced in easy-to-print .pdf format. CHECK IT OUT NOW!

It has been my good fortune to serve as a judge in New Hampshire for thirty-seven years. For thirteen of those years I was presiding justice of the Durham District Court. I served as a justice of the Superior Court for eighteen years, nine of which I spent as chief justice. And I sat on the Supreme Court for six years before retiring in December of 2005. I am proud of our judicial system and the effort of judges in all our courts to treat people fairly and equally, and to protect their individual rights.

While serving as a judge, I rarely expressed my opinion on capital punishment privately, and until now I never expressed my opinion publicly. Nor did I let my personal opinions influence my judicial decisions. In fact, in 1998 I presided over the capital murder case of Gordon Perry, and on every motion filed on his behalf challenging New Hampshire’s capital punishment statute, I ruled he had not established that the law violated our constitution.

Last week, I appeared before the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty, whose members I commend for their willingness to undertake the important and challenging task assigned to them by the legislature . My purpose in speaking to the commission was not to talk about facts and statistics or trials and cases but to address the moral issue of death as punishment.

The way we have been dealing with the death penalty for years is to talk about enacting laws, adopting procedures, establishing practices and providing mechanisms, as if by creating an elaborate process we could somehow sanitize the death penalty and thereby ignore the moral issues that capital punishment presents. We cannot.

I appeared before the Commission to answer one straightforward but complex question: Do I believe the systematic killing of another human being by the state, in my name, is justified?

My answer to that question is, No.

During my tenure as a judge, I met many people with strong opinions about capital punishment.  Through most of that period, over two thirds of those polled in the United States regularly supported the death penalty. Some people I respect still do. So you would think that anyone looking for answers based upon public opinion or strongly held views should have an easy task.

What is the problem, then?  In the face of these odds, why do we continue to struggle with the acceptability of death as punishment?  I believe one reason we engage in this process is that no matter what some people say publicly about capital punishment, deep inside many are not as certain as they proclaim.

I believe another reason is that our thinking evolves, as people, technology, and societies progress. And what is acceptable at one time in our history may become unwelcome at another. If that is true then, we are encouraged to re-examine our core principles and to consider whether death continues to be an acceptable punishment in New Hampshire.

I have great respect for the offices of the Attorney General and the Public Defender and for the integrity and competence with which the attorneys in those offices handle homicide cases. The primary source of my continuing concern about the death penalty, however, is not New Hampshire’s limited capital murder experience but my own professional exposure to criminal justice issues.

There is no question that people who commit murder must be punished and should be removed from society. Life in prison without parole does both. It is interesting to note that two states, New Hampshire, which has not employed the death penalty since before Pearl Harbor, and North Dakota which does not condone capital punishment, did not need death to achieve the lowest murder rates in the nation every year of this century.

No legal system is perfect. Human beings make mistakes. That is one reason we accept the notion that occasionally the guilty will go free and the innocent will be convicted.  But I do not believe anyone accepts the notion that it is alright for a person to be wrongfully executed. So with the most respected judicial system in the world, how can we willingly embrace a sentence which cannot be reversed after it is imposed; and how can we continue to believe that it is morally acceptable for the state to take a human life?

My answer is, we cannot.

As most of us, I have never experienced the emotions felt by a murder victim’s loved ones, and I may never know for sure that I could not be persuaded by the desire for personal revenge to seek the death penalty for a person I knew killed someone I love. But for me, neither of these deficiencies makes opposition to the death penalty any less compelling.

I am not a death penalty expert.

I am not a spokesperson for the judiciary.

I am one New Hampshire citizen; one person, who believes it is not necessary to kill to show that killing is wrong.

So after thirty-seven years on the bench; after presiding over hundreds of jury trials; after sitting on numerous criminal cases; after listening to witnesses in scores of sentencing hearings; after considering information in thousands of probation reports; after imposing sentences upon countless convicted defendants; after entertaining the arguments of lawyers at every level of skill; after talking with a host of judges and corrections officials; and after continued personal reflection; this is what I believe about capital punishment:

• The threat of its use is not a deterrent to the commission of a homicide, because those who kill do not consider the sentence before they act or do not expect to be caught, or both.
• The threat of its use is not necessary to protect the people of New Hampshire for the same reason.
• Its abolition does not dishonor those who serve in law enforcement because honor comes from personal pride and earned respect, not from the ability of the state to execute a human being.
• Its abolition does not diminish the voice of murder victims because the right of all victims to be heard is intended to come at the time defendants are sentenced not at the time they are charged.
• It provides no more justice than life in prison without parole because justice is not measured by the sentences we impose.
• To seek and carry out the death penalty costs the state much more in time and taxes than to prosecute and confine a person to prison for life.
• To seek and carry out the death penalty consumes inordinate resources of courts, prosecution, defense and law enforcement.
• The decision whether to seek the death penalty is too easily swayed by public opinion, political pressure and media attention.
• Its potential as a prosecutorial tool is outweighed by its capacity for misuse.
• It is too easily subject to selective prosecution.
• It is too likely to be imposed upon minorities and the poor.
• It is too likely to depend upon the persuasiveness of lawyers.
• Its imposition is too readily subject to the emotions of individual jurors.
• Its imposition is too clearly dependent upon the composition of the particular jury empanelled for each case.
• It inevitably leads to disparate sentences.
• It creates the unacceptable risk that a person may be wrongfully executed.
• It exalts rage over reason.
• It diminishes our character as a people.
• And in the end, I believe it serves just one purpose: vengeance.
  

Some good news on the sentencing front in California.  Juries in San Bernardino County, known for its high number of death verdicts, have started to turn away from the death penalty. Jurors have reject death in at least three cases in as many months. In the most recent case, jurors rejected a death sentence in favor of life without parole for Mathew Manzano.  

The prosecuting attorney in the Manzano made an interesting comment to the Press-Enterprise:

"The reality is, life in prison without the possibility of parole is the better of the two punishments," said Supervising Deputy District Attorney Michael McDowell. "But there is the emotional quality about the title of 'death,' even though it would likely never be carried out."

By SCOTT CHRISTIANSON

Fifty years ago, in May 1960, two events altered how many Americans viewed capital punishment and the Holocaust.

In California, after a 12-year fight on death row, Caryl Chessman was executed at San Quentin prison. A few weeks later, in Buenos Aires, Israeli agents seized Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi fugitive who helped send more than 400,000 Jewish men, women and children to their deaths. His public trial helped to reawaken global awareness about Germany's genocide against the Jews.

While there were many differences between the two cases, both involved the killing apparatus known as the gas chamber.

Eugenicists had envisioned lethal gas as a quick, practical, and humane approach to cull society of its burdensome "unfit." After the technology was developed in the United States by industry's chemical warfare and pesticide complex, the execution method was first carried out in Nevada in 1924, on an imprisoned Chinese immigrant from San Francisco, Gee Jon, who had been sentenced for murder.

By the late 1930s, seven additional states including California had adopted lethal gas as their official method of "humane" capital punishment instead of hanging or electrocution. One company, Eaton Metal Products of Denver, built several patented gas chambers to carry out hundreds of legal executions using hydrogen cyanide. German, American and British chemical firms collaborated in a cartel that manufactured massive quantities of deadly Zyklon-B. Many prominent thinkers of the day, including Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel, openly recommended the lethal chamber for a wide array of social outcasts.

But then the Nazi regime picked up on the idea, making gas chambers their preferred instrument for mass murder. Suddenly, the innocent victims numbered in the millions.

The highly publicized Chessman and Eichmann dramas revealed the horrors of gas-chamber executions and served to strip away the masks of kindness and indifference from capital punishment in general. As a result, both episodes helped turn many people in the world, including a majority of Americans, against executions.

It may seem hard to believe now, but from 1953 to 1966, the portion of Americans favoring the death penalty dropped from 70 to 42 percent, in tune with international trends. By the late 1960s all but 10 states abolished capital punishment. Executions became more and more infrequent, so that from 1968 to1977, nobody was legally executed in the United States.

During the moratorium, however, conservatives mounted a backlash to reinstitute capital punishment. As governor of California in 1973 Ronald Reagan became the first major figure to advocate a "better" method of execution. Although lethal injection had been used on a large scale by the Nazis, Reagan touted needle executions as "humane" and "painless." As lawmakers seized on the suggestion to repackage their old, discredited practice, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, California and other states eventually adopted it as their official method. Over the next several years, prison gas chambers at San Quentin and elsewhere became lethal injection chambers.

In 1994 a federal district court in San Francisco found execution by lethal gas to be "cruel and unusual punishment," and the last gassing was carried out in 1999 in Arizona, leaving lethal injection as the dominant surviving method.

Now, however, based on more than a quarter-century of experience with carrying out lethal injection executions in the United States, needle executions have also proved problematic, on several counts. Many appear to have been botched, and the participation of medical personnel in such procedures presents a huge ethical quandary for healers bound by the Hippocratic oath. In a deeper sense, spurred by the lessons of the gas chamber, pretexts of killing with kindness and humane executions went out with the 20^th century, thereby removing another rationale for the death penalty.

Today, American popular support for capital punishment may be waning once again. The percentage favoring executions dropped from 80 percent in 1994 to 65 percent in 2009, and that reflects only part of the decline, for if given an alternative, a majority of the public prefers life without parole. Killing is not the answer.

Scott Christianson is the award-winning author of numerous books, including The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber, published by the University of California Press.

Today, the San Francisco Chronicle posted three fantastic letters to the editor responding to the Democratic Party's call for an end to the death penalty.

Follow the link below to read letters by Judy Kerr, a murder victim family member, Nick Scales, a Republican, and Nancy Oliveira, a concerned citizen:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/24/ED471DIOU9.DTL

This piece written by Bob Egelko is fantastic!  I'd like to share this link with you:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/20/MN2J1DF46L.DTL

The United State Supreme Court ruled today that it is unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole when the crime does not involve murder, given the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority decision of the US Supreme Court in Graham v. Florida, said that the sentence is exceedingly rare," that “a national consensus has developed against it and it has been “rejected the world over.”

“The judgment of the world’s nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “demonstrates that the court’s rationale has respected reasoning to support it.”

This reasoning applies to the death penalty as well.  We're on our way.

Lance Lindsey, Executive Director of Death Penalty Focus

May 2, 2010 marked that 50-year anniversary of the execution of Caryl Chessman. Chessman's execution was incredibly controversial and was the catalyst for many young people to become activists against the death penalty.  DPF's own Executive Director, Lance Lindsey, remembers the days and weeks leading up to the execution in vivid detail. The case sparked his activism against the death penalty.  Attorney General Jerry Brown was one of the most vocal opponents of the execution as he lobbied his father, then-Governor Pat Brown to halt it. Governor Pat Brown eventually allowed the execution to go forward, but later admitted that it was one of his biggest regrets in his book Public Justice, Private Mercy.

We'd like to express our gratitude to the hundreds of supporters who have been fighting the good fight against the death penalty since 1960, and the tens of thousands more who have joined the struggle since then.

Take a look at this short booklet featuring some of these extraordinary heroes.

Let's make sure it doesn't take another fifty years to get rid of the death penalty once and for all.  We are getting closer every day.

Photos from DPF's Annual Awards Dinner held on April 21, 2010 in Beverly Hills.  All photos are by Virginia Van Zandt, except the photo of Jane Kaczmarek which is by George Schulman.  Pictured from left to right: Alec Baldwin, Hector Elizondo, Robbie Conal with Sherry and Leo Frumkin, Jane Kaczmarek, Sr. Suzanne Jabro, James Cromwell, Richard Dieter, and Elizabeth Banks. (Photos are copyrighted and may not be used without permission).

Reverend Julia Older

Rev. Julia Older is the pastor at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City (CA). I heard her deliver this powerful sermon on Sunday, April 11th.  DPF is very grateful to Reverend Older and her congregation for their generous support of our work.  It has been edited for length.

***

This is a sermon about institutional punishment and justice.

We are a congregation that not only cares theoretically about justice, we are a community that works in a variety of ways to make this country, this community, this culture, more just and more humane.*

I'm hoping this morning to stir up a few more questions. Maybe you'll want to argue with me. That's good. Being awake and engaged is moral work.

I think that almost all of us here, are horrified at the size and cost of the CA prison system, the strength of the prison guards union and we strongly disapprove of the death penalty, for pragmatic reasons, even if we have some hesitation about it in an ultimate way. We had a forum and took a vote eight years ago and this congregation was all but unanimous in opposition.

If we could not keep truly dangerous people away from society, we might have to have the death penalty. But we do have the ability to keep people who are dangerous away from others. We do it regularly. And often without much fanfare.

It is interesting to observe that some cases get major publicity and get us all stirred up and some stories, equally horrifying, never get newspaper coverage. We learn occasionally about those quiet stories in circuitous ways.

The press regularly stirs up our myths about people behind bars. Bad headlines get attention. Dramatic stories sell papers. Lurid images haunt the public's imagination.

There are stories about a facility like San Quentin that make us both apprehensive and intensely intrigued. We project our nightmares onto such a facility and onto the people who live there.

It is a place of despair. It is life killing. It is probably also a kind of school for inmates to learn more about doing criminal things. Most inmates are eventually released and the recidivism rate is close to 70%.

Can you imagine how hard it would be to remember your worth and dignity if you are kept locked up and have to surrender your most basic freedom? How could you move back into the main stream without damage?

Now some of you may think we are not tough enough on crime. Here's the thing: If you treat people as if they are horrible, how do they find the inner resources to act in an upright manner? Especially when they are released and required to go back to the same environment they came from. The place where perhaps they were part of a gang and had few resources to escape the pressure of gang life?

What would happen to society if places of incarceration were more like schools and taught trades and attempted to close the gaps of opportunity in our society?

Our Unitarian Universalist first principle is the statement that we believe in the worth and dignity of every human being. The worth and dignity.

Perhaps we don't have to treat everyone as if they are good, though I myself believe that given what they need, almost all people are good, but this worth and dignity principle does require that we hold off treating anyone as less than human.

It is pragmatic, too. To treat people with respect and courtesy is far more likely to generate good behavior than to treat people as if they are contemptible.

Frankly, the very idea of "punishment" is confusing to me. My personal opinion is that "punishment" doesn't much work. Even with kids. Our kids. Understanding the effects of our actions works. Encouraging empathy helps. Rehabilitation, retraining, and skills development cut down on recidivism rates.

If we want to make society safer, don't you think we should put our money toward education? Particularly early childhood enrichment? If I understand the CA state budget, we spend more on maintaining Death Row than we do on Head Start.

It's hard to know which things to say about prisons and the ultimate punishment, the death penalty. I'll start with cost:

Our death penalty system costs California taxpayers $137 million each year, according to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. Death penalty trials cost local taxpayers an additional $20 million per year at the current pace of 20 to 30 sentences per year. We have no firm evidence that any of this has been shown to be a deterrent or even help close unsolved homicide cases.

In contrast, permanent imprisonment - lifelong incarceration with no chance of parole - for all inmates currently on Death Row would cost under 12 million.

These are many, many anti-death penalty arguments, but one of the most important, surely, is how arbitrary it is. You know many stories, I'm sure. Probably you've all read how unevenly the sentence is applied, how many more people of color are given harsher sentences and the death penalty. Overworked public defenders and bad representation. Crummy evidence, faulty eye witness accounts and lack of access to DNA testing. I can't understand the refusal to allow DNA testing if an execution is scheduled.

I'll add one more bit that makes the soundness of the system incomprehensible to me. This emerged from my work as a chaplain at Napa State hospital, which has a public and a prison side. On both sides there are people who've committed nightmarish violent acts. On the prison side they are considered incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity.

Here's the big question that haunts me: "Why do some stories make the news for weeks and weeks and others, thank goodness, are never covered by the press?" We know what becomes of those who make the news and the public cries out for punishment.

In contrast, at the hospital, one soft-spoken woman of small stature had killed her children. You probably never heard of her. I don't know the circumstances of that woman's actions but I'm glad she is in an institution. She is not in touch with reality. If she ever gets better, she'll have to deal with her loss and guilt. She is safe where she is. And we are safe from her. I have no need to put her in maximum security. She is treated humanely by doctors and nurses, and even guards, who treat her more as a patient more than a convict.

Because it is a hospital, people were commonly treated with courtesy even on the locked side. The exceptions I saw were when guards came in from the outside to transport someone to another facility. It was quite a contrast.

One of my most delicate patients was shackled and taken to a medical facility by an armed transport team from the outside when she was dying of cancer. She had had a tragic life. Poverty. Brutality. Her crime was prostitution. When I knew her at Napa, she was living in the safest place she had ever known. The outside guards treated her as if she might instantly spring up and attack them. If you have seen animal control officers handle a vicious animal, that's how these guards were handling her.

Those guards had been damaged by their work. My patient was quiet and compliant through it all. I was the one in tears.

The seriousness of some of the crimes at Napa are sufficient to fire your imagination, but the patients there are generally treated respectfully and commonly respond in kind.A different attorney, a different county, a different jury, different coverage by the press and, some of my congregants would have been on death row. It is so capricious!

Would I feel the same if the victim were someone close to me? I hope so. I did go through a terrible time with my friend Cathy Harrington, a UU minister who has spoken here at UUFRC two times. Her daughter and a roommate were killed by an acquaintance. I went with Cathy to the arraignment. Seeing Eric, the murderer, was creepy. He was repulsive to me. Jealousy and rage were part of his motive but I can't really imagine how he, or anyone, could do did such a thing. He is in prison now for life. Cathy and her family are coping. Cathy says her life was utterly destroyed, shattered and torn away and she's living a different life now.

If she had pressed for the death penalty, the trial and appeals would probably still be going on. They would go on for years. And some of the deep grieving would be delayed until after the verdict and appeals and execution.

I think the fight to have someone executed is a way of pushing the grief away, trying to expunge the legitimate rage and focusing on the hope that once justice is done, life will come back as it was. I know you have heard murder victims families talk about holding on until after the execution as if suddenly it will be better. I believe that the hard work of building a new life will only be beginning.

I read in the New York Times that "Last fall the American Law Institute, which created the framework for modern capital punishment almost 50 years ago, pronounced it a failure. According to Franklin Zimring, professor of Law at Berkeley, this institute has been the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty in the country and they voted in October to (quote) " disavow the structure they had created citing the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering the death penalty."

You know I say often, "We are all in this together." This is as succinct a statement of my theology as I can make. "We are all in this together." And what affects the earth or our society, we all carry. We carry in our very bodies what is broken whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Happily we carry hope as well. As part of the web, all reverberations reach us: the health of our communities, the effects of poverty, the treatment of prisoners, the expectations we place on prison workers, the weight of violence as a solution to any problem, and the goodness of someone like Jody Lewen working at San Quentin.

I really do believe in the worth and dignity of every person. I grieve for damaged lives of the patients at Napa, and their loved ones, and the strain of their caregivers.

I grieve for inmates at San Quentin and their guards. Especially those who work on death row.

Wilbert Rideau

Wilbert Rideau was sentenced to death in Louisiana at the age of 19. After a decade on death row, his sentence was changed and he was transferred to the notorious Angola prison.  He has a new book out titled  "In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance." 

Listen to him on NPR's Fresh Air. 

Rideau will be speaking in Marin on Thursday, June 3rd at Book Passage. More details are available on our Events page.  You can purchase the book from independently owned Book Passage.