On The (Original) Redemptive Purpose of Death Row

This being holy week, I thought I’d post an abbreviated excerpt from a short piece that came out last fall. The piece is an on-line response to Marah McLeod’s excellent article on death row, in the Ohio State Law Review.  Here’s the excerpt from the larger (but still small) response.

The word “penitentiary” comes from the word “penitence,” and comes from the idea that punitive confinement could bring spiritual penitence, and with it, redemption of the soul. McLeod notes that death row today is justified on purely secular grounds, while acknowledging that vestiges of the religious purpose of death row remain and that it is not uncommon to see authentic religious conversions among the condemned.

I found McLeod’s discussion of the origin of death row intriguing given the role of religion in arguments for and against the death penalty today. In the domestic discourse, I am primarily referring to Christian arguments for and against the death penalty, and since Christians are deeply committed to redemption of the soul, McLeod’s discussion led me to think about death row and the redemptive purpose once served there.

I concede at the outset that I am now writing from a particular perspective—one that cares about redemption of the soul—and that my thoughts will likely not resonate for those who do not share that perspective. The lens is clearly Christian, although it may be other things too. Bottom line is that for anyone, Christian or otherwise, who cares about things like repentance and redemption of the soul, here’s the rub:

No matter how long the condemned spend on death row, their opportunity for redemption is still artificially shortened by the state when they are executed. The death penalty takes away days, months, years from a person’s life—that’s the point, that’s the penalty. What if the time the state takes is the time that person needed for redemption?

Karla Faye Tucker is a prime example. I was reading about her for this Response when I came across a talk about the death penalty by none other than TV evangelist Pat Robertson. I had wondered what someone like Robertson would say about the redemption question, and there it was in the transcript, someone in the audience had asked him about it. Here is what he said:

Very good point, I’ve had it raised before, and I think it’s—she had 13 years of appeals, and during that period of time, she had a profound religious conversion, and had she been executed within a few weeks of her sentence, that never would have happened, and I don’t know what the answer is. Some things you have to leave to the Lord, but in order to accommodate that, you’d have to essentially do away with the death penalty entirely because you never know at what point of time somebody would have an experience . . . . Frankly, the point you raised is excellent and I don’t have an answer for it, I really don’t.

 I’m not sure if Pat Robertson saying the point is excellent and he doesn’t have an answer for it makes me feel better, or worse. But there it is.

An even better example may be Charles “Tex” Watson, who was once Charles Manson’s right-hand man. Watson was convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison when California temporarily abolished its death penalty in 1971. He has since become a born-again Christian and ordained minister, serving those with whom he is serving time. He has also founded Abounding Love, a prison outreach ministry dedicated to sharing the Good News. All this came about after he became a “lifer.” What if he had been executed instead?

Redemption is hard for an angry twenty-something. But time works changes, and what is true generally is true of angry twenty-somethings as well. Sometimes redemption takes growing up, staying sober, and living with regret. In short, sometimes redemption takes time. So I am back to my original question—what if by executing the condemned, we take away the time it takes?

Calvinists would probably answer that if God had laid claim to that soul, redemption would have happened in some way. But I am not a Calvinist, and so I am far less confident about knowing how God resolves the tension between predestination and free will. As such, the possibility that by executing the condemned, we may take away the days, months, even years necessary for something incredibly important to happen—again, at least from the perspective of those who care about redemption of the soul (for whatever reason and in light of whatever tradition)—is a prospect I find deeply troubling. Almost as troubling as the fact that I am just now thinking about these sorts of things for the first time.

This is not to say that any of these insights are new. A little research uncovered Saint Augustine making the same point over a thousand years ago, and the Catholic Catechism codifying it for the last twenty-five. As it turns out, viewing the death penalty through the lens of redemption is not new; it was just new to me.

And this is interesting, too. To the extent Christian values and rhetoric have played a part in the death penalty discourse here in the United States, they have tended to focus on the corporal aspect of capital punishment—respect for life on the one hand, “eye for an eye” on the other. What I have not seen in the religious arguments that permeate the public discourse is a concern for redemption of the soul.

Perhaps this is because of where it takes us; for those committed to redemption, the central challenge would appear to be justifying the death penalty over the redemption-maximizer of life without parole. But whatever the reason and wherever it leads, those who profess to care about things like repentance and redemption should at least be talking in those terms.