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California’s Historic Opportunity to End the Death Penalty

On November 6th, Californians have the opportunity to vote Yes on Proposition 34.

(Photo: Kurt and Sybilla / Flickr)

This Sunday I met with John Dear, a longtime Jesuit priest and peace activist who has been arrested many times during acts of peaceful civil disobedience, including with the late Phil Berrigan. He is also an editor and curator of Daniel Berrigan’s works. We spoke at length and I want to introduce John to the Truthout community and help bring attention to one of the issues he is working on now, which he believes is at a tipping point. You can follow John Dear here, learn about what he’s up to and get involved if you’re inclined. Here is the letter he wrote me.

~ John Cusack

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California is on the verge of an historic moment. On November 6th, Californians have the opportunity to vote Yes on Proposition 34 and abolish the death penalty. After traveling through California these past few days, I’m hopeful that it’s going to happen, and I encourage everyone in California to join the campaign to abolish the deathpenalty once and for all.

All summer long, churches throughout the state have been mobilizing to get out the vote and get rid of the death penalty. This week, Sr. Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, arrives for an eight day, statewide speaking tour. She told me how excited she is, too, because the churches are at the front of the movement, and there’s a palpable sense of hope in the air. Friends at Death Penalty Focus, one of the state’s leading grassroots groups, are working overtime to end the death penalty.

Proposition 34 will replace California’s death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole. It will require inmates to work and pay restitution to the victims’ compensation fund and allocate $100 million over the next three years to solve more murders and rapes in California and protect our families.

As Death Penalty Focus of California explains, California needs to use its limited state resources instead on real human needs, among them, “to investigate and solve the crimes of murder and rape to help keep our families safe — instead of spending more money on our broken death penalty system.” Forty-six percent of murders and 56 percent of rapes go unsolved every year in California.

Also, California still risks the possibility of executing an innocent person. Nationally 139 people have been freed from death row over the past few decades after they were found to be innocent. The death penalty always holds the possibility of killing an innocent person, and that’s simply a risk that can never be taken ever again.

But California, like other states, can’t afford the death penalty! Since California voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1978, they have spent $4 billion dollars to execute 13 people. Each execution costs about $308 million — about twenty times the cost of a trial for life in prison without parole.

If Prop 34 is passed by California voters on November 6th, it will save California $1 billion in the next five years. This expensive policy of state-sanctioned murder has to be voted down because that money is desperately needed instead for schools, jobs, healthcare and real human needs.

The good news is that the tide is turning. Twenty years ago, the vast majority of Californians supported the death penalty. But last week’s poll showed that 54 percent of Californians favor life in prison without parole over the death penalty.

Just as Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey and Connecticut have recently ended the death penalty and saved their states an enormous amount of money, so should Californians.

There are many other arguments for abolishing the death penalty in California and throughout the nation: It’s clearly racist. It does not provide a deterrent against violent crime. It is often applied at random. One-hundred thirty-nine nations around the world have abolished the death penalty; we’re one of the last nations to practice state-sanctioned murder. Bad lawyers are consistently part of the problem. More money should be spent instead on the murder victims’ families and their needs. And life without parole is a sensible option. (See DeathPenalty.org for more details.)

But I would like to point out that every major religion condemns the death penalty. It is morally and spiritually bankrupt. In particular, no Christian can support the death penalty because Jesus adamantly forbid killing, taught us to forgive, love and show compassion, and even intervened, on one occasion, to save the life of a woman about to be executed by stoning, saying, “Let the one without sin be the first to cast a stone.” Because of his nonviolent resistance against the empire, Jesus himself suffered capital punishment for the capital crime of inciting revolution. He was executed. He was a victim of the death penalty. He did not side with the executioners, but literally with the executed. No one can claim to be a follower of this person and support the death penalty.

Being in California these last few days and speaking with friends about this historic moment reminded me of my work twenty years ago, when I lived in Berkeley and Oakland, to end the death penalty. Twice, I arranged for Mother Teresa to speak with the governor of California in an appeal for clemency for someone about to be executed on San Quentin’s death row.

In 1990 and 1992, Mother Teresa told Governors Wilson and Deukmejian: “Do what Jesus would do.” She was opposed to California’s killing of death row inmates, and invoked Jesus as her rationale. Killing people who kill people is not the way to show that killing people is wrong — that was the message. But more: aspire to the nonviolence of Jesus. That is our holy ideal.

Several times on the phone, Mother Teresa asked me to call upon the people of California and the whole country to end the death penalty. She told me several times that she was praying for the miracle of the end of the death penalty. I bet she’s still praying for that miracle. Now it might actually happen.

I hope and pray that every Californian will take a stand on November 6th and “do what Jesus would do” — which means, stop the killing, vote Yes on Prop 34, and abolish the death penalty. Californians have the chance to make history on November 6th. Perhaps then, they might inspire the rest of the country to throw the death penalty in the dust bin where it belongs.

We’re not going to stand for it. Are you?

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