Chapters Three, Four: Shared humanity

“I generally favor the death penalty because mad dogs ought to die.” Civil Lawyer as quoted in Just Mercy, p. 69

This is an excerpt from a public letter written by a ‘respected civil lawyer’ who became disillusioned after working on a death penalty case. What a harsh sentiment, lumping all death row prisoners together as so many ‘mad dogs.’ Though, as I thought about it, there is a logic to it. If a mad dog has attacked and/or killed, it has to be put down before it does again. And some condemned people have done such terrible, inhuman things that they must be prevented absolutely from doing more. So, while I may not like the forceful manner in which this judgment is presented, there is some logic to the position.

But by the end of this chapter I am reminded that the problem with this statement is that it wants to compare any human being to an animal in an absolute way – as if there is no fundamental difference between the two. Or maybe the better way to approach it is to say, “as a human being, I can treat an animal in one way and another human being in a very different way.” The death penalty is not then so much about what is ‘just,’ given the kind of offense committed, but rather about what we will allow ourselves to do as humans to another human when we (the State) are called upon to act to preserve order in Society. If we see the human characteristics of the condemned, we act differently than if we only see the crime.

And then I remembered. Quite a few years ago now I regularly went into the jails in Cleveland to pray with inmates, on Saturday evenings for the women and Sunday mornings for the men. One of the men was a regular whom I got to know a bit, though never what he had done to get him in jail. When he was tried and found guilty and sent away to prison, he wrote back to us. In one of his letters he said the thing he missed most about his life in a prison was that he had no opportunity to sing, as he had in jail with our religious services. It’s a small thing, of course but to me it got to his humanity, deep under whatever he had done.

Fr. Dennis Dillon, SJ serves as a Pastoral Associate at St. Mary’s.