Speakers:
Jean Rabenold, President and Founder, Universalist Unitarians Against the Death Penalty; and Jane Henderson of Equal Justice USA
It seems like a strange concept — two speakers and a roomful of participants, all but one of whom are morally opposed to capital punishment, seriously discussing whether it is applied fairly and/or with due process. But it makes a weird kind of sense at the beginning of the 21st century in America.
The media and many elected officials keep telling us that "Polls show that the people support the death penalty." That's true, unless you ask whether they prefer killing a convict over holding him for, say, twenty-five years to life and making him pay restitution to the survivors of his victim(s). It's also true only until you ask them whether they feel that the death penalty is always administered fairly, with sufficient concern for due process, and only to the actual perpetrator. Then that support starts to diminish.
So this is where many opponents of the death penalty find themselves today: if the argument can't be won on moral grounds, maybe it can be won on procedural ones. If no court will overturn the statutes — and it's not likely that any would — then an effective lobbying of legislators seems the best tactic. If no legislature is currently prepared to remove the death penalty in any state that still has it, maybe they will agree to a moratorium in the face of mounting evidence of racial bias, of class bias, and of the probable execution of innocent persons. And maybe, during a moratorium, further lobbying, combined with fresh mining of the evidence, will slowly result in the removal of the death penalty from the criminal justice codes.
Additional information and materials can be obtained from UUADP at 1600 Buena Vista Drive, Vista, CA 92083, and from Equal Justice USA at P.O. Box 5206, Hyattsville, MD, 20782 or visit their website at www.richmonduu.org/uuadp. You can also send e-mail to ejusa@quixote.org or visit their Web site at www.quixote.org.
