[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KAN., OKLA., UTAH, IDAHO, CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 28


KANSAS:

Man accused in Kansas Jewish site killings pleads not guilty



A Missouri white supremacist has pleaded not guilty to charges that he gunned 
down 3 people last year at Jewish sites in the Kansas City area.

74-year-old Frazier Glenn Miller entered the pleas Friday during a court 
appearance in Johnson County, Kansas.

He was ordered earlier this month to stand trial on charges of capital murder, 
3 counts of attempted first-degree murder, and one count each of aggravated 
assault and criminal discharge of a weapon at a structure.

Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty if Miller is convicted.

Miller has said he felt a duty to kill Jews before his death, which he believed 
to be imminent because he suffers from emphysema.

A judge Friday denied Miller's request for Internet access while he's jailed 
awaiting trial.

(source: Associated Press)








OKLAHOMA:

Lockett case shows dilemma of doctors involved in executions



As the doctor entered the prison, he was already torn about his role in the 
execution of Clayton Lockett.

Warden Anita Trammell said she met the doctor as he arrived at Oklahoma State 
Penitentiary last April 29.

"I'm just glad I happened to be down there or (he) may have just walked out," 
Trammell said. "(He) said, 'I'm just filling in anyway. I don't know why I'm 
even, why I even, you know, agreed to do this."

2 other doctors had already said no to attending the double execution planned 
for that night. The physician - identified only in investigative transcripts as 
"doctor" - agreed to step in only days earlier.

Such duty challenges the oath that doctors take upon entering their profession. 
They pledge to do no harm and minimize suffering, yet when asked to serve as a 
sword of justice, they can find themselves conflicted.

That contradiction, between Hippocratic Oath and capital punishment, is the 
source of heated controversy within the medical community. Most physicians 
groups - including the American Medical Association - strictly forbid members' 
involvement in such acts, with the exception of prescribing sedation beforehand 
or, later, signing a death certificate.

For those reasons, states are finding it harder to recruit doctors to 
participate in executions, said Dr. Steven Miles, an internist and professor of 
medicine and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota.

"Executions are not considered a medical act," he said. "Basically a doc's role 
is that of a healer, and this is not a healing act which is serving the 
patient's interest."

(source: Effingham Daily News)








UTAH:

Utah's firing squad law reveals crisis at the heart of US capital punishment 
---- Historically each new execution method is presented as more humane but 
with judicial killings having almost ground to a halt, the state is returning 
to the past



The last time anybody was executed by firing squad in the US, in June 2010, the 
5 assigned sharpshooters equipped with Winchester .30-30 rifles decided for a 
reason that remains known only to them to pull the trigger on the count of 2. 
Not 1, but 2

"5," a warden shouted.

"4."

"3."

Wham.

At that second 4 live bullets (1 was dud) were propelled from the distance of 
about 25 feet at Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer, entering his heart. 
We know that's where he was struck because shortly before the countdown began a 
medical doctor entered the death chamber, located Gardner's heart using a 
stethoscope, and placed a red target right over the spot. At the end of the 
proceedings, the target was inspected and found to be riddled with holes.

Gardner chose to die by this arcane method, explaining his decision with the 
memorable phrase: "I lived by the gun, I murdered with a gun, I will die by the 
gun." His death was reminiscent of the most famous execution in modern American 
history - that of Gary Gilmore, whose death in Utah in 1977 was turned into 
literature by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song.

"Gary never raised a finger," Mailer wrote. "Didn't quiver at all. His left 
hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the 
strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and 
slowly went down as if to say, 'That did it, gentlemen.'"

Gilmore also died by firing squad, a method that Utah abolished for all new 
death row inmates in 2004 (Gardner was condemned before that cut-off date so 
could still opt for it.) But on Monday the state revived the controversial 
technique, enacting a new law that resurrects it as an alternative should the 
preferred method of lethal injections be unattainable.

Utah's decision to take a step back in time and return to a mechanism last 
regularly used in the early 20th century is the sharpest indication yet of the 
crisis that has engulfed the death penalty in the US. Across the country, 
states are turning away from the ultimate punishment altogether, or being 
forced to consider a return to older, largely discredited methods.

18 states have formally abolished capital punishment, and a further eight have 
staged no executions in more than a decade. The number of active death penalty 
states has receded to little more than a handful, and even they are in dire 
trouble.

You only have to look at the roster of upcoming executions that is curated by 
the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). In the month of March, it records 
14 executions scheduled in 7 different states - Albama, Georgia, Ohio, 
Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.

Every single one of those scheduled executions have been marked "Stayed" - that 
is, put on hold. In short, the American death penalty has virtually ground to a 
halt.

"What we have seen in Utah this week with the revival of the firing squad is in 
a very real sense a measure of the failure of the lethal injection protocol in 
the US," said DPIC's executive director, Robert Dunham.

The main cause of this unintended and unofficial moratorium has been the 
struggle of states in acquiring medical drugs used in lethal injections. In the 
wake of a worldwide boycott of US departments of correction, led by the 
European Union, active death penalty states have been turning to increasingly 
creative ways of filling their syringes, from commissioning thinly regulated 
"compounding pharmacies", to experimenting with previously untested cocktails 
of drugs.

That, combined with a rash of new secrecy laws designed to prevent the public 
finding out what killing techniques are being deployed in their name, has led 
to a predictable outcome: a succession of shockingly botched executions. When 
concern over the use of one previously untested drug, midazolam, reached fever 
pitch, the US supreme court stepped into the furore and announced that it would 
review the state of the lethal injection protocol to see whether it violates 
the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

With the supreme court set to hear oral arguments in its review on 29 April, 
there is a sense of barely contained chaos hanging over the death penalty 
states. As Deborah Denno, a specialist in execution methods at Fordham 
University in New York, put it: "American executioners just don't know what 
they are doing, and it's transparent now to the entire world. Our flaws have 
been exposed for everyone to see."

Viewed through the longer lens of history, the current turmoil is merely the 
latest manifestation of an age-old conundrum: how to separate America's 
fondness for judicial killing from the cold-blooded murder committed by the 
very same people it puts to death. In his book, Gruesome Spectacles, the 
Amherst professor Austin Sarat describes the historic search over the past 100 
years for a technique that was safe, painless, in some sense civilised - and 
the eventual failure of each new approach.

"With the use of each new technology - whether hanging, the firing squad, the 
gas chamber, the electric chair, or now lethal injection - the same claims have 
been made. The new method would be humane, it would avoid the constitutional 
ban on cruel or unusual punishment," Sarat told the Guardian.

(source: The Guardian)

********************

Is Death By Firing Squad 'Cruel And Unusual'? Try Asking Someone Who's Been 
Given The Choice



Earlier this week, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a bill allowing the state 
to use firing squads to implement the death penalty, if the state cannot 
procure the drugs needed for lethal injection at the time of the execution. The 
move disgusted critics. Randy Gardner, the brother of the last man to be 
executed by firing squad in Utah, told the AP, "When you take somebody and you 
tie them to a chair, put a hood over their head, and you shoot them from 25 
feet with 4 rifles pointed at their heart, that's pretty barbaric."

I say "potato." You say "pretty barbaric."

If someone thinks that all capital punishment is barbaric, then barbaric the 
firing squad is. But compared to some of the recent death-chamber mishaps when 
states have executed inmates by lethal injection? Randy Gardner's description 
of the firing squad sounds rather benign next to the deaths of Clayton Lockett 
or Michael Lee Wilson. In January 2014, Wilson reportedly said that he could 
feel his "whole body burning" after being injected with a pentobarbital 
cocktail. In April 2014, witnesses reported seeing Lockett revive after his 
initial loss of consciousness, later groaning, straining against the 
restraints, and gritting his teeth.

Recent problems with death by lethal injection are largely attributable to 
shortages of sodium thiopental and other drugs used in the standard lethal 
injection protocol. While the European Union's embargo on the drugs was 
intended to stymie American capital punishment, the ban has led states to 
experiment with new, less reliable chemical combinations.

The history of the death penalty in the United States is riddled with plenty of 
gruesome stories, botched lethal injections aside. There are the inmates who 
reportedly caught fire during electrocutions. There are the ones whose deaths 
by asphyxiation lingered longer than expected. There is Jimmy Lee Gray, who 
reportedly died banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber.

Is firing squad worse?

Comparing methods of human execution is not like comparing cell phone 
providers. The execution comparison does not lend itself to side-by-side 
line-item analysis. You can't ask people who have experienced the alternatives 
to tell you about what worked and what didn't. And you certainly don't want to 
try things out on your own.

How then do we decide how to carry out death sentences? How do we determine 
which ways are pretty barbaric and which are acceptably barbaric and reliably 
lethal?

Eighth Amendment analysis requires a whole lot more than a gut-level response 
to these questions. But the public debates about whether the death penalty is 
worth it and what means of execution are acceptable often do start with this 
step. Based on the vocal dissent in Utah this week, people can't agree enough 
to move past this step yet.

How do we know whether Utah's firing squad is crueler or kinder than Utah's 
lethal injection? Maybe we should ask the people for whom the decision matters 
most, namely, the condemned inmates themselves. Or, more properly, we ought to 
take into account the history of choices made by past prisoners who chose the 
method of their own deaths. In states where condemned inmates choose the method 
the state will use to execute them, plenty of people have opted for means other 
than lethal injection.

For example, Randy Gardner's brother, Ronnie Lee, was the last man to be 
executed by firing squad in Utah. Before his death in 2010, Ronnie Lee picked 
the method his brother calls "pretty barbaric" over dying by lethal injection.

In 1996, Delaware hanged Billy Bailey, the state's last inmate executed at the 
gallows. Bailey chose hanging over lethal injection. Bailey said, "I'm not a 
dog. I'm not going to let them put me to sleep."

Bailey sneered at lethal injection back when the procedure was considered 
reliable and humane, even fashionably so. At the time, Delaware had recently 
introduced the injection option and many observers were pretty surprised that 
Billy Bailey didn't jump on the opportunity. Imagine what he would have to say 
about lethal injection now, in an era of clumsy experimentation with new drug 
cocktails by states that can no longer obtain the tried-and-(mostly-)true ones.

Why should we care what a few inmates think is the better or worse way to die?

Perhaps we shouldn't listen to them because the condemned aren't medical 
experts, not anesthesiologists or coroners. The inmates who have chosen methods 
of execution other than lethal injection don't really know how painful their 
deaths will be. They may be heavily invested in making the least-painful 
choice, but they don't actually know how one or the other way of dying feels.

Well, neither do you.

That's the mystery of death. The lack of first-hand, subjective knowledge is 
going to stay a problem.

For however much it matters, the recipients of the death penalty have 
themselves intentionally ended the lives of other human beings, something that 
no physician should be able to claim. Committing murder surely does not make 
these prisoners experts in death, but neither does being a doctor.

Perhaps we shouldn't care what inmates think of execution methods simply 
because doing so suggests a softening of our attitudes toward death row 
criminals. The inmates' victims did not chose the manner of their deaths; why 
should murderers be afforded that dignity, one might ask?

Whether killers deserve this choice or not, there is a substantial history of 
giving those sentenced to death an option about the method to be used in their 
own individual cases. There is also a history of states drawing conclusions 
based on patterns of inmate preferences and adjusting general policy 
accordingly.

For examples, we need look no further than Utah, the locus of the recent death 
penalty skirmish. Until 1888, people sentenced to death in Utah could pick 
among 3 options: hanging, firing squad, or beheading. No condemned prisoner 
ever picked beheading. So, in 1888, Utah nixed this option. There are 
economy-of-scale problems with all that guillotine upkeep, I suppose.

Utah continued to offer inmates the choice between firing squad and hanging 
until 1980, when the state swapped hanging for lethal injection. Only in 2004 
did the Utah legislature take this choice away from the condemned. Only those 
denizens of death row who had chosen firing squad before the new legislation 
passed, such as Ronnie Lee Gardner, would be permitted the option of dying by 
firing squad. Moving forward, all death sentences would be carried out via 
lethal injection. That is, until this week.

Inmates' ideas about the relative barbarism of execution methods should not, by 
themselves, determine a state's capital punishment policy. But states shouldn't 
completely disregard that information either.

After looking at the death penalty through the eyes of those facing it, 
alternatives to lethal injection, even the firing squad, might not look quite 
so objectionable.

(source: Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall 
School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief 
of the school's law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of 
Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal 
Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science 
to improvements in legal education----abovethelaw.com)








IDAHO:

9th US Court of Appeals dismisses Duncan's appeal of death sentence



A federal appellate court has dismissed the appeal of a man who was sentenced 
to death for kidnapping, torturing and killing a young northern Idaho boy after 
killing several of members of his family.

Joseph Edward Duncan III faces the death penalty for the 2005 murder of 
9-year-old Dylan Groene. He also faces several life sentences for the murder of 
three family members and the kidnapping of his then-8-year-old sister.

Duncan represented himself at his sentencing hearing and later waived his right 
to appeal. But he has since changed his mind and his defense attorneys say he 
wasn't mentally competent to waive his rights.

On Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that claim. The court 
said a lower court had correctly found Duncan competent. The justices said it 
was too late for Duncan to change his mind.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA:

Sodomite Suppression Act proposal sparks controversy



A controversial referendum in California calls for the death penalty to anyone 
who participates in homosexual activities but what are the odds it actually 
gets signed into law?

Experts said the Sodomite Suppression Act's chances are slim to none but 
regardless of its plausibility it is sparking intense reaction throughout the 
country.

"Absurd. The guy is crazy," said Liz Bradbury with Allentown's Bradbury 
Sullivan LGBT Community Center.

The referendum sponsored by a California attorney calls for any person who 
willingly touches another person of the same gender for sexual gratification to 
"put to death by bullets to the head."

"It's not constitutional," Allen Tullar with the law firm Gross McGinley said.

California law allows anyone with $200 to propose a bill of any kind. Once the 
attorney general writes a title for it, the petition needs more than 350,000 
signatures to be put on the ballot.

"I would hope the response of the general public would be to heap ridicule on 
something like this, not take it seriously," Tullar said.

But even if it reached the ballot Tullar said courts would swiftly strike it 
down.

There's also a California referendum called "The Intolerant Jackass Act" in 
response to the Sodomite Suppression Act. It calls for penalties against anyone 
who introduces a ballot measure calling for the death of gays and lesbians. 
Experts said that's not likely to pass either.

(source: WFMZ news)








USA:

Defense moves into spotlight in Boston Marathon bombing trial



The Boston Marathon bombing trial shifts sharply in tone next week when 
prosecutors rest their case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and turn proceedings over 
to his lawyers, who have already admitted he planted explosives at the finish 
line in April 2013.

One of Tsarnaev's lawyers, death penalty specialist Judy Clarke, opened the 
trial on March 4 with a blunt statement to the jury that "it was him" who 
killed 3 people and injured 264 in the attack.

Clarke contended, however, that the 21-year-old played a secondary role to his 
older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in planning and executing the plot.

Her goal: Persuade jurors in federal court in Boston that Tsarnaev deserves a 
sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty.

It is an argument the defense team, which includes death penalty specialist 
David Bruck and Boston's top court-appointed lawyer, Miriam Conrad, will not be 
able to make in earnest until the jury decides if Tsarnaev is guilty.

Until then, they are left to poke holes in the prosecution's case and work in 
as many allusions to 26-year-old Tamerlan's influence as the judge will allow, 
according to legal experts.

The jury got a taste of the approach in the past week when an FBI agent who 
searched Tsarnaev's college dorm room described finding metal BB pellets, which 
were packed into the bombs that ripped through the crowd. Prosecutors also said 
the brothers practiced shooting with BB guns. 3 days after the April 15, 2013 
attack, they fatally shot a police officer.

Conrad asked the agent, Kimberly Franks, if the search had turned up actual 
firearms or just BBs. Franks testified that no guns were found.

When a 2nd FBI agent described finding the Tsarnaevs' Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
apartment empty, Conrad noted it had not been vacant when agents arrived 4 days 
after the bombing.

"You're not aware of the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife and child were 
there at the time when the search team arrived?" Conrad asked FBI special agent 
Christopher Derks. Derks replied that he had been down the street when agents 
blasted the door open early on April 19, 2013.

By that time, Tamerlan had died of injuries sustained during a gunfight with 
police.

Questions like that, legal experts said, are intended to plant doubt in the 
jury's mind about the strength of government's case.

"Impeaching the quality of the investigation can help support their view that 
it was the older brother who was running the show," said Mark Pearlstein, a 
former federal prosecutor in Boston who has faced Conrad in criminal cases.

LONG EXPERIENCE

The defense team has long experience representing clients in death penalty and 
terrorism cases.

Clarke and Bruck rose to national prominence two decades ago when they defended 
a South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, who a jury found guilty of killing her 2 
sons but spared her a death sentence after Clarke argued that her actions 
reflected deep depression rather than malice.

The pair's research unveiled Smith's troubled history of sexual abuse and 
attempted suicide, some of the mitigating factors that lawyers use to persuade 
a jury to consider a more lenient sentence.

Clarke went on to defend "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and 1996 Atlanta Olympics 
bomber Eric Rudolph. She also served as a defense consultant to al Qaeda 
operative Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001 
attacks.

All 3 ultimately pled guilty and are serving life sentences.

Conrad defended Rezwan Ferdaus, who in 2012 pleaded guilty to planning to fly 
an explosive-laden remote control plane into the U.S. Capitol, and Aftab Ali 
Khan, who was deported from the United States after pleading guilty to helping 
transfer about $5,000 from his native Pakistan to a man who tried to set off a 
car bomb in New York's Times Square in 2010.

One major difference between those cases and Tsarnaev's is that prosecutors 
have not agreed to a plea deal, instead trying to put the ethnic Chechen, who 
immigrated to the United States a decade before the attack, to death.

But the same skills that have allowed the defense team to secure plea deals 
could help them persuade the jury to sentence Tsarnaev to life in prison 
without possibility of parole, legal experts said.

In either case, the lawyers need to present the same sort of "mitigation" 
evidence, said Barry Scheck, co-director of the New York-based Innocence 
Project, which uses DNA evidence to exonerate convicted people.

In a delicate balancing act, Tsarnaev's attorneys have taken care not to appear 
belligerent towards the bombing victims, declining to question any of them.

That could help protect their credibility in the jury's eyes, said Scheck, who 
said he has known Clarke for three decades: "You have to trust the messengers 
as much as you trust the message."

(source: Reuters)

******************

Prominent Latino Evangelical Group Joins Effort to Repeal Death Penalty in 
Groundbreaking Move



In a groundbreaking move, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition (NaLEC) on 
Friday became the 1st national association of Evangelical congregations to join 
the effort to repeal the death penalty.

Speaking at a press conference in Orlando, FL, Rev. Gabriel Salguero, President 
of NaLEC, stated, "We are here on this historic moment to announce publicly 
that we and our partners around the country are taking a public stance against 
the death penalty; we are calling for the abolition of the death penalty."

Since 1973, 150 people who were found guilty and sentenced to death row were 
later exonerated, leading NaLEC to argue that the death penalty has not been 
carried out in a just manner. Additionally, studies have shown that the race of 
the victim has a profound effect on which crimes receive the death penalty.

"People convicted of murdering a white victim are many times more likely to get 
sentenced to death than people convicted of killing Latinos or African 
Americans. In California, Latinos are murdered at twice the rate of white 
people, yet 11 of the 13 people executed in the state were convicted of killing 
a white person," Heather Beaudoin, National Advocacy Coordinator of the Equal 
Justice USA, told the Gospel Herald in an email.

"Nationally, Latinos are murdered at twice the rate of white people, but less 
than 7% of victims in pending death penalty cases are Latino. A recent study 
from the University of Nebraska Lincoln shows that Latino defendants are more 
likely to be sentenced to death by white jurors. In 96% of the states where 
there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of 
either race of victim or race of defendant discrimination or both."

The members of NaLEC believe that repealing the death penalty is not just a 
social issue, but more importantly, a Biblical one.

"We are a pro-life organization and we believe the death penalty is an 
anti-life practice," Rev. Salguero said. "As Christ followers, we are called to 
work toward justice for all. And as Latinos, we know too well that justice is 
not always even-handed. The death penalty is plagued by racial and economic 
disparities and risks executing an innocent person. Human beings are fallible 
and there is no room for fallibility in matters of life and death."

NaLEC, a group which seeks to "respond to a real need for Latino and Latina 
Evangelical voices committed to the common good and justice in the public 
sphere," has focused on a variety of criminal justice issues since their 
formation. However, the death penalty conversation escalated when Equal Justice 
USA had the opportunity to speak with them and highlight current problems with 
the death penalty.

"After prayer, reflection, and dialog with anti-death penalty organizations 
like Equal Justice USA, we felt compelled to add our voice to this important 
issue," Rev. Salguero explained.

While there is much more work to be done, the members of NaLEC take comfort in 
the major strides already taken to repeal the death penalty, and are urging the 
group's 3,000 member congregations to support them in working towards ending 
capital punishment across the United States.

"The good news is that people across the ideological spectrum are coming 
together and calling for an end to the death penalty," Ms. Beaudoin told the 
Gospel Herald. "In the last few years 6 states repealed the death penalty. In 
the last 2 years Republicans in Montana, Kentucky, Wyoming, South Dakota, 
Kansas, Nebraska and New Hampshire sponsored bills to repeal in their states. 
We are hopeful that more faith leaders will join NaLEC and the end of the death 
penalty is not far away."

(source: gospelherald.com)

*******************

Catholics on Left and Right Find Common Ground Opposing Death Penalty



As the editor of The National Catholic Reporter, a national biweekly, Dennis 
Coday reads his competitor, The National Catholic Register. But he does not 
have to agree with it.

The Reporter is seen as somewhat liberal in theology and politics. The 
Register, a competing biweekly with a confusingly similar name, is popular with 
more theologically traditional Roman Catholics, who often fall to the right 
politically.

But last year, seeing the amount of attention that The Register was giving to 
arguments opposing the death penalty, Mr. Coday came up with an idea: Maybe the 
2 newspapers could collaborate on an editorial calling on Catholics to oppose 
the death penalty.

"What struck me the most was Oklahoma Archbishop Paul Coakley came out strongly 
against it," Mr. Coday said. "And his comments were covered by The National 
Catholic Register."

Indeed, The Register had covered Catholic death-penalty opposition last May, 
after the botched execution of an Oklahoma inmate, Clayton Lockett, and again 
in July, after the protracted execution in Arizona of Joseph R. Wood III, who 
took nearly 2 hours to die.

Eventually, Mr. Coday got three other publications, including The Register, to 
join him. On March 5, "Catholic Publications Call for an End to Capital 
Punishment" ran on the websites of The Reporter; The Register; Our Sunday 
Visitor, which is considered conservative; and the Jesuit magazine America, 
which is considered liberal. The editorial was written principally by Mr. 
Coday, with the involvement of the four editorial boards.

The editorial was an unusual show of unity among publications that speak for 
often antagonistic niches of Catholic public thought. Editors at the 
publications agreed, in interviews this week, that such a joint effort would be 
unlikely on other topics, like same-sex marriage or abortion.

With the death penalty, the time seemed right. According to last year's major 
Pew survey, support for the death penalty is slipping nationally. At the same 
time, different branches of Roman Catholicism are uniting behind a message that 
has been consistently delivered by Pope Francis and his predecessors Benedict 
XVI and John Paul II.

"We, the editors of 4 Catholic journals," the editorial begins, "urge the 
readers of our diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and 
all people of faith to stand with us and say, 'Capital punishment must end.'"

"The Catholic Church in this country has fought against the death penalty for 
decades," it says. "Pope St. John Paul II amended the universal Catechism of 
the Catholic Church to include a de facto prohibition against capital 
punishment. Last year, Pope Francis called on all Catholics 'to fight ... for 
the abolition of the death penalty.' The practice is abhorrent and 
unnecessary."

The Register's editor, Jeanette De Melo, said that when Mr. Coday first 
broached the idea last fall, they could not quite make it work.

"The Register's take on the death penalty," Ms. De Melo said, "is to talk about 
it in broader context of the life issues," like abortion and euthanasia. "We 
wanted to contextualize it last fall in that broad context."

Ms. De Melo said that she and Mr. Coday could not agree on an editorial that 
brought in so many contentious issues. But when, in January, the Supreme Court 
agreed to take up the case of Glossip v. Gross, which challenges Oklahoma's use 
of lethal injection, she thought that maybe it was time for an editorial solely 
on capital punishment.

"Since the Supreme Court took up this case," Ms. De Melo said, "it seemed maybe 
we could look at it in a narrower context. I felt it was important to stand on 
something we can stand together on, these diverse publications with diverse 
audiences. We do agree this should end."

Some readers questioned Ms. De Melo's decision to join with more liberal 
publications. On March 16, she wrote her own editorial, placing her death 
penalty opposition in the context of issues that are important to 
conservatives.

"Euthanasia, abortion, war and capital punishment differ in moral weight, but 
they all threaten human dignity, and we must work to end them," Ms. De Melo 
wrote.

The church now teaches that the death penalty could be justified only for 
self-defense in the narrow sense of preventing a killer from committing a 
future killing. So in the modern state, the argument goes, with effective 
prisons and life sentences to keep killers off the street, there is no morally 
valid reason to use it. According to the Catholic theorist Robert George, who 
teaches at Princeton, capital punishment is not as bad as abortion or 
euthanasia, but it nonetheless needs to end.

"Although I do not regard capital punishment to be on a moral par with the 
deliberate killing of innocent persons - including killing unborn babies by 
abortion and killing elderly or handicapped persons in euthanasia - I believe 
that the abolition of killing as a punishment will promote a culture of life," 
Professor George wrote in a Feb. 19 letter to the governor and legislature of 
Kansas.

Coming from Professor George, who is admired by the Catholic right, the letter 
was another indication that on this particular issue, a unified position may be 
emerging.

Not everyone agrees. The Rev. John McCloskey, a conservative priest, wrote this 
month that "the Catholic Church's Magisterium does not and never has advocated 
unqualified abolition of the death penalty." He invoked Augustine and Thomas 
Aquinas in support of the death penalty, as well as Pope Pius XII.

Then there are the 59 % of white Catholics who, according to the Pew survey, 
favor capital punishment - 4 points higher than the average for all American 
adults.

Matt Malone, who edits America magazine, said Catholic journalists were 
starting to reach across these political divides. He pointed to a symposium his 
publication hosted in December, which drew journalists from the Register, the 
liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, U.S. Catholic, and the conservative 
magazine First Things, popular with Catholics.

"I think it's part of a general trend where we're less afraid to reach out to 
each other and do things than we used to be," Father Malone said.

Greg Erlandson, the publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, said that Catholics needed 
to keep talking to one another, lest they become as dysfunctional as the 
secular world.

"The ideological polarization that has paralyzed American political life has 
seeped into the church, unfortunately," Mr. Erlandson said. "So something like 
this" - the joint editorial - "is an important signpost for the church."

(source: New York Times)