March 16th, 2011
By George Raine
A group of Catholic lawyers in California is forming to rally fellow Catholics to oppose the death penalty, saying it is morally wrong under church teaching and the system that administers it is dysfunctional and wasteful.
The plan is to establish groups of Catholic lawyers in each of the state’s 58 counties and dispatch members to speak at parishes, retreats and anywhere Catholics congregate to ask them to join in a campaign to change California law that permits capital punishment. In the short term, the lawyers plan to pressure district attorneys not to seek the death penalty.
The mobilizing of Catholic lawyers is one of the first steps toward launching a ballot initiative, perhaps in a few years, to repeal the death penalty in California, death penalty opponents say. The law that authorizes the penalty came via initiative, and it can only be amended or repealed by initiative.
Although polling shows that support for the death penalty among Catholics has declined in recent years, those still supportive form an obstacle to abolition, said Gerald Uelmen, professor of law at Santa Clara University and chairman of the advisory committee for the group he has co-founded, California Catholic Lawyers Against the Death Penalty (CCLADP).
“We are not going to get a unanimous vote to abolish the death penalty but I think there are enough people who can be persuaded on this issue that we could turn it around and succeed,” said Uelmen, a criminal law and evidence specialist. “It is going to take a lot of work.”
Uelmen has helped create the Catholic lawyers’ website, www.ccladp.org, on which Catholic lawyers can join the effort. It also contains information on biblical references to the death penalty, what popes have said, what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says and the teachings of the U.S. and California bishops.
The church teaches that each person is created in God’s image and that killing is wrong. The U.S. bishops, in a 1999 statement, also said the death penalty perpetuates a cycle of violence and promotes “a sense of vengeance in our culture.” In 2010, the California Catholic Conference said life without the possibility of parole is an alternative that protects society.
Uelmen, a Catholic, from Saratoga, is honing that message for his statewide volunteers and also making a case that administering the death penalty is prohibitively expensive, costing California taxpayers $137 million a year when the state is mired in debt.
Moreover, he said, the promises prosecutors make to the families of murdered victims – that they will secure justice with executions – are “delusional.” He added, “The idea that you are doing this for the families of the victims, I think, is really cruel, because you are promising them something you can’t deliver,” Uelmen said. “Most of them will be dead before the perpetrator is dead,” given that it takes on average 17.2 years to carry out an execution after a death penalty has been pronounced.
Uelmen was motivated to launch the group after seeing the results of an American Civil Liberties Union poll in 2007, never made public, that showed that Catholic voters were not well informed about the church’s position and that, among religious groups, Catholics showed the greatest support for the death penalty.
That appears to be changing, not only because of moral opposition but because of the cost to taxpayers. Uelmen was the executive director of a commission formed by the California Legislature in 2006, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, that found that death penalty trials cost at least $500,000 more than other trials and possibly much more, and that housing a prisoner on death row adds $90,000 a year to the costs of normal imprisonment.
A November, 2010 poll for the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C, found that 61 percent of U.S. voters would choose a punishment other than death for murder if given a choice. Lake Research Partners found that 39 percent would support life without the possibility of parole and restitution to the victim’s family; 13 percent sided with no parole and 9 percent supported life with the possibility of parole.
In contrast to the 2007 ACLU poll on Catholic thinking, the Lake Research survey of 1,500 people found that Catholics were more supportive of alternatives than Christian non-Catholics and non-Christians, said Richard Dieter, the anti-death penalty group’s executive director.
Slightly less than half of all respondents said the death penalty is against their moral beliefs, but for Catholics it was 6 out of 10.
This growing Catholic opposition to the death penalty, said Dieter, may reflect a joining of traditional liberal opposition with the conservative view that sees it as a right to life issue. “They come together on this issue,” said Dieter.
The executive director of the lawyers’ group is Paul Comiskey, a retired lawyer in Newcastle (Placer County) and a former Jesuit priest. “If we can show that the death penalty is a pro-life issue we can change the minds and hearts of Catholics,” he said.
Since 1978 when California reinstated capital punishment, 54 condemned inmates have died from natural causes, 18 committed suicide, 13 were executed, one was executed in Missouri and six died in prison violence. There are currently 712 offenders on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Courtesy of http://www.standdown.org/
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