What's next nationally in the campaign for a moratorium on the death penalty?
We have 112 innocent people -- or at least let me say wrongly convicted people -- who have come off death row. For every eight persons that we've executed, one person has had to be released from death row because we made a mistake. That's eight hundred years combined of people's lives. We're beginning to be aware as a society -- at first we thought we really had a perfect court system -- that we've got some problems. There's this tendency to do this quick fix thing -- give everybody DNA [tests] and all. Those are superficial, and they're never going to answer the real problem. There is a new moment of people questioning the death penalty, because for most people it is beyond any moral decency that innocent people would be executed along with the guilty.What about the sniper trial? Do you think that makes for greater opposition to a moratorium on the death penalty?
In every society, even in countries that don't have the death penalty, when a terrible murder has happened people are in a state of outrage and fear. You do a poll and people will say, "Yes, he deserves death," because [they are] operating right out of the outrage -- very selectively, though. Our society holds what they call the poster children for the death penalty. But most people don't have a clue about how selective the death penalty is.
For me, the moral question has to be faced. If one human life is taken violently -- a whole universe is lost when one of us is killed. It gets to compounding in that more get killed, making it worse, but to face the loss and killing of one human being to me is the essence of the moral question.
Then we come to the moral question for ourselves as a society. One time a man was about to be executed. It was a day before his execution, a bunch of reporters were interviewing him, [and] someone said, "Mr. so and so, you've done an unspeakably heinous crime. Can you give us one good reason why this society should not execute you for what you did?" And he said, "Because you're better than I am."
The flip side of the moral question for us as a society is: Maybe in books of justice people who do these terrible things deserve to die, but who deserves to kill them? Any time we have a society executing, it's going to boil down to about twelve human beings whose task it's going to be to go get that person who has been handcuffed and shackled and is defenseless and bring them from a room and take them and kill them, and participate in their killing. That's the other side of the question that gets raised by us as a society.
Why is it that, according to polls, a majority of American Catholics supports the death penalty?
Catholic support is dropping, and not just Catholic support. I've been tracking this. When you ask, "Do you support the death penalty for people who do these terrible crimes?" then people say "Yeah, yeah, yeah." [If] you bring them a little deeper and say, "If you had to choose between two things -- the death penalty or life without parole," [support] drops to 50 percent. People are ambivalent about it. When you ask them, "Should mentally retarded people executed?" [they say] "Of course not." Or, "What about young kids?" Did you know, in this country, the United States of America, if you are below eighteen you can't buy alcohol or cigarettes, you can't sign a legal contract, you can't witness an execution, but you can be executed? Isn't that incredible? We're one of only two countries in the world that lets kids be killed. Once you dehumanize people, once you say you only identify them by the crime and you make a monster of them, then you can kill anybody.
What about the families of victims?
All the other countries that practice the death penalty never make the claim that they're doing it for the victims' families. Our politicians are unique, and I think they're trying to legitimize being for the death penalty. After 25 years, we know it doesn't deter. All the states that practice it have roughly double the homicide rate of states that don't have the death penalty. Look at New York and Massachusetts. New York has it -- they spend over $80 million to get six people on death row -- and Massachusetts doesn't. So how do you legitimize it? "Well, we're going to do the decent, noble thing and we're going to do it for the victims' families." Most people don't know that 98 percent of all the people who kill other people -- those victims' families don't get the so-called justice. It's for a very, very small number, and almost always it's because white people have been killed. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think white people should be killed either, but we definitely have a selectivity process in this, and it's worth looking at.
Describe your new book.
In LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE MACHINERY OF DEATH I tell the story of accompanying two people. The courts upheld their guilt until the end, but the reader is going to be the jury they never had. The reader is going to see what evidence was hidden and what things were done -- and it's going to give you that sense of outrage at injustice, and I'm hoping it will awaken passion.
Second story: Joseph O'Dell, a man of Virginia who is accused and convicted of killing a woman, Helen Schartner. They both were in the same bar. For 11 years, he begged the courts to let him have a complete hearing where he could have the new and improved DNA testing on evidence that would prove his innocence. Virginia never let him have the hearing, the courts refused, and then they executed him, and then they destroyed the DNA evidence so it could never be tested. He was the one who aroused all the international concern. The European Union called Virginia, and they passed a resolution asking for him to have this hearing. Italy got involved, the pope got involved, Mother Teresa got involved. The Virginia governor got 10,000 faxes and phone calls from the people of Italy. And then, when Joseph was killed by the state of Virginia, the mayor of Palermo had made him an honorary citizen of Palermo, so they claimed the body, flew him over, and gave him an honorary burial in Palermo and on the way there met the pope.
