Deathwatching

Whitefeather is a Catholic Worker house in North Portland, Oregon. It is named for a peace activist and friend of current leader of house activities, Tom Hastings. Last night I was invited to come and share my work on the death penalty.

I arrived to the sound of chatter and the clinking of glasses and the clatter of silverware just in time for the vegetarian potluck. Central to the fare was vegetarian pizza in honour of Philip Workman’s last wish and many of the people at the evening were people living in single resident occupancy accommodation, or others who have had the experience of homelessness even if they are not now. After we were satisfied with the fresh fruits and delicious breads on offer we sat in the large parlour and I asked each person to introduce him or herself and tell me why they had come.

Many were interested in how a Christian witness could be reconciled with support of the death penalty, others were interested in prison conditions and the incidence of suicide, some wondered about international views of the US, others asked about the impact on offenders families and the families of victims, mental illness was mentioned, there were questions about the movement in Oregon, deterrence and realistic alternatives. Many simply said they had come to learn.

The talk ranged over all these subjects and more. How refreshing it was to be in a room full of people who like me find the death penalty unacceptable. And yet, one young man apparently confided in his mother afterwards that I was a great Devil’s advocate and it was hard to discern what I really think.

Although it was not my intention to be ambiguous about my own beliefs I did intentionally advocate for careful listening and respect of those who hold different beliefs. At one point I asked people to call out reasons why people support the death penalty. With the utmost respect people gave many of the reasons students and others I have met who do support the death penalty have given for their opinion.

These ideas included:
Protection of society and potential victims from further violence
Deterrence of crime
Cost of life in prison
Closure for victims
Culture
Upholding the moral order
Justice
Holding the perpetrator accountable
Hammurabi Law
The power of example
Revenge
Spectacle

I was able to show that apart from the last four, we would all be in sympathy with the other objectives if not of the means of meeting them. And that this gave us a lot of common ground.

We talked on into the candlelight and then into the darkness. Some people left, others stayed and chatted even after it was all over and we were standing in the kitchen while Tom and Rhoda our hosts washed the last few dishes.

It was a wonderful opportunity for me to explore a way of talking about listening with respect. And I was able to end by saying what I firmly believe: that people support the death penalty out of fear and pain, and that they can be loved but not hated from that position. Someone said it took two to have that conversation. I disagree. Because we come from love we come from strength and so it is for us to go the extra distance to meet and hold these people until they can step into the Light.

I heard this morning that Philip Workman’s final wish was to have his last meal donated to the homeless. He asked for a vegetarian pizza to be donated to a homeless shelter near the prison where he was executed by the State of Tennessee in the early hours of Wednesday morning this week.

Philip Workman robbed a Wendy’s when he was strung out on cocaine. Officer Oliver was shot and killed during the attempt to arrest him. The only state’s witness recanted his testimony, five jurors said that if they had known that the witness was lying they would not have voted for death, and ballistics experts testified that the wound in Lt. Oliver was more consistent with the calibre of the police weapons being used than it was with the gun Workman used. These facts make me have more than a reasonable doubt that perhaps he did not kill Lt. Oliver.

Nevertheless, Philip Workman was executed. And the prison said it didn’t donate to charity so the pizza wasn’t delivered…until a local woman decided to honour his last wish herself. She asked her friends and other concerned people to chip in and help her. She raised $1200.

I wondered if you’d help me do the same.

If you know of a homeless shelter near you where you could donate one vegetarian pizza in the name of Philip Workman, please do it. Otherwise, contact me and tell me what you are willing to donate and I’ll arrange the purchase and delivery of pizzas to some shelters in downtown Portland.

It’s not much, but it is something good to come out of something really sad. We don’t often get this opportunity.
Personally, I don’t think anyone should be executed, but this man’s unselfish act when all hope was gone, is something to inspire us to act I think.

Senate Bill 1018

Several weeks ago a group of people began to talk about the possibilities of a bill to establish a Commission along the lines of the New Jersey Commission in Oregon. Much encouraged by the mixture of commissioners in NJ who had nevertheless concluded that the death penalty there served no legitimate purpose and should be abolished, this group of scholars, attorneys, legislators, activists and others wondered if the time was ripe for such an enquiry here.

What had made them think so? Opinion polls have not indicated much shift in Oregon support although data about prosecutor charging behaviours and jury sentencing behaviours have indicated a trend that sees fewer people charged with aggravated murder and fewer sentenced to death even if they do go to trial. Indeed last year, a Multnomah jury determined that someone convicted of a double murder would go to prison for life rather than be executed, a first for a Multnomah jury.

But national trends also reflect this loss of enthusiasm for sentencing. And this is the behaviour to watch. The ebb and flow of executions in states are a playing out of past problems with death penalty statutes and refinements of state death penalty machines. It is current charging and sentencing behaviour which reflect public confidence in this controversial policy.

Despite a continuing swing toward retributive responses to crime, and increasing incarceration and harsher punishments, a rise in the concomitant concern with wrongful conviction and the exonerations of over 123 people who were sentenced to death is giving even the most committed supporters pause.

But apparently not sufficiently to ensure a bill requesting an enquiry even a hearing. I would love to know why the hearing was so vigorously opposed, and by whom.

Interesting.

In chronological order, here are the classes I will be offering through Portland State University this summer session. They are all online and participants can audit if you don’t need credit. Registration questions and processes at www.pdx.edu. Please join me!

AJ410/510: The Function of Crime in Society: Reflections on Durkheim
(1 credit - web)
Monday 25th-Friday 29th June, 2007

Bellah, R.N. (Ed.) (1973) Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press.

Emile Durkheim is credited with being the father of sociology as an academic discipline. Durkheim saw the occurrence of different groups in society as evidence of their function in balancing society. Different roles have the effect of binding people together in Durkheim’s view although the cohesiveness of these bonds may be of differing types. He distinguished two: mechanical and organic. Mechanical bonds were fostered by law and contracts and tended toward more punitive and respressive social relations. Organic bonds, in contrast were founded on more restitutive aims. In this course participants will read and reflect on the implications of Durkheim’s ideas for the study of criminology.

AJ410/510: Crime and Social Order: Reflections on Garland
(1 credit – web)
Monday 2nd – Friday 6th July, 2007

Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press.

Garland writes compellingly and influentially about what he calls “cultures of control”. In this book he grapples with serious questions such as, if we in the US and the UK are so convinced of the value of individual freedom then why have we adopted mass imprisonment and other repressive social controls over the last decades? Garland has developed an analysis of the underpinnings of what he calls the control culture which makes essential reading for students of criminal justice today, and which has informed much interesting work both nationally and internationally. In this course participants will read and reflect on the implications of Garland’s ideas for their own theories of criminal justice.

AJ410/510 The Proper Sphere of Punishment: Reflections on Foucault
(1 credit – web)
Monday 9th- Friday 13th July, 2007

Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Michel Foucault is one of the most influential contemporary sociological philosophers. Fundamental to all Foucault’s work is the way power and knowledge are related in society. Discipline and Punish examines the evolution of this relationship while Foucault argues that the focus of punishment moves from the body to the soul. His project is to explain the appearance of contemporary imprisonment. In this course, participants will read his book together, building meaning and understanding through discussion of Foucault’s ideas and considering trends and developments in American penal policy in the light of his propositions.

AJ410/510 Concepts and Purposes of Pain and Harm in Corrections
(1 credit – web)
Monday 16th-20th July

Clear, T.R. (1994) Harm in American Penology: Offenders, Victims and Their Communities. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ignatieff, M. (1978) A Just Measure of Pain; The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850. London, UK: Penguin Books

Clear’s project is to examine the expansion of imprisonment (which continues unabated more then a decade after he wrote this book) and to challenge it in terms of the harm it does not just to offenders but also to their communities. Ignatieff’s book analyses a period in history when the very function of punishment changed and the modern concept of penitentiary was born. When we read these two books together, what light does each shed on the thoughts and conclusions of the other? When we consider their propositions, what do they contribute to our understanding of current trends in American penology? Participants will read and discuss these ideas, as well as ideas which surface in the reading during this one week intensive book study.

AJ410/510 “The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment”: International Perspectives on the Death Penalty.
(4 credit – web)
25th July – 17th August, 2007

Sarat, A., & Boulanger, C. (Ed.s) (2005) Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hood, R. (2002) The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (3rd Edition) Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

While the majority of states in the US impose the death penalty on their worst criminals, a slight but increasing majority of other nations have abolished capital punishment. International law prohibits international courts and tribunals from using the death penalty and international treaties and conventions suggest an objective of total abolition. The US is under considerable international pressure to reconsider its increasingly isolated stance. When major religious writings call for the death penalty, and most cultures have espoused it until recently, what explains this trend to abolition? Is abolition of the death penalty becoming an international norm? How would we know if this were the case, and what obligation would the US then be under to abolish? American “Exceptionalism” and concepts of sovereignty will be discussed in order to understand these trends in all their complexity.

AJ410/510 Conceptual Underpinnings of International Law in Crimes Against Humanity: Reflections on May
(1 credit – web)
August 6th-10th, 2007

May, L. (2005) Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

We are all horrified by crimes against humanity when we learn about them from our news outlets. We turn to one another and wonder why no-one is doing anything about it. And why aren’t they? Larry May probes the underpinnings of international law, concepts of sovereignty, and the evolution of norms to provide a logical and legal argument to justify intervention in certain circumstances. His argument throws light on domestic enforcement and concepts of jurisdiction that will be considered. Participants in this short course will work collaboratively to examine the situation in Darfur where crimes against humanity are being committed, and use May’s discussion to provide a critique of what international intervention there has been, making recommendations for ways of approaching this situation and similar situations in the future with greater certainty and effectiveness.

We all want our outrage expressed at particularly heinous murders. For some the only way they imagine this being done adequately is by the imposition of a death sentence.

In a democratic state where the populace feel as these folk do, the convicted person is usually confined in some way prior to execution. Of course the possibilities for exercise of the power that gives the state over the person are several.

Should we authorise the state to torture a person in captivity if that person has tortured his or her own victim?
Should we authorise the state to remove parts of that person’s body if that person has removed parts of the body of his or her victim?
Should we authorise the state to recreate the conditions of the original murder as closely as possible so as to replicate the experience of the victim for the convicted person?

Whatever our feelings about just deserts, our state has determined it will not do these things. In fact our state labels such retaliation, barbaric. We even find the symbolic retaliation of amputation carried out in Saudi and other Moslem nations hard to take.

But on what grounds does the state not do these things? Out of kindness to the convicted person? Only partly, but that’s not the whole story. I think it is so because our culture seems to think that causing another human being to suffer indignity disgraces us. The reaction to the events at Abu Ghraib are a recent example of this. Were we horrified because we were thinking of the feelings of the prisoners? Possibly. But I think we were much more ashamed to be associated as Americans with the Americans who carried out those actions. We just didn’t think that doing those kinds of things were consistent with the image we’d like people to have of Americans.

In this sense, human rights are also symbolic. They have to do with a dignified restraint of the state and its respect for the dignity of citizens no matter what they have done. The state giving a person due process, a qualified attorney, an opportunity to appeal his or her sentence, a “humane” death; all these gifts indicate a state which is magnanimous, and which has respect for the rights of all citizens. It has to do much more with honor than with retribution.

While private individuals may feel beside themselves with outrage and horror, full of desire for vengeance and revenge, we have, as a group, decided our state will deal with these matters. But I suspect our trust in our state to manage things on our behalf would be seriously undermined if it didn’t respect the human rights of even the worst of us.

Thus I would say that respecting the human rights of another person is not about kindness or compassion or forgiveness necessarily, but about allowing that person to be dignified. Because the state could choose not to so easily, and by choosing this it can stand on the moral high ground and refuse to create events such as the original murder in which someone’s rights and dignity were simply thrown aside and thus his or her humanity denied.