Don't kill my killer: the Cherish Life Circle opposes the death penalty by helping both criminal and victim

I couldn't find anyone else to go--it was too close to Christmas." But the matter was urgent: a death row prisoner was to be executed in two weeks, and he was asking for spiritual guidance. So Camille D'Arienzo, a Sister of Mercy from Brooklyn, made the journey with a priest friend to a federal prison in Pennsylvania to speak with a man facing imminent death by lethal injection.

That trip in 1998 stemmed from the "Declaration of Life" that serves as the guiding principle of the Cherish Life Circle that Sister D'Arienzo founded. The declaration reads: "I ...