The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 7, 1997 by Gary MacEoin

While world opinion against the death penalty mounts, the United States has moved in the opposite direction. After a decade without a single execution, a faring squad in Utah killed Gary Gilmore in January 1977. The number of executions in 1985 rose to 18, and in 1987 to 25, one of whom, according to Amnesty International "may have been innocent, another was mentally retarded, and a third was executed after a 4-4 vote of the Supreme Court denied him a stay of execution " By 1995, with death penalty laws in 38 states, the annual number of executions was up to 56, and legal changes to restrict both public funds and appeal procedures indicated even higher figures to follow.

Since the Reagan era with its glorification of greed and selfishness, citizen opinion has strongly supported the revival of the death penalty. The mood has intensified more recently with the growth of economic insecurity caused by massive downsizing and the explosion of part-time jobs without health or other social social benefits. Megivern would here include "the sensory overload of TV and movies that present endlessly unrelieved violence and killing as the unquestioned norm."

Megivern is disappointed but confident. International opinion has changed irreversibly, he insists. The United States will follow.

The Death Penalty is the product of two decades of research by a major historian and theologian. It gives us the voices of two thousand years of Christian thinkers on punishment by death, with 81 pages of notes and 39 of bibliograpy. A formidable task. A timely achievement.

Texas Death Row constitutes the perfect complement to The Death Penalty. Donovan and Light had unprecedented access for a year to the four hundred men waiting in the Ellis maximum security prison to be executed. The statistics are staggering: disproportionately poor, uneducated, African-American; average age, 22 to 25; average education, ninth grade; average time between conviction and execution, over 7 years.

No words could do justice to the pictures. Their total impact is well described by Donovan: "I was struck by what we have in common, the fragility of our lives and the potential for violence within all of us.... Most people don't want to think about how much they share with someone sentenced to die." The photos that hit me hardest were Randy visiting with his two-year-old daughter (a metal screen preventing physical contact), Martin similarly projecting a kiss to his mother, and Robert being baptized by immersion in a tub with two prisoners as sponsors.

Donovan, while insisting on the high probability that each of these men is a murderer, is able to see them as human beings uncomfortably similar to ourselves. "Time, with its corollaries hope and fear, is a thread running through conversations," she says. "How to spend time, how it crushes those who let it, how it feels to wait to be executed."

James shared with her a decade of reflection: "When you go through life out there, time is like air to you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out; it passes through you, and you sort of pass through time. But when you're here and it's final ... time doesn't go anywhere. It comes and it stops. It builds up inside, and it's actually like a weight after a while. Ten years weighs an awful lot."