Thoughts about the Orthodox Church and capital punishment

  • This recent firestorm over the pend­ing (and now accom­plished) exe­cu­tion of Tookie Williams started a dis­cus­sion going, and some­one asked what the Ortho­dox think of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. My rec­ol­lec­tion was unclear, and so I con­sulted <a href=”“The Ortho­dox Church: Four Hun­dred and Fifty-Five Ques­tions and Answers.” This was their answer:

    Cap­tial pun­ish­ment is the way the State pun­ishes par­tic­u­larly severe and rep­re­hen­si­ble crimes. While the Church always prays for the con­ver­sion of the sin­ner and believes that the chief pur­pose of pun­ish­ment is the reha­bil­i­ta­tion and reform of the crim­i­nal, and has always coun­seled mercy and com­pas­sion in deal­ing with law break­ers, it has not taken a blan­ket stand against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. But in coun­tries where cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is not exer­cised in ways which serve jus­tice, our Church has con­demned its use as arbi­trary, unfair and purposeless…

    …and then he goes on to name an arch­bishop who has spo­ken out against it. And my quick perusal of the Web found this and this by cler­ics who are against it.

    So we have one of those times when the Ortho­dox Church doesn’t have just one view or one voice. (That book is almost 20 years old now, but this arti­cle linked from the Ortho­dox Wikipedia made me think that things haven’t changed.) Can I be a lit­tle relieved about that with­out sound­ing like I desire the death of a sin­ner?

    I’m con­flicted on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment; it is one of the times that I truly don’t know what I think. I believe that God gave us life and I can’t elim­i­nate my mis­giv­ings about the state tak­ing it away. On the other hand, I look at the world we live in and feel very strongly that if cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment were never an option, there would be an esca­la­tion of vio­lence in and out of prison and many inno­cent peo­ple would suffer.

    I sup­pose that’s the crux of my prob­lem: which life means more — the life of the inno­cent or the life of the guilty? (That’s in a case where there really isn’t a ques­tion that the con­victed crim­i­nal is guilty. I know that Williams claimed he was inno­cent, but since I haven’t heard that claim taken up even by those who were most pas­sion­ate to plead his case in the media, I’m going to assume there isn’t a rea­son­able doubt that he didn’t kill those four peo­ple.) We would all much rather that no life was lost at all, but if we don’t notice the vio­lent pro­cliv­i­ties of vio­lent peo­ple, we aren’t look­ing at the world we actu­ally live in but rather a rhetor­i­cal world. I don’t live in a poor neigh­bor­hood; am I being com­pas­sion­ate to those who do if I look away from the crime that exists there because I want to feel good about myself? I don’t think that all ide­al­ism is vir­tu­ous — the ide­al­ism of the sec­u­lar left has led to moral decay and ter­ri­ble social con­se­quences, not the least of which is even­tual dis­ap­point­ment and cyn­i­cism. And I don’t believe that the worst crim­i­nal ele­ments of our soci­ety are under con­trol enough to remove this most extreme sentence.

    So maybe it sounds like I do favor cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. But if some­one asked me to pull the switch or make the lethal injec­tion, I don’t think I’d be able to, not from a lack of grit but from a lack of con­vic­tion. And if I’m ask­ing the state to do what I wouldn’t, I’m not being true to my con­vic­tions. I think that I wish it could just be decided on a case-by-case basis, and I wish that it were under a moral author­ity like a church rather than a purely legal one, though I know that isn’t at all real­is­tic. Because it is a mat­ter of guilt or inno­cence, life or death, con­tri­tion or hard-heartedness, jus­tice or injus­tice, I wish that the Church could be the one to make the call. But I’m indulging in my own rhetor­i­cal world when I wish for that — it’s not a real-world solution.

    In the case of Ortho­dox voices who argue against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, I have to admit that I start out by con­sid­er­ing what their sit­u­a­tion is. Are they from a coun­try or com­ing out of a his­tory where the state abused its author­ity and put polit­i­cal pris­on­ers to death? Are they from a coun­try that seems to embrace the cur­rent West­ern lib­eral ethos more than I’m com­fort­able with? When they speak, do they real­ize that sav­ing one life from a sud­den, humane death comes at the cost of dis­re­gard­ing the inhu­mane deaths of their vic­tims and may well result in more lives being taken?

    This is my ques­tion when I watch the cir­cus of Hol­ly­wood lib­er­als decry­ing this exe­cu­tion as well. In their case, it’s a much more open-and-shut case. I can’t find any­thing in what they say that gives me the least impres­sion that they under­stand what’s at stake or under­stand that any sane per­son would feel com­punc­tion in pro­long­ing the life of this mur­derer. In choos­ing to throw the weight of their sta­tus as pub­lic fig­ures behind the most dis­gust­ing and socio­pathic indi­vid­u­als, they make me won­der at their own level of deprav­ity. Why is it that these same peo­ple couldn’t find the least shred of this human feel­ing for Terri Schi­avo? Why couldn’t they fight for her clemency from a state-ordered death? Is it because she was inno­cent? Have they fallen so far that their own guilty con­sciences can only get exer­cised to defend some­one who robs and slaugh­ters peo­ple? These are hor­ri­ble ques­tions to pon­der, and I would love to find out that I have grossly under­es­ti­mated their abil­ity both to rea­son and to truly “hunger and thirst for right­eous­ness.” But some­one else would have to make the case for them — they haven’t done a decent job of it them­selves, and so my dis­gust at hear­ing the crimes of Tookie Williams is com­pounded with hear­ing celebri­ties dic­tate terms once again on social issues that they seem com­pletely wrong-headed about.

    So Tookie Williams is dead now. Well, two last points about that, one of which actu­ally gives me a lit­tle hope:

    • No mat­ter whether you’re for or against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, there is never any cause to take 20 years to carry out a sen­tence. I can’t imag­ine what ben­e­fit could ever emerge from the end­less legal harangu­ing that puts those under a death sen­tence in a sort of liv­ing death.
    • There doesn’t appear to be any of the riot­ing that we’d been led to believe would break out. It could still hap­pen, but if it did, it would smack more of mere oppor­tunism than true out­rage. And if it doesn’t break out at all — if in fact, those both black and white who pre­dicted it were mis­taken in think­ing that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of blacks in LA would con­sider the law­ful death of a mer­ci­less killer a cause for indig­na­tion — then that’s the best news I’ve had about this whole sor­did thing.

    Hope­fully it’s over now. I don’t intend to think about it any­more. That may seem cow­ardly of me, but every time I heard of Williams’ offenses, I thought of the line from Eph­esians 5: “And have no fel­low­ship with the unfruit­ful works of dark­ness, but rather reprove them, for it is shame­ful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret.”


    Related posts:

    1. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist
    2. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    3. No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.
    4. Poi­son by trifles
    5. 11:38 am

    December 13th, 2005 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 12.13.2005

    good food for thought…I’m 75–25 for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. I used to be a total paci­fist. Now I travel with a gun under my car seat. Maybe its because I have kids now. Mar­tyr­dom is one thing, sense­less vio­lence and wan­ton rape etc. are some­thing else in my mind. I dunno… maybe I’m just get­ting old and crotchety.

  • Mimi

    I think that the killing of some­one dimin­ishes us as a soci­ety, in the death-penalty, in abor­tion, and in war.

    But, that’s me and I’m totally ok with there not being an Ortho­dox view­point on the issue, although I’d sus­pect most clergy would err on the side of a chance to offer repen­tance and reconciliation.

  • s-p

    hmmmm…sounds like I need to post a blog about this. I’m prob­a­bly more about “grace and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion” than most clergy I know, but I’ve moved toward the death penalty as a “non-diminishing” event, unlike abor­tion and most mod­ern wars.

  • Grace

    Mimi,
    I can eas­ily imag­ine hav­ing that opin­ion, which is why I can’t count myself as sure about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as I am about other life and death ques­tions. Prob­a­bly I’m too uncer­tain that it isn’t an issue where lives will be lost and soci­ety com­pro­mised either way.

  • Grace

    s-p,
    Wish you would. I love your analy­sis on the big Ortho­dox ques­tions. (No pressure!)

  • s-p

    I recently cross posted a piece on my blog and Con­cil­iar Press’ blog http://www.conciliarpress.com/blog/
    CP has some “heavy hit­ter” con­trib­u­tors who are good for dis­cus­sion and don’t surf per­sonal blogs.

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