Excerpt from ‘Shepherd’s Corner’
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Death Penalty – The Value of Life
The Most Reverend Archbishop Joseph Harris
Archbishop of Port-of-Spain
“What I want to do now is begin to talk a little bit about life, the value of life. It is the greatest gift that God has given to us; and in our Church there is the pro-life movement, the movement which says life is special, life is a gift of God, life must be maintained, life must be sustained, life must be lived in very human ways and that we, as christians, have to ensure that people live really human lives. That is what God wants of us as christian people.
It is important to note that God is the author of life. Not you, not me, no one else. All life comes from God. God is the author of life. All life must be respected. If we are pro-life we can’t be pro-life in sections. If we are pro-life we are pro-life across the board. If we are pro-life we ensure that there are people who live truly human lives and we work for that. If we are pro-life we are against the killing of innocent life either through abortion, through infanticide, through murder. If we are pro-life we are against that. If we are pro-life we are also against killing by the State or capital punishment.
Our Popes recently have been very clear in what they say. Pope John Paul II in 1995 wrote this in an encyclical called Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). And he says that this is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty. On this matter there is a growing tendency both in the Church and in civil society to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus in the end, with God’s plan for man and society.
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The second part is this: That there is no proof whatsoever that the death penalty as we exercise it is a deterrent to crime. Our laws do not facilitate the immediate implementation of the death penalty. In certain countries it may take two or three weeks after a crime is committed for the death penalty to be implemented. If that were our situation then the death penalty might have been a deterrent. But it is not. That is not our situation and I don’t know if any of us want to go down that road because in situations like that, too many innocent people get executed. I don’t know if we want to go down that road. In fact, I don’t think we do.
The other issue for me is this: Of the 37/38 odd murders committed since the year begun, how many had been apprehended. Very few. If ten of those have been apprehended that would be a lot. It is far less than that so for whom are we implementing the death penalty if we can’t even find those who are perpetrating the crimes. No, we have to find other ways to deal with this situation. As a people we have to come together and find other ways of dealing with the causes that bring about violent crime in our land. If we don’t, violent crime will continue. We have as a people to come together and deal with the issues which cause violent crime. I don’t know if we are doing that.
My third issue is this: Violence begets violence. Violence is not something that stops with one act. Violence begets violence. And we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere and say: ‘Fine, we will not be violent in return.’ We cannot continue that spiral. I was reading some time ago some statistics of the countries that have the death penalty at least in the Western world and those that have not. And those statistics seem to suggest that countries with the death penalty have a higher per capita murder rate than countries without the death penalty. In fact, those statistics were saying that even in the United States, the states which had the death penalty, those states had a higher rate of murder than those states which do not have the death penalty. It does not seem as if the death penalty is in fact a deterrent. Statistics do not show that.
The other thing is this. I had a friend once, very much, very much, – She’s dead now, God rest her soul – very much pro the death penalty and was always arguing with me why it should be implemented until a cousin of hers was on death row up for murder. Then she was at my door, calling me regularly: ‘Father, are you saying the Mass I asked you to say for me?’ When it is those people it is easy to call for the death penalty. When it is people who are close to us: our relatives, our friends, our brothers, our sisters, nieces, nephews, then the death penalty begins to be a little bit more problematic for us. So I think that all of us christian people, believers in Christ Jesus, we have to take the high road. Pandering to a sense of vengeance in our people will not help. Putting on the papers pictures of crime and sobbing people is not good. It helps no one. Rather it inflames passions. We have to be people who look at this thing rationally, come together and see the best ways that we can find of eliminating the causes, of eliminating the causes.
In our country at this time as you know, part of the problem is the drug culture. We have to do whatever we can to get rid of the drug culture and that may mean arresting big people but we have to be serious about getting to the roots of what is the cause of the violence and the criminal activity. If we do not, the spiral of violence will continue. If we do not have an education system which truly educates our young people the spiral is going to continue. If we do not have a system of education which gives young people hope that when they are finished with their education they will have something to do, the spiral of violence will continue and in a certain way if we do not do these things we create the criminals and then we hang them. That is not the christian way. It will never be the christian way. The christian way is love, the christian way is forgiveness, the christian way is doing the best that we can for others to ensure that they can live truly human lives. All of us, you and I, have to commit ourselves to that. As I say, if we do not, then the spiral of violence which we are seeing will continue. That is what I wanted to say today on the death penalty. I know it has been in a lot of people’s minds. People have been saying to me: ‘Father, Your Grace, when will you say something. Well, we said something last year before I was Archbishop because the problem came up last year. We will see what happens this year. The problem has come up again. If the Bill is not passed it will be shelved for another year and we will continue saying the same thing. The death penalty is not the answer. It is not the answer. Let us come together and together find the solutions to the problems which caused the death penalty.
So thank you all very, very much.
