A Yom Kippur Reflection on the Death Penalty
And I could tell you that Judaism finds the kind of capital system we have abhorrent and unacceptable. That while the Torah lists dozens of capital crimes – including violating the Shabbat, witchcraft, and talking back to your parents – the rabbis of the Talmudic era erected procedural and evidentiary obstacles that essentially obviated the possibility that a Sanhedrin (a Jewish court) would ever hand down a death sentence. Those rabbis 2000 years ago were concerned about exactly the same things that concern us today – the risk of executing an innocent and the abomination of dual systems of justice for different classes of people. Better not to have a death penalty at all, they reasoned.
But let’s forget about all this for a moment. Innocent or guilty, victim of a flawed trial or not, Stan Tookie Williams is set to die in 2 months time. A young criminal who evolved into something more, someone more than the sum of his crimes. Now a force for good in the world, keeping others from making the same mistakes he made. The letter of the law is clear in this case; his appeals have been exhausted. There is no where else to turn. Unless the governor grants him clemency, he will die. The State of California will kill him in the name of the People of California. Which, of course, means that you and I will kill him.
So what do we do? I imagine I know what Jonah would do, faced with our dilemma. He would take a seat, and watch San Quentin to see if the judgment would be carried out. I think he would hope that it would be. This time, he probably won’t be disappointed.
But what about us? The Book of Jonah tells us that all people are equal under God, and that we are all of us responsible for each other, even those we don’t know. Even those we don’t like. And the Book of Jonah tells us that even the wicked can make t’shuvah, and that when they do, God will renounce God’s punishment. And that it is wrong to hope otherwise. And that our job as Jews is to be agents of t’shuvah in the world. And Isaiah tells us that we are also to serve as agents of justice. For us today, Niniveh, sits repenting in sack cloth and ashes in the death-house in San Quentin Prison on the San Francisco Bay. 60 Days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. What will we do?