The Days Are Coming

“There are just certain people who should never 
see the light of day as free men or women.”
Rev. Francis J. Flynn, Psy.D., CAP

“Behold the days are coming…”

Look! They’re coming from the East?

Or the West! Or the North? Or is it the South?

The truth is it really doesn’t matter. The Prophet Jeremiah had it right when he warned “Behold! The days are coming….”

Today, he might declare, “Behold the days are coming when many of those who claim to be ‘prolife’ will show their true selves, for the days of the death penalty are fewer and that gate becoming narrower. 

“True,” the Prophet would acknowledge, “the man some of you proclaimed ‘the most prolife president in history’ proved himself ‘pro-death’ as he fled town before the Inauguration ceremony. But that’s not an excuse for the bloodbath of executions that marked the days after he lost his reelection campaign.

“And beware” warns the Prophet, “many ‘prolifers’ will throw hissy fits as more states move to abolish the death penalty and the new administration will – probably soon - begin plans to eliminate federal executions.”

In December 2020 and the first weeks of 2021, on his way out the door, the “most prolife president in history” and his “prolife” Attorney General Bill Barr executed more people than all of the fifty states, and the number of federal prisoners put to death – thirteen in fewer than seven weeks – was the highest since Grover Cleveland’s second term in the White House. In comparison, only seven state-level executions were carried out in 2020 – a 37-year low. Before the outgoing administration pushed the syringes of lethal injections, only three federal inmates had been executed since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988.

In addition, fewer new death sentences – eighteen – were imposed in 2020 than in any year since 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down all existing capital punishment statutes. Moreover, no administration since Cleveland’s first presidency had carried out multiple executions during the then November-to-March transition. Simply stated the Trump-Barr regime carried out more executions than had occurred in a presidential transition period in the nation’s history. 

Before Barr’s resignation, he justified the executions – including the first federal execution of a woman since 1953 - by claiming they were being carried out against “the worst criminals” and to bring relief to victims and their families.

The staunchest advocates of the death penalty have long used this argument: When we kill the bad guys – electric chair, hanging, firing squad, guillotine or lethal injection; it doesn’t matter – the victims and their families family can begin to heal. Anyone, anyone who mourns the death of a beloved knows that’s not true. After more than fifty years of marriage – more than the last two decades characterized by Francis’s complete inability to care for himself and the last years in a permanent vegetative state because of a series of brain injuries, Alice whispered, “There’s a hole in my heart.” Not relief, although certainly there must have been some, but “a hole in my heart.” 

Does any truly honest advocate believe less? Over time, the hole changes. For years, the hole-of-pain may be so all-consuming that it renders the truly loving prostrate in grief with only moments of blessed forgetfulness. With time – with years, holy forgetfulness yields way to consolation, grace-filled memories and “a “sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.” (The Book of Common Prayer. The Committal)

Surely almost every one of the men and one woman killed in the outgoing administration’s unquenchable search for yet another claim to fame was guilty of horrendous crimes. Almost because the intellectual capacity of some will be forever debated. 

In a dozen years as a chaplain at a maximum-security Florida prison, I interviewed more than ten thousand inmates and spent thousands of hours counseling them; I was present for the infirmary and hospital deaths of dozens and informed far too many families of prisoners’ suicides and natural deaths. I witnessed barely a handful of “jailhouse conversions.” [A lasting memory is walking into the chapel one evening as a prisoner waved a bible over his head testifying “I don’t know how it happens. But every time I come to I prison, I end-up with this Good Book in my hands and I get saved.” When I reviewed his record, he was on his thirteenth – yes, 13th – tour of the Florida penal system.]  Genuine jailhouse and prisons are few and far between.

While I’m convinced that there are some men and women in our nation’s prisons who should never see the light of day as free persons, I remain opposed to the death penalty. It will not bring closure or relief to families. 

On the night of January 23-24, 1989, crowds gathered, singing and chanting, playing drums and setting off firecrackers as Theodore Robert Bundy was executed and, shortly thereafter, a white hearse transported his body from Florida State Prison grounds. “It [the gathering outside the prison gates] took on a macabre, circus like atmosphere,” a television reporter noted in describing the “ten years, twenty-eight confessions, millions in Florida’s legal battle to end his life.”  

When we celebrate any state-sanctioned death we diminish the quality of our shared humanity.

Charismatic and (some say) handsome, Bundy was a serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered young women and girls during the 1970s, perhaps even earlier. In the end, he confessed to 30 homicides, committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. Because he was executed, it is possible that the world will never know the full extent of his crimes. “In fact, he did not charm these women. He tricked them, he attacked them, mashed them in the head and he killed them,” said Lynn Thompson, former defense attorney for Bundy.  

One biographer described him as “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after.” One of his defense attorneys called him “the very definition of heartless evil.” 

There could never be a doubt that Ted Bundy deserved to die in prison.

There can never be a doubt that many men and women who have committed horrific crimes should never see the light of day as free individuals. They should die in prison. But they should not be executed. 

One year into it, if we are attentive, at a visceral, at the most profoundly gut level, the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantine and isolation have taught us about the death penalty, imprisonment and death row. 

Imagine spending the entire pandemic in a room roughly the size of a large parking space; a stainless steel combination toilet-and-washbasin – for responding to nature, brushing your teeth and washing your face; a knee-high single bed with a plastic covered mattress not as thick as your fist; if you’re lucky a tiny window allows you to see the smallest patch of sky – decorated by glimpses of wire fences and concertina wire; for the rest of your life you will never be able to choose what you eat; use of the toilet is visible to guards passing by on the other side of the cell bars; reading is limited to whatever is delivered from the prison library – and if you’ve got more than a high school education you will live thirty, forty, maybe fifty years with virtually no intellectual stimulation. You will never again know privacy and you will only know silence as a gift of Death. 

Your “meals” will be delivered on metal trays through the “bean hole” flap of the cell door. Depending on the state, your exposure to “open air” will be an hour two, three, maybe four times a week inside a four-walled compound roughly the size of two or three basketball courts. 

Contact with friends and family will be largely by mail and, after six months or a year, most will stop writing – because there is nothing to write about.

You’ll never see a sporting event in real life, go to a movie, attend a family wedding or the funerals of your parents or children. You won’t ever go to Publix or CVS; you will live in day-to-day fear that an officer will accidentally introduce COVID-19 to your unit and your “medical team” is a really only a generation or two from leeches and bleedings. 

Finally, every element of your life will be determined by some of the lowest paid and least well-educated employees in any state. 

By late 2020, the Innocence Project had secured the release of 232 men and women, who had spent a combined 3,555 years wrongfully incarcerated; on average, they were convicted at age 27 and release at age 43. Ten percent of those wrongly convicted had been sentenced to death. They were 58% Black, 33% White and 7% Latinx; 63% were convicted based on eyewitness misidentification and 26% involved false confessions.

Data from the National Registry of Exonerations indicate that of the 2,700 exonerated in the past three decades 9% were women and nearly 73% were wrongfully convicted of crimes that never occurred; these “crimes” included accidents, deaths by suicide and fabrications; Many women were convicted of “shaken baby syndrome,” even though physicians now agree that the three symptoms of Abusive Head Trauma – diffuse brain swelling, subdural and retinal hemorrhages – can result from a number of diseases, falls and even the birthing process. False and misleading forensic evidence based on unreliable or unproven forensic methods resulted in the wrongful convictions of 87 women. 

In August 2018, Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to read “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The pope noted that, in the 21st Century, the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.” 

On October 3, 2020, Pope Francis issued the encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”) in which he wrote “There can be no stepping back from this position. Today we state clearly that 'the death penalty is inadmissible' and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide."  In total, Fratelli Tutti referenced the death penalty twelve times, calling attention to the possibility of judicial error and the misuse of capital punishment as a tool of persecution or revenge.

In February 2021, Virginia was moving quickly toward abolishing the death penalty. Virginia, with 113 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, is second only to Texas with 576 and about to become the twenty-third state to eliminate the death penalty.

Watch for the elimination movement Pope Francis has called for to begin to grow in other states and with the new administration in Washington.

When that happens, we will know who is “prolife” and who is simply “pro-birth.”