Subscription: $15 / year Membership: $15/year All correspondence to: Editor: Duane Bates All correspondence to: P. O. Box 1744 Greenville, SC 29602 January, 2008

The Voice of Sanity THE NEWSLETTER OF THE UPSTATE S.C. SECULAR HUMANISTS Visit our web-site for current and back-issues at: www.uscsh.org e-mail: secularhmnst@aol.com

DEATH KNELL FOR THE DEATH PENALTY?

The New Jersey legislature is set to pass a bill to abolish the death penalty and the Governor has said he will sign the bill into law, becoming the first state in forty years to abolish the death penalty. A New Jersey Commission charged with examining the death penalty issue determined it did not deter murders, was more expensive than life without parole and created conditions where an innocent person could be executed.

The Supreme Court will hear a case involving the Constitutionality of lethal injections as a method of execution next month, effectively placing a moratorium on executions in the United States until the issue of whether lethal injections constitute the “cruel and unusual” punishments banned by the Constitution. Even if lethal injections were found to be a “cruel and unusual” punishment by the Supreme Court, the death penalty would not be outlawed; the Federal and state governments would have to develop methods of executions that would pass Constitutional muster.

Between 1973 and this year, 124 convicted murderers have been exonerated of their crimes, based on DNA and other evidence, and released from death row. Fifty-eight percent of these exonerations took place in just six states, 22 in Florida, 18 in Illinois, and eight each in Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas.

The United States is one of the few developed nations that still execute criminals and we currently have about 3,300 prisoners on Death Row in the fifty states. If our criminal justice system is right 99% of the time it means as many as 33 persons on death row are innocent. While we can have confidence that a particular person accused of murder is guilty of the crime, the more persons that are placed on death row the greater the possibility that errors have occurred at some point in the arrest and trial process. The work of the Innocence Project has proven that major flaws exist in the criminal justice system and that innocent persons have been convicted and placed on death row.

Our societal traditions state that it is better for a guilty person go free than an innocent person be convicted of a crime he or she did not commit. That is the ideal, but given our history of racial slavery and segregation, unequal access to legal assistance for the poor and mentally ill and the normal error rate of human error in police investigations, eyewitness identifications and other criminal justice procedures, the system is far from perfect. The advent of DNA evidence has begun to demonstrate the flaws and error rate, but DNA evidence is available to be used in a minority of criminal cases to convict or acquit an accused person.

As a retired mental health therapist who worked in a jail, I would prefer to have a death penalty because I know there are a few violent persons who have proven by their crimes that they cannot be trusted to live in our society. I also know that our criminal justice system is flawed and has, at least in 124 proven cases, sentenced innocent persons to death for crimes they did not commit. A criminal justice system than can sentence a person to death has to be perfect, and we know that this is an impossible achievement in any system that involves humans. Our only moral and ethical choice is to give up the right to execute persons for any crime in order to ensure that we will not execute innocent persons.

The maximum sentence for any crime should be life without the possibility of parole. The only release from this sentence would be death in prison or new evidence that would prove in a court of law that the accused was not guilty of the crime to begin with. Murder would not be the only crime eligible for this sentence. On the day I wrote this article a man went into an insurance agency in Florida intent on committing a robbery. He took with him a gallon of gasoline and proceeded to pour it on the two women, one of them pregnant, working in the office and set them on fire. A passerby tried to intervene to help the two women and was shot in the face by the robber. The women were burned over ninety percent of their bodies. This type of violent crime should also qualify for the life without parole for the first non-lethal offense unless there are extreme mitigating circumstances. Second crimes involving serious, non-lethal, violence would certainly qualify for the same sentence.

Many people will object to the elimination of the death penalty, but is just a matter of time until it is proven that an innocent person was executed for a crime he or she did not commit. What do we say to the family of the executed innocent when it happens?

The link below will take you to a more extensive article on this issue and the website of the Innocence Project.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22222241/

http://www.innocenceproject.org/

DO 14-YEAR OLDS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIE?

A Seattle fourteen-year-old Seattle boy died of leukemia after a judge ruled he had the right to refuse a life saving blood transfusion because of his religious beliefs. Dennis Lindberg was diagnosed with leukemia in November and had received chemotherapy. Doctors said that Dennis had a 70% of living for another five years if he had received blood transfusions.

The legal guardian for Dennis was his aunt, a devout Jehovah’s Witness. His birth parents stated that they believed she exercised undue influence over Dennis because of her religious beliefs.

As parent and retired Child and Adolescent therapist I was shocked that any judge would allow a minor make a medical decision that could result in his death. The judge said that Dennis was “mature, and that he did not believe he was trying to commit suicide. The parents decided not to appeal the judge’s decision when the doctors told them Dennis had probably suffered brain damage as the result of a coma.

It is ironic that if Dennis had received regular treatment, including blood transfusions, he had an excellent chance to live to the age when he would be an adult and have the right to make his own decisions regarding medical treatment. When I was in high school I had two friends, brothers that had type I diabetes. They were Christian Scientists and would not seek medical treatment for their illness. They both died in their early twenties, but at least they made their decisions as adults.

I believe the judge made a terribly wrong decision in this case, and cannot remember another case that is similar.

WHEN RELIGION GOES WRONG

Recently the CBS program Sixty Minutes ran a segment on the plight of Iraqi Christians still living in Iraq. Since our invasion of Iraq the minority Christian community has been subjected to increasing persecution, murder, kidnapping of their children and bombing of their churches. They now have to hold services in secret, led by an Anglican priest that is suffering from MS. Many Iraqi Christians have left the country, but those that remain either cannot or will not leave.

The interview with the Anglican priest was very interesting. In response to a question from the Sixty Minutes interviewer he stated that before the invasion there was no persecution of Christians and that people of all faiths lived together peacefully in integrated neighborhoods. In fact, Saadam’s Foreign Minister and later Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Chaldean Catholic. Saadam was a mass murderer, torturer and generally a terrible human being, but his secular government apparently did know how to maintain peace and respect between different religions.

The Anglican priest said the persecution of Christians in Iraq occurred because “Islam has gone wrong”, but he was quick to add that in the past Christianity has also “gone wrong”. We are all shocked and upset when we see video of Sudanese marching in the street demanding the death of a British schoolteacher working in their country for allowing her seven-year olds to name a teddy bear after their Prophet, but we forget the mass killings and persecutions that have occurred in the name of religion, and as the result of simple prejudice and greed, throughout history.

The centuries-long persecution of Jews by European Christians that culminated in the Holocaust of WWII, the treatment of indigenous peoples by Islam and Christianity during the age of world exploration and conquest and the murderous treatment of people of different religions and nationalities by the Empire of Japan prior and during WWII are all examples.

If religious and political leaders fail to condemn these types of violent behaviors we can only assume they tacitly approve of them. In our country the lynching of thousands of African-Americans did not provoke any national outcry for justice until after the Civil Rights laws were passed.

I believe the persecution of Iraqi Christians is directly related to our invasion because Iraqi Muslims see the invasion not just as an invasion from the United States and England, but as an invasion of Christians, invoking the centuries old conflict between Christianity and Islam. The Iraqi Christians are now bearing the brunt of the conflicts that began in the Middle Ages and are still, unfortunately, alive and well in the minds of supposedly modern human beings.

January 2008 Meeting Schedule

January Brunch: This month’s brunch will be held on Saturday, January 12^th at 10:30AM at Denny’s Restaurant, 2521 Wade Hampton Blvd in Greenville. Call Duane Bates at 423-0802 for more information and directions.

Monthly Meeting: The January monthly meeting will be held on Sunday. January 27^th at 5:00PM at a place to be announced.