The death penalty may seem like a distant and abstract issue for people who are threatened by layoffs, or unable to make house payments or pay the rent. However, while the country is largely focused on daunting economic problems, questions about social justice and the death penalty are still very much with us. And those committed to its abolition continue to press their cause.
Recently, a close friend e-mailed a copy of the powerful and moving eulogy that conservative author and activist David Horowitz delivered at a celebration for his daughter, Sarah, who passed away earlier this year. While many are aware of actor Mike Farrell’s work as president of Death Penalty Focus and Sister Helen Prejean and her decades of anti-death penalty activism, few know about Sarah Horowitz.
A “remarkable person who led an extraordinary life,” she had a long list of accomplishments: advanced degrees, an undying commitment to peace, social justice and helping the disadvantaged, a strong connection to her Jewish faith, and a willingness to put her convictions to the test, whether by working in a village in El Salvador or walking the snowy streets of Iowa for then-Senator Barack Obama during the Democratic Party primaries.
She worked on the Obama campaign because she believed in the message of hope and change. As Horowitz pointed out, on the campaign trail, things were not easy for Sarah:
She took her meager resources and bought herself a plane ticket. She ignored the hearing problems which made even conversations with family and friends sometimes difficult, and made arrangements over the phone to get herself transported thousands of miles away; arrangements to stay in a state where she knew no one; to find Jews to pray with when the Sabbath came; and to receive her instructions and orders for the campaign.
She trudged through airports on her aching, malfunctioning hip; she gritted her teeth and endured the pains of a gastrointestinal tract ravaged by illness, and she put pressure yet again on a cardiovascular system damaged and inadequate from birth, and on a body whose wounded state would take her so cruelly from us only two months later.
Undaunted by every discomfort and challenge, she marched into two-degree weather, in the depths of a heartland winter, to knock on doors and bring out Americans she had never met to join in her campaign of hope, of yes we can. And you can bet that when she called me from Iowa to relate her progress there was a smile in her voice and not a hint of complaint about the weather or anything else.
Sarah was also unalterably opposed to the death penalty. In his eulogy, Horowitz described how Sarah, often suffering from her own considerable list of physical ailments, would nevertheless brave “bitter cold Bay Area nights” to participate in anti-death penalty vigils outside the gates of San Quentin prison—an old, bleak, and unforgiving edifice—whenever an execution was scheduled. She “believ[ed] that even though the condemned had committed heinous crimes it was wrong for the state to take a human life,” Horowitz said.
The same week I learned about Sarah’s life, I received my regular e-mail copy of The Equal Justice Edition, the bimonthly online newsletter from Equal Justice USA. The issue focused on the tireless work of the Austin-based Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
To anyone even casually following death penalty developments over the past dozen years or so, the combination of the words “Texas” and “death penalty” conjures up that state’s horrendous record of executions. Still, relatively few are aware that Texas accounted for 50% of the executions in the United States this past year.
In a TCADP news release announcing the publication of its annual report titled “Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2008: The Year in Review” , the organization pointed out that “A de facto moratorium on executions nationwide existed from September 26, 2007, until April 16, 2008, while the US Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol used by the majority of death penalty states.” In Baze v. Rees, the Court ruled “that the current protocol used by Kentucky (and other states, including Texas) does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.”
The Court’s decision “lifted all stays in effect at the time,” allowing “for the resumption of executions.” Less than two months later, on June 11, 2008, “Texas’ first execution of the year took place… when Karl Chamberlain was put to death.” Over the course of the rest of the year, Texas “went on to execute 17 more people [a drop from 26 in 2007]… accounting for just under 50% of all executions in the United States” in 2008. “Seven of those executed had been convicted in Dallas County.”
The number of executions nationwide dropped to 37 in 2008, a 14-year low. According to USA Today, “The Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment and compiles annual statistics, reports that for the most part only Southern states resumed executions. Ohio, which carried out two, was the only state outside the South to impose the death penalty in 2008.” (See the DPIC’s “The Death Penalty in 2008: Year End Report” for more information).
“2008 can only be characterized as yet another rollercoaster year for the death penalty in Texas,” said TCADP Executive Director Kristin Houle. “The state carried out a ‘typical’ number of executions in a record amount of time—averaging nearly one per week over a five-month period. Yet officials’ zeal for executions was not matched by public desire for new death sentences, as evidenced by the continued steep decline in the number of new inmates arriving on death row.”
TCADP also pointed to some hard-earned victories over the past year, particularly in securing stays of execution. “Six inmates with execution dates in 2008 received last-minute stays, due to concerns about possible innocence, the fairness of their trial, or issues related to mental retardation or mental illness.” The organization noted that the case of Charles Hood:
Challenged the integrity of the Texas judicial system, after solid evidence confirmed that the judge who presided over his original trial was romantically linked to the prosecutor who sought his death sentence. Hood received a stay from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on September 9 on an issue unrelated to the improper relationship; his attorneys continue to seek a new trial.
Other report highlights included:
*“In 2008, the State of Texas carried out 18 executions in 5 months. Only eight other states carried out executions this year; none executed more than four people. Texas has executed 423 people since 1982. Currently there are 354 inmates on death row in Texas—344 men and 10 women.”
*“Michael Blair became the 9th inmate exonerated from death row in Texas after DNA testing failed to connect him to the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to death.”
*“Seven other inmates were removed permanently from death row in 2008; their sentences were commuted to life in prison. This includes Thomas Miller-El, Johnny Paul Penry, and LaRoyce Smith, whose convictions and/or death sentences had been overturned at various junctures by the US Supreme Court.”
*“Jurors rejected the death penalty in at least four capital murder trials in 2008, opting instead for the punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
*“Harris County, which accounts for more executions than any state in the country (besides Texas), did not send a single person to death row in 2008.”
*“Texas defied federal officials and the International Court of Justice when it executed Mexican national Jose Medellin on August 5, 2008, despite the fact that he had been denied the right to contact his consular office upon his arrest in 1993 as afforded by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.”
*“The US Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana on June 25, 2008, invalidated the death penalty provision of “Jessica’s Law,” which the Texas Legislature passed in 2007. The Justices ruled 5-4 that the death penalty is unconstitutional as a punishment for the crime of raping a child and they effectively barred its imposition for any crime that does not take the life of the victim.”
The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty which seeks “to end the death penalty in Texas,” will have its work cut out for it since Texas has already scheduled eleven executions for the first three months of 2009. “Despite continued concerns about the flaws and failures of the Texas death penalty system—and growing public awareness of its fallibility—the ‘conveyor belt to death’ continues to operate on high gear,” said Kristin Houle. “TCADP urges all elected officials to take a hard look at this costly, broken government system—a system that produces wrongful convictions and most likely wrongful executions—and to support alternatives that protect society and punish the truly guilty.”
Toward the end of his eulogy, David Horowitz described the clash of his beliefs with those of Sarah’s:
I observed that all the prophets taught us to love each other as we love ourselves and to take the attitude that ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ But this was finally, I thought, imprudent advice. Is it wise, I wrote, ‘to put our trust in strangers, or to love our enemies as ourselves? Would we advise our children to do so?’ Are we really one with criminals?
And then I inserted a passage to which Sarah took great exception: ‘Many try to believe it, but I cannot embrace this radical faith. I feel no kinship with those who can cut short a human life without remorse; or with terrorists who target the innocent; or with adults who torment small children for the sexual thrill. I suspect no decent soul does either.’
Sarah’s response helped her father understand her mission:
My objection is that you’re confusing compassion with gullibility. I do visit prisoners, and I think it matters to make that human connection. That doesn’t mean I’d necessarily trust them with my purse. I wouldn’t let the State execute them in my name, either. I don’t think kinship with people who’ve crossed the line blurs my own morality. In fact, it gives it more clarity.
The United States continues to hold the distinction of being one of the few “developed” nations that imposes the death penalty. It is the Sarahs of the world who stand vigil and bear witness. Likewise, it is the Sarahs who provide quiet certainty and inspiration as they challenge and attempt to right our system of unequal justice. David Horowitz had good reason to be proud of his daughter.
