Death penalty morally wrong

By Jonathan Zimmerman

Terrance Williams was sexually abused by the two men he killed, according to his lawyers. He was poorly represented at his trial, where jurors never heard about these circumstances. And the widow of one of his victims wants Williams' death sentence commuted.

But those aren't the strongest arguments for sparing the life of Terrance Williams, who is scheduled to be executed on Oct. 3. The best reason is the simplest: Capital punishment is inherently wrong, no matter the circumstances. And Philadelphians should understand that better than anybody else.

That's because the movement to abolish the death penalty in America began right here, in the City of Brotherly Love. On March 9, 1787 - just a few months before the drafting of the Constitution - Philadelphia physician and patriot Benjamin Rush delivered a stinging rebuke to capital punishment at a lecture in the home of another famous local patriot, Benjamin Franklin.

Part of Rush's argument would be familiar to us today: The death penalty won't deter the most vicious criminals. But his real concern - repeated until his own death in 1813 - was the effect of capital punishment on the rest of us.

At its root, Rush wrote, the death penalty "lessens the horror of taking away human life." Conducted in public, executions often devolved into drunken revelries of mirth and revenge.

Worst of all, the death penalty allowed human beings to determine life and death. Rush wasn't worried about whether capital cases were correctly decided, which is the issue that dominates our debate today. Instead, he insisted, the decision wasn't ours to make.

"'Vengeance is mine,' said the Lord," Rush declared, quoting Scripture. "A religion which commands us to forgive, and even to do good to, our enemies, can never authorize the punishment of murder by death."

Spearheaded by Rush, the movement against capital punishment scored some impressive early victories. In 1786, the year before his lecture at Franklin's home, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish the death penalty for robbery, burglary, and sodomy - all capital crimes at the time.

Eight years after that, in 1794, the state removed rape, manslaughter, arson, and counterfeiting as capital offenses. All that remained was was "willful, deliberate and premeditated" killing - that is, murder in the first degree. Other murders would be punished by sentences in the state's new prisons, which Rush touted as the more humane alternative to the death penalty.

In 1824, Pennsylvania's legislature became the first to recommend abolition of public executions. But the state never eliminated capital punishment outright, as Rush had imagined. To his critics, indeed, Rush lacked the imagination to empathize with the victims of crime.

As one Philadelphia minister argued in defending the death penalty, Rush "has never had a brother, wife or child murdered by the cruel hands of any ruffian; it is all theory with him." But if Rush's own family were victimized, the minister continued, "his fictitious humanity will evaporate before the strong and irresistible feelings of nature" - and his opposition to capital punishment "will vanish as chaff before the whirlwind."

The charge evoked TV newsman Bernard Shaw's now-famous question to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988: if Dukakis' wife were raped and murdered, would he want her killer to be put to death? A longtime opponent of capital punishment - and a man of true principle - Dukakas said no. And it might have cost him the election.

Since then, almost no major political figure - of any party - has dared oppose the death penalty. During his own campaign for the presidency, Bill Clinton pointedly returned to his native Arkansas to sign a death warrant for a convict who was so brain-damaged that he planned to save the dessert from his last meal to eat after his execution.

Likewise, an earlier death warrant for Terrance Williams was signed by a Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, who approved more than 100 such warrants during his eight years in office. And amid his 2008 quest for the White House, Barack Obama said he supported the death penalty "in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes."

But as Benjamin Rush warned us, even a limited form of capital punishment lets the state decide which people should live. And that implicates all of us in their deaths, even if we don't personally affix the noose - or administer the needle.

Capital punishment "is equally a usurpation of the prerogative of heaven," Rush wrote, "whether it be inflicted by a single person, or by a whole community." If Terrance Williams dies on Oct. 3, there will be blood on your hands. And on mine.