Organisations which favour or oppose the Death Penalty

First of all there is to say that there are more organisations against the death penalty than for death penalty. One of the most important organisations is Amnesty International which is opposing the death penalty. The ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Death Penalty Information Center are also against the death penalty. Further there are also many private people who start campaigns for supporting or abolishing the death penalty in the USA. Mostly these people are victims who had something to do with death row inmates or even were their relatives. According to polls of the Washington D.C. Death Penalty Information Center you can also see that the police in the USA consider the death penalty one of the least effective punishments for deterring.

Religious aspects:

Many people´s attitudes towards the death penalty are framed by their religious beliefs.For example the American Jewish Committee agrees that the death penalty is cruel, unjust and incompatible with the dignity and self respect of a man. The Christian Church is also opposing the death penalty.

Demonstration in Pittsburgh against legalized lynching

Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):
An encyclical issued March 25, 1995 by Pope John Paul II, after four years of consultations with Roman Catholic bishops throughout the world, states that execution is only appropriate "in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvement in the organisation of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

Victim’s voices:

Speakers from anti-death penalty organisation "The Journey of Hope ... from Violence to Healing" addressed law students and others at Detroit's Wayne State University in 1999. The organization presented a unique perspective of those who have experienced the murder of a family member, but who strongly oppose the death penalty.

One of the reasons the organization came to Detroit was that death penalty legislation is currently under debate in the Michigan Senate. The state, a speaker pointed out, was one of the first English-speaking governments to abolish the death penalty and has not practiced it for 153 years.

The presentations at the meeting undermined the oft-repeated claims by politicians, prosecutors, judges and the news media that the death penalty eases the pain and suffering of murder victims' families.

Anne Coleman is a member of Amnesty International and engages herself for the abolition of the Death Penalty. After her daugther had been killed, and the murderer could not have been caught by the police and after her son had committed suicide because he couldn’t get along with the death of his sister, she got in contact with the mother of a death row inmate. So she visited some death row inmates and got to know how it is to live on death row. Further she was present at the executions of some death row inmates she had tried to support. Although she lost both of her children in such a cruel way, she is of the opinion that the death penalty is cruel and unjust and says:"The life of my daugther is as valuable as the life of the death row inmates because their ancestors feel just like I feel !"

Coretta Scott King, widow of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:"Although my husband was assassinated and my mother in law was murdered, I refuse to accept the cynical judgement that the killers deserve to be executed. To do so would perpetuate the tragic cycle of violence that feeds itself. It would be a disservice to all that my husband and his mother lived for and believed."

Kerry Kennedy (the daughter of Robert Kennedy): "I was eight years old when my father was murdered, and I remember praying, 'Please God, please don't let them kill the man who killed my father.' I didn't want another person--any person--to die. And I didn't want another family--any family--to experience the grief that my family was experiencing."

Dorothy Morefield's son Nick was 19 when he was brutally murdered in cold blood. When they arrested Nick's killer--Dorothy Morefield felt a tremendous physical pain of grief. The pain turned into pure, white hatred and frightened her because it was unnatural. "I had not felt hatred like this before and it was truly a sense of being burnt up.

"At that time I wanted to hurt the killer as he had hurt me; I would have liked him dead and I didn't care how or where. My feelings at that time would have certainly permitted the death penalty. They could have marched him out and shot him at high noon and I would have cheered."

A few months after Nick's death she woke up one morning consumed with rage, with burning hatred, her first thoughts were not of her family, but of the murderer. "It was unbearable. My son was gone, my husband and I were hanging together by a thread, each living with our own anguish, unable to find a place to help one another. My other five children were suffering dreadfully over Nick and needed my comfort, but all my emotions, my energy, my feelings were going into the rage I felt towards the killer. That morning, when he was the first thing to enter my mind, I thought: 'My Lord, what is happening. I am thinking more about the murderer than about Nick. He has taken my son from me and now he is taking my sanity.'

"The day I realised the killer was filling more of my thoughts than Nick was, the day I saw that I could not put anything into my life with a husband I love, with my remaining children who are also very, very precious, the day I felt I could easily live for the rest of my time full of hate, were the days I knew the death penalty which encourages us to seek a very primitive revenge, to reduce ourselves to the level of killers too, was not the right way. I cannot feel compassion for Nick's killer; I don't think I shall ever forgive him, but I also know that his death will not alter any part of the loss I feel for my son.

"The bottom line argument for execution has always been that society owes it to the victims. But my experience and that of many, many others I have counselled, is that the belief we may be able to have the person who has hurt us hurt equally, keeps us locked into a desperately destructive, bitterly painful situation.
You can spend years waiting for somebody to be executed, years spent with all your emotional energy directed towards the murderer rather than rebuilding life."

Carol Duncanson's mother, a teacher, was murdered during a robbery in 1979.

She said politicians in the last election were more interested in the death penalty issue than in the situation in the public schools. "Instead of doing something about our homeless population, instead of helping to educate the youth, like my mother did, we are spending our resources on the death penalty."

So the concern for the victims must not be misused to justify the deliberate execution of a prisoner by the state. The execution of a murderer will not replace a single life

Supreme Court Justice Blackmun, who was appointed by President Nixon and died recently, had voted to uphold the death penalty in 1972 and 1976, when the government called for a halt to executions and reinstated the death penalty for years later.

But at last he was of the opinion that the death penalty was futile and unfair.

He concluded: "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the..., machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more ................fairness to the death penalty. .............I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. "

(Callins v. Collm's, 114 S.Ct. 1127, 1130 (1994» See also DPIC's 20 Year Report on the Death Penalty.