"Unfit for Execution," is the title of Lynn Lichtfield's My Turn column at Newsweek. Litchfield was chaplain at Virginia's Fluvanna prison from 1998 to 2009.
For six years, I regularly spent an hour talking and listening through a small slot in a metal door. On the other side was the only woman on death row in Virginia, an inmate who pleaded guilty to hiring two men to kill her husband and stepson, allegedly in exchange for a cut of the insurance money. Sometimes I was allowed to sit in a chair as I stooped down to hear her, give her communion, or just hold her hand; usually I alternated between half-squatting or kneeling on the concrete floor. As chaplain at Virginia’s only maximum-security prison for women, I expected to minister under challenging circumstances. These visits were unbearable, however, and not because of the physical conditions. It was my feeling—at first fleeting, now certain—that this woman doesn’t deserve to die.
On Sept. 23, barring the governor’s unlikely pardon or the Supreme Court taking her case, Teresa Lewis will die in the electric chair or by lethal injection (she hasn’t chosen). She lost a federal appeal earlier this summer, putting her in line to be the first woman the state has killed in 98 years—and the 12th nationally since the high court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
And:
Also disclosed since Teresa’s original trial: a 2003 letter from one of the two men who carried out the killings admitting that it was he, not she, who masterminded the murders. Still, the state Supreme Court, a U.S. District Court, and, most recently, a U.S. Court of Appeals, have upheld the ruling that Teresa deserves to die. The actual killers got life in prison.
Last year, as Teresa’s prospects receded, I left the prison ministry. On the inside, I was forbidden from speaking out. Now I can help her cause.
In his Ethical Life column for the La Crosse Tribune, Richard Kyte writes, "Why capital punishment is unethical."
In my last column I referred to the case of Teresa Lewis, a woman currently on death row in Virginia, as an example of the sort of punishment that we ought to find morally outrageous. I did not offer any reasons to support that claim, however, since the main point of that column was to look at how we make cross-cultural moral judgments. In the present column I turn to the topic of capital punishment explicitly, in order to examine its moral status.
And:
Character: Here we come to the crux of the issue. The reason capital punishment has so much support in this country is that it is motivated by vengeance. And that is certainly understandable. When I imagine myself in the position of a victim or victim’s family, I want to see the perpetrator punished severely. Any person would. But the state is not a person. The obligation of the state is not to see that vengeance is satisfied, but that justice is carried out. It has to ensure that both the investigation and the prosecution of a crime is carried out dispassionately, reliably and fairly.
Earlier coverage of her case is here.
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