Stephen Dear writes, "What I Learned at My Arrest at Troy Davis' Execution," for Huffington Post. He's the executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty.
A few minutes before Troy Davis was scheduled to be poisoned to death in Jackson, Ga., on Sept. 24, I made the sign of the cross, took a deep breath and, with my friend Kurt, calmly stopped traffic and walked across the street into a phalanx of heavily armed police and SWAT officers at the gates of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. We were surrounded.
"I am here to stop the execution of Troy Davis," I said.
They screamed at me to leave.
At that moment, with a thousand people standing behind us watching and cheering, I knew things would never be the same in the movement to abolish the death penalty. There were too many new faces in the crowd.
"I am here to stop the execution of Troy Davis."
They screamed into my face and grabbed me.
"We are nonviolent. We are unarmed. We mean you no harm, officers."
We were handcuffed tightly behind our backs, and yelled at again. (Nearly two weeks later, I still cannot feel my left thumb from the heavy plastic ties left on for one hour.) We were placed in a police van with three young men, fellow protesters. Two more new friends, a father and son from a Georgia church, would join us.
We did not know Troy's fate until we were released in the morning. That same night Lawrence Brewer was executed in Texas.
Charged with disorderly conduct, we go to court on Nov. 17.
And:
I have heard all the arguments for the death penalty backwards and forwards. Religious leaders of all kinds must come to reject the death penalty as now just a relic of the Old South -- racist, error-prone, expensive and brutalizing. It is cruel and unusual. There is nothing biblical about America's death penalty.
The death penalty is a sin. Jesus has nothing to do with the death penalty, and America's death penalty has nothing to do with the prophets of the Jewish Bible.
I believe that this decade is a kairos moment on the death penalty -- a special, opportune time the way the 1980s were in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid. Religious leaders have a choice: stand, speak and nourish this historic movement, or be irrelevant as the death penalty withers but more Troy Davises are condemned and executed. Clearly, more are choosing to speak.
I had been in Georgia the week before Troy's execution to deliver the letter organized by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty and Amnesty International and signed by more than 3,500 religious leaders from across the country and beyond. CNN and other media reported PFADP's finding that no such letter in modern history was thought to have nearly as many endorsements from religious leaders. More than 1 million people signed petitions for Troy.
We are winning. States have started to abolish the death penalty and more are close to doing so in the next two or three years.
In light of the massive mobilization that so many people helped bring about, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles did more than seal Troy's fate with their failure to grant clemency.
They triggered a new wave of the abolition movement.
They have challenged the consciences of clergy and laity to become involved in new ways. In recent days Christian theologians and ethicists across America have started collecting signatures on a public letter calling for abolition. A similar letter from Catholic theologians decrying the death penalty now has more than 300 signers so far.
Our movement will never be the same.
On Saturday I was an honorary pallbearer at Troy Davis' funeral in Savannah, Ga. Troy empowered millions of people and that is how I will remember him. He asked everyone to pledge to work to end the death penalty. I so pledge, and you can too.
Now that Troy has been laid to rest, let us take this sad moment and transform it from despair into hope and action.
Today's Lexington Herald Leader carries Rev. Marian McClure Taylor's OpEd, "Ban the death penalty, hideous example of nation's violence." She is executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches.
The Sept. 21 execution of Troy Davis affected me the way it did many who saw his picture and read the details. It made me feel sick, and it made me grow even more determined to end the death penalty.
When I say "it made me feel sick," I mean horror at the ritual killing, and sadness about the tragic death Georgia's courts were trying to address. But it also put me in touch with the widespread sickness in which our country's history of violence makes many Americans comfortable with our public executions.
Of our nation's regional histories of violence, I am most familiar with the Deep South where I've lived most of my life. Georgia, where Troy Davis was killed, has one of the worst histories of lynching for example. A Mississippi woman has quilted listings of each lynching victim by state.
Viewing her work at a Louisville museum, my god-daughter asked, "Where's Georgia?" Then we saw an entire separate quilt displayed on the next wall, just to make room for Georgia's list.
Perhaps this history of violence blinds our Bible-believing region to the fact that biblical standards for just executions have never been, and cannot be, met in this country. Instead, the Bible calls us to participate in God's endless mercy.
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