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April 21, 2000/16 Nisan 5760, Vol. 52, No.33
Death-sentence opposition covers Jewish spectrum
CHRIS GARIFO
Staff Writer
"The penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
Exodus 21:23-25 |
Jewish opposition to capital punishment is based on law and tradition and crosses secular and denominational lines, according to rabbis and activists.
Eleanor Eisenberg, executive director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union, is a secular Jew who has opposed the death sentence "for many, many, many, many years."
Eisenberg recently became co-chairwoman of the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty. The coalition, co-chaired also by Kathy Norgard of Tucson, has begun an effort to get a moratorium on executions declared, much like that declared by Illinois' Republican Gov. George Ryan in January after corruption, tainted evidence and other problems were revealed in the cases of 13 condemned prisoners in that state.
Experts say such problems, coupled with new technologies such as DNA analysis, are raising questions about many convictions brought against death-row inmates across the country.
According to the state Department of Corrections Web site, Arizona has 117 inmates on death row, all but two of whom are males. Since 1992, Arizona has executed 21 people, the most recent being Patrick Gene Poland, who was executed by lethal injection on March 15. From 1962 to 1992, no executions took place in the state.
While no improper convictions have yet been reported in Arizona, the Justice Project, involving students at the state's two law schools, is reviewing cases of prisoners thought to have been wrongly convicted of murder.
While efforts against the death penalty are starting to grow across the country, Jewish opposition to the death penalty has a long history that crosses denominational divides, with Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis sharing the same basic viewpoint.
Rabbi Alan Bright of Beth Emeth Congregation of the West Valley in Sun City West explained that since the destruction of the Second Temple and the dissolution of the Sanhedrin around 70 C.E., Jews have not had the right to institute the death penalty.
Bright believes people don't have the right to execute people, regardless of whatever crime may have been committed. "The only being who has the right to take a life is God himself," he said.
"However, Jewish law (also) says we are obliged to follow the law of the land in which we live," he added.
Rabbi Mendy Deitsch of Chabad of the East Valley in Chandler said that while the Torah repeatedly asserts that death is the proper punishment for certain crimes, Talmudic law decries "a Jewish court that gave the death penalty even once in 70 years."
Deitsch said the Torah requires that, even in cases that allow the death penalty, Jews try to avoid imposing it. "We should try to find some merit in the person so that they should not receive the death penalty."
Rabbi Lester Frazin of Sun Lakes Jewish Congregation said all life, even that of a convicted criminal, is considered sacred. And when an innocent person is mistakenly convicted and executed, "it's as if you've murdered the entire world."
Eisenberg added that issues involving the death penalty go beyond determining guilt or innocence. "Our (legal) system is supposed to be about justice and truth tempered with mercy, and not vengeance," she said.
Eisenberg discounted polls suggesting that most Americans favor the death penalty. She said support for it drops sharply when respondents are asked their attitudes if there were a guarantee that killers would be locked up without possibility of parole.
"People want to feel secure. They don't want a killer, especially one who might kill again, out on the streets."
There is also the risk of police or prosecutorial misconduct, Eisenberg added. Although recent disclosures about abuses by officers in Los Angeles' Rampart Division likely represent an isolated case, "There are from time to time corrupt police officers, (as well as) prosecutors more interested in winning the case than assuring that the evidence is reliable."
Eisenberg said she believes that such instances happen rarely, "but they do happen."
Justice isn't always blind to racial and economic differences, she said. Although it once was assumed that a criminal's race was a determining factor in receiving a death sentence, more recent evidence shows that the victim's race is a greater determining factor, Eisenberg said.
"If you have a black victim, then whether the killer is white, black or purple, they are less likely to be charged with a capital crime and less likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is white," Eisenberg said. "And clearly if you have a black killer and a white victim, overwhelmingly they will be charged with a capital crime and, if convicted, they will be sentenced to death."
The rich are far less likely to receive the death penalty than the poor, Eisenberg said. Wealthier defendants can afford private attorneys who can conduct their own investigations, while the poor usually are represented by a public defender whose resources are limited.
"Public defenders are among the best attorneys I know," Eisenberg said. "But they are much too busy and under-funded."
Paul Bender, an Arizona State University law professor who sits on an advisory committee for the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty, said plea-bargaining also can decide who is sentenced to die. "It's possible for people, by pleading guilty, to avoid the death penalty when they might otherwise get it," Bender said.
Barnett Lotstein, a special assistant county attorney with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, said country prosecutors take death-penalty cases very seriously and are very deliberate in how they approach them. Lotstein said County Attorney Richard Romley designated a capital review team of senior prosecutors who consider all first-degree murder cases, the only cases that qualify for capital punishment.
"We review all the (mitigating and aggravating) factors ... and then make a recommendation (to Romley)," Lotstein said.
The committee process provides for "consistency in application" of the death penalty, rather than relying on any single individual to make the recommendation, he said.
"In any system, nothing is perfect, (but) in Maricopa County, we go to such lengths in reviewing these matters and making sure that (the death penalty) is not arbitrarily applied, that there's no imbalance, no racial imbalance, ... that everyone is treated equally."
Lotstein said he believes there are "certain crimes for which an individual has forfeited the right to live with us." He pointed to Israel, which does not allow capital punishment but nevertheless executed Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
When the death penalty is applied in Arizona, Lotstein said, it is conducted in a humane way, "at least as far as it can be applied with lethal injection."
However, Eisenberg said Arizona should have a moratorium on executions to examine the many issues concerning capital punishment.
"We don't think the death penalty has any place in a country that prides itself on being just and humane," Eisenberg said. "We are the only Western, industrialized democracy that maintains the death penalty. ... But the whole system is fraught with peril for what I think we would like the United States to be, which is a country with a soul and a heart."
Eisenberg says her activism against the death penalty isn't a result of any religious feelings - she says she's never been a religious person - but may be rooted in her family's discussions about the still-controversial executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both convicted of espionage in the early 1950s.
"I grew up in a secular home and went to Arbeiter's Ring, or Workmen's Circle, School (in the Bronx, N.Y.), where we learned culture and holidays and history and Yiddish, not religion and prayers in Hebrew," Eisenberg said.
"I can't really say that any factor in a Jewish upbringing would have led me to oppose the death penalty, although my parents and my family certainly were progressive people politically and would have opposed it."
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