The death penalty: Voices unite for louder opposition

Death
PENALTY

The very phrase provokes extremes of emotion, a passion for punishment or a passion for life. It’s a final solution that in the eyes of the Catholic Church isn’t a solution at all except in extremely rare cases, but yet another step creating more violence and victims.

Polls show a growing number of Americans, and particularly American Catholics, are seeing the matter in the same light as the Vatican and the U.S. and Florida bishops. The voices joining in the mounting call for an end to the use of the death penalty are coming from varied, and in some cases surprising, quarters.

This 12–part feature, The death penalty: Voices unite for louder opposition, outlines Church teaching on the death penalty and opinion poll results, and includes the witness of Catholics and non–Catholics who are intimately acquainted with — and opposed to — the death penalty in Florida and elsewhere.

Eight
OPPONENTS

Eight current or former Floridians were interviewed for this article. Their stories are from personal experience involving the death penalty. Click on the links at left to read why a man accused, convicted and exonerated; the public defender, the chief justice, the loved one of two victims, the pastoral minister, the family counselor, the death row warden and the priest are opposed to capital punishment.

Though these individuals have various reasons for such opposition, their stances give them something in common with the Catholic Church, which teaches that capital punishment is an unnecessary affront to the sanctity of human life.

From the highest level, as reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Church teaches that — while it is permissible for a government to take a human life when there’s no other way to protect society — cases today in which the use of the death penalty is justified are “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Juan
MELENDEZ

“I didn’t know how to read, write or speak English. I was treated as the worst of the worst — this who was called monstrous! I believe it’s my duty to speak out,” said Juan Melendez, a former migrant farmworker who spent 17 years, eight months and one day on Florida’s death row for a murder he did not commit.

Melendez, 58, was released in January 2002 and is now an Arizona–based public speaker and activist against the death penalty. He recalled his full life in the community at St. Isidro Parish in Maunabo, Puerto Rico, before he became a Polk County farmworker at age 18 and at 33 was accused, convicted and sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of Delbert Baker in his Auburndale beauty salon. Melendez credits his mother’s relentless prayer of three rosaries daily with uncovering the evidence that led to his exoneration and release.

“There were times I wanted to commit suicide,” Melendez shared. “Every time I got depressed, I prayed to God and God sent me a beautiful dream. I was wise enough to take those dreams as a sign from God to just hang in there.”

Melendez said he bears no grudge against those involved in his case.

“I forgive the people who did this to me,” Melendez said. “I forgive all of them. And now it’s productive speaking out about the death penalty. I am totally focused on abolishing the death penalty — that would be the happiest day of my life!”

Michael
ORLANDO

“I have a very strong desire to help the underdogs of the world,” stated Michael Orlando, Collier County public defender. “It’s a calling for me to help the outcasts of society who have somehow lost their way. I don’t believe that a government entity has the moral right to choose that someone dies on the one hand and that’s OK, and someone else’s death is a murder.”

In his 21–year career, Orlando has seen how circumstantial evidence, media exposure, poverty and lack of experience can cause the system to fail. One client spent three years on death row before he was exonerated and released. Florida leads the nation with the highest number of exonerations — as of May 29, there have been 22, with 67 executions since 1976; nationwide there have been 133 exonerations and 1,165 executions.

Gerald
KOGAN

Retired Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan has spent close to 50 years devoted to the law and its fulfillment, starting out as a Dade County assistant state attorney, then chief prosecutor, circuit judge, then administrative judge. In 1987, he was appointed to the Florida Supreme Court where he served until retirement in 1998. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, 28 people were executed and he personally presided over nine of them. Now in private practice in Miami, Kogan advocates against the death penalty.

“There is only one purpose of the death penalty — for society to wreak vengeance on the perpetrator,” Kogan said. “There’s never going to be closure. It doesn’t deter. Professional hit men are never caught. Most are crimes of passion with alcohol or drugs or mental disease involved. It’s a very, very expensive procedure. And the finality of the punishment is really final — if you find out you’ve made a mistake, you can’t rectify the mistake.

“There is no question in my mind at all that the death penalty has no place in a civilized society. We cannot, as human beings who are imperfect and in a system that is imperfect, try to come out with a perfect solution.”

Kathy
DILLON

Kathy Dillon is a parishioner at St. Hubert of the Forest Mission in Astor. In 1974, her father, a state trooper in New York, was murdered and subsequently her boyfriend of four years was murdered as well.

“In the wake of a murder, we all feel deep sadness, outrage and vulnerability,” Dillon shared. “But the antidote to violence is not more violence. For me, an execution in response to a murder in my life would only have added to the horror and the trauma of the whole experience. I know too well the far–reaching, damaging effects of violence to want any more violence. One thing I know clearly, in my lifetime, I must give voice to my opposition to the death penalty.”

Dale
RECINELLA

Since August 1998, Dale Recinella, a deacon at St. Mary Parish in MacClenny, has served as the Catholic lay chaplain for Florida’s death row and solitary confinement. “I know everybody on death row and I go to every cell. I take each man where I find him and look for the opening to help him to move closer and deeper into the reality of God’s love.”

Recinella has been on deathwatch a dozen times and witnessed five executions. “It’s a powerless feeling to watch someone whom you have experienced as a human being, whom regardless of what they may have done, you have seen the good in them and then you sit in front of that window and watch their life extinguished by other people. It’s hard to describe the depth of powerlessness,” he shared.

When asked how he is able to bear the experience, Recinella replied, “Again and again I go to Mary watching her son die on the cross. That’s where I go to ask God to take that pain. The only way to stand at the edge of the abyss of evil and not lose our balance is to remember to look into the abyss of God’s love — it is always deeper.”

Susan
RECINELLA

Susan Recinella is director of clinical psychology at North East Florida State Hospital in Jacksonville and has joined her husband, Florida death row lay chaplain Dale Recinella, in prison ministry, making herself available to the families of the men being executed.

Recinella described her first encounter: “The family was a very strong Catholic family and we bonded. You can’t just say goodbye after the trauma, so they came to our house as if after a funeral. I was sitting at the table and realized I had seen this pain before — families whose child had been murdered. They had seen their son in the morning and he was healthy and he was intentionally killed. We always knew that in a murder, and now here was this innocent family. They are like me. They never would have guessed that a family member …” she left the sentence incomplete. “Their faith has been awe–inspiring.”

Ron
MCANDREW

Ron McAndrew worked in the Florida Department of Corrections for 22 years, and as warden at Florida State Prison oversaw the electrocutions of three men — the last Pedro Medina, whose execution “went seriously awry” — and then went to Huntsville to observe five executions by lethal injection.

“I didn’t find lethal injection to be any cleaner or more merciful than the electric chair,” McAndrew, a parishioner at St. John the Baptist Parish in Dunnellon, explained. “It was not out of sight and out of mind. Looking back, I wish I had never been involved in carrying out the death penalty. Looking forward, I see the experience as a door–opener to work toward the total abolishment of the death penalty. I see it as my vocation.”

Father Sebastian
MUCILLI

In the course of his four–year friendship with Alabama death–row prisoner Darryl Grayson, Father Sebastian Muccilli, who in his retirement serves the Nettles Island community in Jensen Beach, became convinced of Grayson’s innocence and even more committed to the eradication of the death penalty.

“I think there is a spirit of revenge inherent in the culture,” Father Muccilli shared. “Revenge seems to be used to compensate for our inability to be peaceful. It gives us the approval to be violent. It seems so obvious to me that if Christianity lived up to its values and being the presence of Jesus in our world, we would be more pro–life.

The U.S.
BISHOPS

The U.S. bishops have been on the record in opposition to capital punishment for nearly three decades, and in 2005 launched the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty. Also that year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released the document “A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death,” in which the bishops reaffirmed that, “Every life is a precious gift of God. This gift must be respected and protected. We are created in God’s image and redeemed by Jesus Christ who himself was crucified.”

In Florida the bishops, through the Florida Catholic Conference, routinely appeal to the governor to spare the lives of those slated for execution and also urge lawmakers to end the use of the death penalty. In the coming year, the Catholic conference plans to push for an interim measure that would require a 12–0 vote for a jury to recommend a death sentence. Mike McCarron, the conference’s executive director, said many legislators didn’t know until his organization brought it to their attention that Florida allows juries to recommend that a judge impose the death penalty without unanimous agreement. “Even in our conversations they were not aware of that and expressed disbelief,” he said.

The
POLLS

A Harris Interactive poll last year of more than 1,000 American adults found the number of people who oppose the death penalty had increased to 30 percent from 22 percent since 2003. The percentage of respondents who “believe in capital punishment” dropped from 75 percent in 1997 to 63 percent in 2008.

The Gallup Poll’s October 2008 national survey of American opinion on the death penalty found that support for capital punishment dropped by 5 percentage points from 2007, down to 64 percent support from 69 percent. The percentage of those opposing capital punishment rose from 27 percent to 30 percent.

A 2005 national poll of Roman Catholic adults conducted by Zogby International found that Catholic support for capital punishment had declined dramatically. The poll showed 48 percent of Catholics supported the death penalty in 2005. Comparable polls by other organizations had registered 68 percent support among Catholics in 2001.