A Moratorium on the Death Penalty

Last night I attended for the first time a discussion on the death penalty at one of the favorite Little Rock restaurants, Lily's Dim Sum Then Some. I have always loved the idea of somehow using food therapy to compensate for the serious nature of the topics under discussion. After hearing the invited speaker give a pitch for fundraising in order to lobby for a moratorium on the death penalty, one of my friends (who is an attorney defending people on trial for heinous crimes) made a point about Northwest Arkansas. He said that area of our state needs to be commended because it currently has no death penalty cases on the docket. I wonder if the answer is truly that simple--that the attorneys there are more sympathetic to the issue or more capable in their defense--or if another more sinister fact is at work, namely that, until about ten years ago, Northwest Arkansas was almost entirely Anglo.

I know that many studies have been conducted throughout the years to show the preponderance of men of color on death row. Does that fact relate only to issues of economic poverty, or does it relate more to our continuing racial prejudices? Having lived in Northwest Arkansas for some thirty-four years, I know that the overall culture tends to be quite conservative. Yes, the city of Fayetteville is the exception since it houses a major state university. However, even it though is surrounded by a host of very conservative churches that tend to preach the virtues of capital punishment and support their argument with a variety of Old Testament verses for proof that God has ordained it.

I think about this subject as I remember that my father was killed in 1976 by some unknown person coming into the bar in which he sat to shoot him three times in the abdomen. Had that perpetrator been apprehended, I would not have supported the death penalty. I simply believe life imprisonment without parole is more than sufficient for punishment. I also worry about the number of cases that have been reviewed by law students or attorneys in recent years that have shown the innocence of many death row criminals either before execution or after. Most importantly, I still worry that our deeply-grained prejudices from the past condemn others simply because of their race.